The HEART of the MATTER

Exploring the Spiritual Exercises

By Thomas W. Durso
Illustration by Michael Gibbs

In a culture in which e-mail and voicemail are now considered hopelessly slow means of communication, in which our children have busier schedules than we do, in which we have cell phone conversations while working out at the gym, in which we take our Blackberrys to the beach, in which the only permissible answer to the question “How’s work?” is “It’s busy,” it seems inconceivable that a nearly 500-year-old instruction manual that emphasizes prayer, introspection and slowing down should find itself enjoying unprecedented favor.

Yet it is precisely that hyperactive aspect of American society that seems to be driving the desire to return to a more contemplative time. Across the Maryland Province and around the country, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, that linchpin of Jesuit training, are being made by more and more lay men and women who wish to rediscover a relationship with God and spend some time, however brief, regularly delving into their own hearts and souls. The Society of Jesus has had to do some creative adapting to answer the call for more spiritual direction.

If the people can’t come to Ignatius, it seems, the Jesuits and their colleagues will bring Ignatius to the people.

ADAPTABILITY IS THE KEY

Two hundred pages long and written in the first quarter of the 16th century, the Spiritual Exercises are “a month-long program of meditations, prayers, considerations and contemplativ practices that help Catholic faith become more fully alive in the everyday life of contemporary people,” according to Fr. Robert J. Egan, SJ, professor of foundational theology and spirituality at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. The book of the Spiritual Exercises is not to be read through such as a work of non-fiction, but exercises to be prayed through, usually under the guidance of a trained spiritual director. The Exercises present “a formulation of Ignatius’ spirituality in a series of prayer exercises, thought experiments, and examinations of consciousness — designed to help a retreatant experience a deeper conversion into life with God in Christ, to allow our personal stories to be interpreted by being subsumed in a story of God,” according to Egan. They are divided into four separate parts:

• consideration of God’s generosity and mercy and the complex reality of human sin;

• an imagining of the life and public ministry of Jesus, his proclamation of the gospel, his sayings and parables, his teachings and his miracles;

• Jesus’ last days, his arrest and interrogation, whipping, public mockery, passion, crucifixion and death;

• Jesus’ Resurrection, his Ascension, and the pouring-forth of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and Christ’s continued life in the world through the Spirit today and in the Messianic people called and missioned to his cause.

Ignatius originally intended the Exercises to be made over a period of 30 days in silent contemplation away from home. Ever concerned with a spirituality that reaches people in their everyday lives, however, he recognized that not all who wished to make the Exercises could afford to carve an entire month out of their lives to shut themselves away and pray in isolation.

“If you look into the book of the Exercises, the first thing you see are 20 annotations, primarily notes, and the point of the 20 is precisely how adaptable the experience is,” says Fr. George Aschenbrenner, SJ, rector of the Jesuit community at the University of Scranton. “If you do the experience fully, Ignatius is clear that it takes 30 days, more or less. But in Annotation No. 19, Ignatius himself suggests another way of making the full Exercises for people whose work didn’t allow them to get away for 30 straight days.”

According to a translation of the Spiritual Exercises by Fr. Elder Mullan, SJ, the 19th Annotation begins: “A person of education or ability who is taken up with public affairs or suitable business, may take an hour and a half daily to exercise himself.” Ignatius then goes on to delineate specific topics on which to meditate and pray and includes specific lengths of time that the person making the Exercises should devote to it.

“Then there are all other kinds of adaptations,” Aschenbrenner adds. “Whether you make it in 30 straight days or over four to six months, you’re experiencing the full Spiritual Exercises.”

Indeed, as Kevin O’Brien, director of Ignatian partnerships for the Maryland Province, notes, “There are a lot of attempts to get the Exercises out in a variety of ways. The key to the Exercises for St. Ignatius was always adaptability. They really lend themselves to fit into different contexts with different types of people.”

Perhaps that flexibility has its origins in Ignatius’ own status while he was writing the Exercises.

