Following in the footsteps of Ignatius - Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius

National Catholic Reporter, April 13, 2001 by Margot Patterson

They've been called a school for freedom, a work of teacherly genius and a powerful tool for conversion. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are being turned to by growing numbers of people who say the 450-year-old primer on prayer and contemplation offers a personal encounter with the divine that frees them to be more themselves.

"There's no sense of predicting how you'll change," said Belden Lane, a theology professor at St. Louis University who did the exercises in 1994-95 and calls them "risky in the very best sense."

A Presbyterian minister who grew up in a fundamentalist Protestant family, Lane, said the exercises led him to come to terms with his father's suicide years ago, his mother's dying the months he was doing the exercises and his own mortality. "You're taken into loss and death and all the denials and illusions you play with. It can be profoundly disconcerting," Lane said.

"There's a kind of desert journey," he said. "You travel into terrain that you want to forget about. You go there and you don't run away and you work through your fears and then you have the experience of Isaiah 35: the desert blooming like a rose."

For Lane, one of the unexpected gifts of the exercises was rediscovering the aliveness of the Bible, which as a child he had grown up reading on a daily basis.

For Victoria Carlson-Casaregola, an instructor of English at St. Louis University, the greatest challenge the exercises presented was integrating the head and the heart.

Whatever their individual experience, those who practice the exercises agree that the process is creative and the effects of the exercises unexpected.

"You're in it in order to be in the act of becoming," said Vincent Casaregola, an associate professor of English who did the exercises several years ago. "You can't name it ahead of time, and if you could name it ahead of time you'd stop the process."

A spiritual classic

St. Ignatius of Loyola was still a layman when he began taking notes on his own spiritual experiences. These formed the genesis of the spiritual exercises, which Ignatius was eager to share with others in his lifetime and which have since become a classic work in Christian spirituality.

Not surprisingly, the Society of Jesus, the religious order Ignatius founded in 1539, is rooted in Ignatian spirituality. At least twice in the years leading up to their final vows, all Jesuits make a silent 30-day retreat in which they do the exercises.

The 19th annotation of the exercises -- so labeled by Ignatius when he wrote the exercises -- is an at-home retreat that consists of an eight-month program of prayer in which those doing the exercises, often referred to as the exercitants, commit to an hour a day of prayer following the pattern of scripture reading, prayer and contemplation Ignatius laid down. As exercitants read the gospels and place themselves inside the stories, they are encouraged to pay attention to how God is inspiring them.

Today the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius are no longer just the preserve of Jesuit retreat houses. All of the 28 Jesuit colleges in the United States and most of the 40-plus Jesuit high schools offer the spiritual exercises to their faculty and staff, part of an effort these schools have undertaken in an era of dwindling vocations to the priesthood to transmit a key element of Jesuit identity and education to their non-Jesuit faculty members and staff.

Increasingly, it's the 19th annotation of the exercises rather than the classic 30-day retreat that people are turning to, if for no other reason than that few people have the time to make a month-long retreat. Even the at-home retreat requires a substantial time commitment.

The surprise is that so many people make that commitment.

"It would be safe to say that more people are engaged in these exercises today than at any time in history," Jesuit Fr. Joseph Tetlow, Secretary for Ignatian spirituality in Rome, wrote in National Jesuit News in 1995.

The 30-day retreat calls for retreatants to spend five hours a day in prayer and is divided into four blocks of time that are approximately one week each. The 19th annotation stretches each of these weeks into several. But retreatants still spend their time meditating on sin and their own experience of sin in the period designated as Week 1, on Christ's life and early ministry in Week 2, Christ's passion in Week 3 and the resurrected Christ in Week 4. The exercises follow the liturgical year, which is one reason why persons practicing the 19th annotation often begin in the autumn and end around Easter.

Today the popularity of the spiritual exercises has taken on an independent life of its own. "It's kind of a contagious thing," said Fr. Charles Currie, head of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in Washington. "When people see how helpful they are, they tell their friends,"

Advocates say people are seeking a spirituality they can adapt to their busy lives.

"People are hungry for a spirituality that fits their own experience, and the experience of many people today is that they can't go away to find God. They're hungering to find God in the midst of their everyday life," said Jesuit Fr. Andy Alexander of Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.