“Ignatius was a lay person when he started offering the Exercises to others,” says Martina O’Shea, director of the Jesuit Center for Spirituality at Holy Trinity Church in Washington, D.C. “He was not ordained a priest, and he had not yet gone to the University of Paris for his theological training. The Exercises are structured to help people find God in all things — to find God in the ordinariness of daily living and not just the mountaintop experiences.”

According to Fr. Dominic Maruca, SJ, a professor emeritus at Rome’s Gregorian University, who is now in residence at Loyola College in Maryland, the Exercises began as a one-on-one process, with a director guiding a single person through them. As more people became interested in making the Exercises, the number of directors available to help them didn’t keep pace, and so group offerings -- known as “guided retreats” -- began to occur. Since the mid-1970s, however, there has been an increase in the number of lay people trained to give the Exercises, and individual spiritual direction has returned to prominence.

“The extent and universalization of it and the increased number of non-Jesuit lay directors had a tremendous impact on how the Exercises were read, translated, understood, applied,” says Fr. Howard Gray, SJ, assistant to the president for special projects at Georgetown University and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Jesuit spirituality.

New means of communication have opened up even more avenues for busy people to make the Exercises.

“There are electronic means that are being used and making the Exercises accessible on a widespread level,” notes Maruca. “Many lay persons are benefiting from the Exercises made available to them through different websites. That’s wonderful because it is making them accessible to more people, but still there will be people who, after going through that experience, would like something more personalized.”

Ignatius would have approved of such innovation, Maruca believes: “That’s the way in which God is inviting us to do this now -- not to be archaic and go back. Ignatius tried to advise his men to cope with new situations. What we’re doing in the Exercises is helping a person rediscover the significance and meaning of life and the contributions we can make in enjoying life and engaging in it with others.”

For all the talk about St. Ignatius’ intentions, though, Gray cautions not to try placing oneself in the shoes of the Jesuits’ founder.

“We’re always guessing when we go into the mind of Ignatius,” he says. “You don’t want to be foolish enough to say you have a direct line.” Still, he notes, “the principle of adaptation is key to making the Exercises work. You take the text of the Exercises and you allow it to come to life out of the age, the experience, the culture, the background, the pastoral need of the individual in front of you.”

Because they “come to life” and are personalized, the Exercises are active in nature. They are not simply a static series of prayers, but an evolving experience that positions those who engage in them to let God more fully into their lives.

“The Spiritual Exercises have a development to them,” says Aschenbrenner. “You don’t just talk about anything, and you don’t just sit in quiet prayer. The Exercises are going somewhere. They start and they move. That’s why there are four weeks or four parts to them. Ignatius compared physical exercise to spiritual exercise. In physical exercise, you stretch your muscles and parts of your body to shape them up. In the Spiritual Exercises, the grace of God is going to stretch and strain your soul and thereby shape up your soul.”

PART OF THE EXPERIENCE

A couple of years ago, when Helen Stewart became a campus minister at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, she began the fall semester by leading the Spiritual Exercises for a group of 20 students. By Christmas break, half had dropped out. Seeking to provide a meaningful prayer experience that was not so intense as to drive participants away, the university began offering the 19th Annotation throughout the academic year. Participants meet with a spiritual director and as a group once a week, and while college students may be the last group one would think is in search of some quiet contemplation, Stewart says some see it as an integral part of their time at Saint Joseph’s.

“They are looking for a closer relationship with God,” Stewart says. “What the Exercises do is help you realize how God is present in your life everyday. You just have to start to notice, to become aware, and that happens through the Exercises. Ten students signed up last year, and they all finished. The fact that they’re at a Jesuit university gets them -- they think, ‘This is part of the Jesuit experience; I want to do this.’”

Even the 19th Annotation requires a significant allocation of time, and Stewart cautions students who express interest to be ready to immerse themselves in the experience.

“Because of their schedules and how they’ve been praying, it’s a big commitment,” she says, “and that’s what I tell them: ‘It’s 28 weeks, and you have to find time to meet with the [spiritual] director and come to the group meetings.’ I try to talk to them all before they sign up.”

The spirit of adjustment that led Saint Joseph’s to begin offering the 19th Annotation also gave rise to its invitation to students to make the 18th Annotation, a less involved program that lasts five weeks.

“It was really successful, to the point that students who did the five-week program last year thought they were ready this year to do the whole 19th Annotation,” says Stewart.

This fall, the university is offering a brief series on prayer and using one’s imagination to pray with the Scriptures, all in hopes of preparing underclassmen to make the 18th or 19th Annotation in future years on campus.

“They’re not huge numbers,” acknowledges Stewart, “but they are steady, and we keep trying to build on it by learning things and asking what worked last time.”

A DEEPER INTIMACY WITH GOD

At Georgetown University, a small group of administrators had been conducting seminars on the Jesuit tradition with board members and senior leaders when something began to dawn on them.

“In the experience of trying to teach people what the Jesuit tradition is, it was clear that the only way to really understand it was to undergo the Spiritual Exercises,” says Anthony Moore, PhD, special assistant to the president. “Trying to give seminars to folks on the Ignatian tradition gave us the clear awareness that for people to really get it, the Exercises are the only way. Unless you’ve actually gone through a discerning process yourself, it’s hard to get it.”

That realization led to a new effort at Georgetown through which Fr. Philip Boroughs, SJ, vice president for mission and ministry, invites faculty members and staff to make the 19th Annotation. The program started two years ago, when Boroughs and his fellow directors invited 50 colleagues to participate. Expecting just a dozen to accept, they were pleasantly surprised to get twice that amount.

The program runs for the entire academic year. Each participant is expected to pray for 30 to 45 minutes a day, and to meet with his or her spiritual director once every week or two and with the entire group monthly to receive “a little more input on the dynamics of the Exercises,” says Moore, who is one of the directors. “It’s also an opportunity for them to do some faith-sharing and to develop a community of people who are going through the experience of the Exercises.”

Those identified to receive invitations, he says, have been recommended by others or are colleagues “we feel would have an interest in the Exercises.”

Not everyone is prepared to make the Exercises, Moore notes, which is why Georgetown’s program is invitation-only. Even Ignatius himself, he says, spent considerable time before giving the Exercises to people “making sure this was the appropriate engagement for them.”

Catherine Heinhold, a member of Georgetown’s campus ministry office, had completed a weeklong retreat for prayer in daily life some years ago, and as part of her professional duties, she directs Ignatian retreats for students. She had wanted for a long time to make the Spiritual Exercises, so when she received Boroughs’ invitation to join the inaugural group making the 19th Annotation, she jumped at the chance.

“I was really drawn to doing the Exercises,” Heinhold says. “There was my professional interest, but I know that on the spiritual level the Exercises include a deep encounter with the person of Jesus. That was something I was feeling called toward in my spiritual life. I really wanted to spend some time with that.”

With Moore as her spiritual director, Heinhold dove in. She says her active imagination helped her enjoy Jesuit contemplation to the fullest, and Moore was an encouraging, affirming presence along the way. The monthly group meetings were “very supportive,” and she found the entire experience so positive that she continued to meet with Moore for months after the program concluded.

“The general overall grace I got from the retreat was a deeper intimacy with God,” she says. “It’s something I’ve carried with me over the past year as different things have happened.”

Use of the Spiritual Exercises to strengthen Georgetown’s Jesuit identity has proven successful, according to Moore.

“It’s been a very dependable way to develop on campus a group of people who have some personal experience of the value of the Ignatian tradition for their work and for their lives,” he says.

AN ACTIVE SPIRITUALITY

In a country where we purchase countless gadgets without wires so that we may, ironically enough, stay connected wherever we may be, what compels busy men and women to set aside valuable time specifically to retreat into themselves?

“It’s the culture of our times,” answers Marilyn Merikangas, a retreat team member at Holy Trinity’s Jesuit Center. “We’re dealing with serious things. Look at the news each day. We have Iraq, we have al-Qaeda. People today are under a kind of pressure even if it’s not at the forefront of their minds. And some of them do work that is really demanding and stressful. There’s so much in our lives today that calls people to find meaning, to find a link to what they do on Sundays.”

“Our world and our society are so fast-paced and driven and external that people are looking for an opportunity to step back and do some internal work, some reflection,” agrees Kevin O’Brien. “Ignatian spirituality is well suited to that. It calls people to be contemplative but also active in the everyday world.”

That notion of active, real-world immersion is a hallmark of Jesuit ministry, according to Aschenbrenner.

“Ignatius’ spirituality is an active spirituality,” he says. “It doesn’t send you into a monastery. It sends you on the road to life so you’re finding God and serving God in all the busy challenges of your active life.”

Seeking to reach people where they are and make the Exercises relevant, spiritual directors often use creative devices -- literature, poetry, film, and music, for example -- to help those who make the Exercises better understand their affective dimension and how they impact one’s understanding of who Christ is.

“Ignatius frequently uses a narrative frame to get at the truth,” Gray points out. “He tells parables and uses images. In an age of images and of sounds which frequently influence people, you see the use of those in the context of the Exercises which can be very helpful to people.”

SPIRITUALITY FOR THE HOMELESS

Efforts to deliver the Spiritual Exercises to new populations and in new ways extend beyond the Maryland Province.

Perhaps most notably, in Chicago, Fr. William Creed, SJ, had his eyes opened a decade ago by a friend who was working with homeless people while also completing an internship in Ignatian spirituality and spiritual direction. Creed’s friend needed clients to provide direction to, so he went to those with whom he was working. Hearing about that experience caused Creed to re-evaluate his own assumptions about the homeless and to act on what he learned about himself.

“I began to learn that the homeless have a spiritual life,” he says. “I don’t know about others, but I had these categories that I’d heard: The homeless don’t need spirituality -- they need housing, they need job training, they need addiction counseling, etc. And those are all true. But they have a spiritual life. In many instances, spirituality and adaptation of the Exercises give a person meaning and perspective. That meaning can be the energy that moves people in hope toward getting off the streets, getting a job, getting into a recovery program.”

Thus was born the Ignatian Spirituality Project. Creed began by visiting transitional shelters, places people go when they’re trying to get off the streets, but with funding drying up and many of those sites closing, he has moved on to overnight shelters. He arrives first thing on a Wednesday morning to lead an hour of prayer and faith sharing, then returns two days later to do it again. “Those people that show up again and again, you get a sense of who among this group would be ready for an overnight retreat,” he says. “Then I extend that invitation.”

The overnight retreats include 12 to 15 participants, most of them homeless people. While early retreats also included a few mornings of follow-up, Creed soon found that many of his participants couldn’t come because they had landed jobs that interfered with their ability to attend. Now he also conducts daylong reflection sessions to help people living on the street to connect with God and with themselves.

The retreats feature plenty of discussion on such topics as recovering one’s story, fear and trust, and healing of memories. Participants share their personal histories and talk with their spiritual directors. They learn about meditation, praying with Scripture and contemplative and meditative prayer, and are led through an examen of consciousness that helps them see where God is in their own lives.

“When you’re homeless and addicted, you isolate. You withdraw. You abandon everything,” Creed explains. “Much of addiction begins in the same blindness, deafness, paralysis, denial. Much of our retreats is based on honesty -- personal honesty, honesty with one another, and honesty with God. Retreatants are invited to notice any patterns in their life. They reflect: What situations or relationships seem to pull me down, and what places or persons help me act with courage and centered confidence?”

Creed has led nearly 80 overnight retreats in Chicago and is working with groups in Baltimore, Boston, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, Saint Louis and San Francisco to develop overnight retreats and days of reflection there.

“We need to understand that the Exercises are not just a text to be followed literally,” Creed says. “The Exercises are Ignatius’ reflections on what God’s Holy Spirit did in his own life and seems to be doing in other people’s lives. He put together these Exercises and graces to pray for because he understood there was a responsive movement that the Holy Spirit does in persons who are open to God. The Exercises articulate that series of graces. We need to understand the Exercises not as a series of hoops to jump through but as an opening to God. The homeless have an acute sense of that, having lost everything. They often say, ‘It’s a miracle I’m alive. God has saved me, sustained me, provided for me day by day.’”

THE JESUIT COLLABORATIVE

With lay men and women making the Exercises in increasing numbers and varied ways, Jesuits are seeking new opportunities to work together to increase Ignatian spirituality among those they serve. One of the most promising initiatives is the Jesuit Collaborative, which links the Maryland, New York and New England provinces in an effort to share thoughts on programming related to the Spiritual Exercises and on how to reach out to different groups that haven’t been traditionally served.

“The mission of the Jesuits, as it were, is precisely the call to the magis, the more,” says Fr. Ron Mercier, SJ, head of the collaborative and member of the New England Province. “It’s to reach out to those people who aren’t being served at the moment. What we’ve experienced is that there is really a need on the part of people that isn’t necessarily being met by the contemporary Church. On the other side, there’s a real hunger people have for Ignatian spirituality, the Exercises, the retreats — but not in the traditional forms. People don’t have the time to go to retreat houses. These are taking place in parishes, in schools, in lots of other areas, trying to bring the Exercises into people’s everyday lives. We’re trying to respond to those new needs.”

The Jesuit Collaborative grew out of the respective strategic planning process the three provinces are engaged in. A survey about emerging spiritual needs in the eastern United States combined with what Mercier calls “the structural challenges,” such as the reduced numbers of Jesuits, along with “the increasing availability of those trained to give the Exercises -- lay men and women who are able to do that and do it very well” -- led the provinces to realize that by combining their efforts, they could build on their strengths and move into new initiatives.

The effort got underway officially in June with the “Conference on Ignatian Spirituality” at Fairfield University “to help people enter more deeply into being able to give the Exercises,” says Mercier. Participants numbered more than 250, and conference organizers had to turn away 150 others. Elsewhere, the collaborative has launched training programs in New England, Washington, D.C., and New York to help ministers learn how to give the Exercises. Conferences will be held involving retreat houses and other programs across the East that train people to direct the Exercises “to develop a common curriculum and common resources,” and “to expand our ability to offer that to more and more people and to offer follow-up on it: How do we help people build on that experience, and find communities that can support them in that?”

As Mercier notes, one of the drivers of the collaborative is the recognition that the number of Jesuit priests is declining, and so one of its initiatives is a series of retreats “to help people develop a sense of what it means to be a leader in an Ignatian context.”

The effectiveness of the Jesuit Collaborative will be reviewed in 2009 with an aim toward possibly expanding the effort nationally. Early returns are promising.

“One of the things that has struck me is the way in which experienced lay people really do want to get involved in this,” says Mercier. “The generosity and spirit of cooperation have been extraordinary. A kind of eagerness not simply to be a receiver but to be a giver of the Exercises is something that, in terms of the number of people wanting to do that, has been very happily surprising. What we’re doing seems really to tap into an emerging need people have -- Catholics and non- Catholics.”

A PROFOUND EXPERIENCE OF GOD'S LOVE

The continued relevance of a series of prayers and contemplations nearly five centuries after they were written may seem surprising, but once one understands what it is people are seeking -- to find God and meaning in their relationships, their careers, their lives — perhaps the greater surprise is that more people don’t heed Ignatius’ call.

“The Exercises are a profound expression of God’s love in a uniquely personal way that leads to freedom for whatever God’s will may be,” says Aschenbrenner. “The goal of the Exercises is freedom. Not freedom to do whatever I want to do, but freedom to do whatever God’s will is for me. You don’t come to that freedom unless you have a very personal, profound experience of God’s love.”

Freelance writer Thomas W. Durso
last wrote for Ignatian Imprtins on the
"Grad at Grad" atrtributes of Jesuit high
school students and alumni.