The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Since I will be away for a while, I decided to leave a chunk of reading that will last for the entire month. Something of a skeletal summary of the 30-day Exercises, this may give you some idea of what I am engaged in over the next several weeks. What I wish to do is give a short outline of the Exercises for those who want to understand a little more about what I will be doing on retreat, but also to give personal annotations and how the various elements of the spirituality are present in my daily life.

At the very beginning of his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius defines what he means by "spiritual exercises." Using the analogy of physical exercise, which includes everything done in order to improve physical conditioning, spiritual exercise is everything done in order to reach the highest possible state of spiritual conditioning. I have been learning over the past five months that spiritual exercise can be just as exhausting as physical exercise in its own way, so contrary to my vague impressions of yesteryear that the 30-day Exercises is something of an extended vacation to get in touch with one's spiritual faculties, it is far more closely analogous to boot camp.

The Spiritual Exercises are often judged to have an esoteric mystique, but Ignatian spirituality is really a way to understand everyday experience that is common to everyone. The "full" Exercises occurs in the context of the 30-day retreat, but is not confined to that; not only does it occur in a surprisingly diverse array of retreat formats, but the elements found in the Exercises are all applicable to daily life.

Some basic elements:

• The retreat is silent: outside of meeting with a retreat director everyday for up to an hour, attending daily mass, and any other vocal prayer there is no other speaking, music, or other non-ambient sound. This serves multiple purposes, principally fostering a spirit of recollection and interior reflection, but also acknowledging that God speaks through all the events of daily life and not just times formally designated for prayer. 

*In daily life, the grand silence (9 pm to 6 am for us) serves the same purpose

• The retreat is ideally conducted away from home and work: it is convenient for us that the Oblates have a retreat house very near, but it is good to be in an environment different from normal away from the distractions of daily life.

*This is not an essential element; St. Ignatius' 19th Annotation of the Exercises provides for those who are unable to take time away from their daily obligations for a 30-day or eight-day retreat, specifying that they should have 90 minutes set aside for silent prayer daily and meet with their director weekly. And, obviously, all elements of the Exercises used in daily life occur in the home/work environment. But being away really helps eliminate distractions.

• The retreat consists of meditations on the Gospels or a designated theme four or five times daily during the retreat: this is the core activity of the Exercises. The person of Jesus is encountered in praying with the Scriptures, leading to deeper knowledge of him and self. 

*This is one of the core elements of formation throughout novitiate; it is part of the Spiritual Directory of the founder for all Oblates to meditate on the Gospel for at least one hour daily.

• The retreat is about discernment: a major misconception about discernment equates it with decision making. The process of discernment is really about growth in relationship with God, which is another way of saying growth in knowledge of God and knowledge of self; decisions should be made out of this growth, but they are not the direct end in themselves. 

*This misconception probably stems from the fact that most people only make a really intense discernment (such as a 30-day retreat) when they are facing a really major life decision such as one relating to vocation or career, but it is still not correct to conceive of the retreat as being about the choice to be made- once again, choices made on or subsequent to retreat flow from encounter with God, the true goal of the Exercises.

The ultimate way that the Exercises and the Ignatian spirituality of discernment relate to choices is through freedom, which can be seen as the goal of the exercises. True freedom that comes from profound encounter with God and the self-knowledge that it imparts enables decisions to be made based on the experiences in life of how God is drawing one to himself, and to weed out superficial desires that can get all twisted up (but more on that later).



If you are still reading, congratulations! Your reward is further exposition on the structure and content of the Exercises.


The internal structure of the Exercises covers four phases, plus an introductory phase. (In the original text of the Exercises, these phases are referred to as 'weeks,' but contrary to another popular misconception, these do not correspond to chronological weeks but to different graces received in prayer; a person may make a 30-day retreat and remain in the first week the entire time).

A. The First Principle and Foundation (text here).
The Exercises begin (before they actually begin) with the personal experience of divine love. This is where the desire that drives discernment originates: if there is no sense of God creating me in love for a definite end, then there is nothing feeding my desire to know or serve him.

*This is the starting point of all Ignatian prayer; before the Examen, for example, one should "consider for a brief moment that God the Father is beholding me with love."

I. First Week
The goal of the first week is the conviction of personal sin and the experience of God's loving forgiveness, given at great cost to himself. It is not simply an exercise in rejecting one's specific personal sins, but seeking the grace to understand sin from a theocentric perspective, to experience God's own abhorrence of sin.
The most famous part of this week is the fifth exercise: application of the senses to the horrors of hell. It has sometimes been viewed as a way to force conversion by scaring exercitants, but Ignatius clearly specifies that it is not the starting point of the week but a final step of confirmation. The grace received is gratitude for realizing more fully what salvation means.

This is followed by the Kingdom Exercise, in which three questions are posed: What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What must I do for Christ?
After the experience of the Foundation and First Week, this question invites one to a subtler, more nuanced way of loving. The Second Week does not begin automatically; Ignatius was clear that the director must see signs that the exercitant is seeking deeper intimacy and has the desire to grow in this more sensitive way of loving God.

II. Second Week
This is the school of discipleship. It is a deeper relationship with a desire to continue growing in knowledge of the other person. The Second Week of the Exercises employs a different set of rules for discernment than the First Week that reflect a more probing sensitivity in relating. This is where Ignatian contemplation, the entrance to intimate encounter through the application of the senses, a prayer that goes deeper than simple consideration, becomes the main component. Through repetitions, the person is affected on the deepest and most intimate dimensions. Ignatius knew that this is the only way that lasting transformation is effected.

The second phase is followed by the Two Standards Exercise, in which the exercitant considers that the only forces in the world are those acting with Christ or with the devil. ("standards" here refers to battle standards, not moral frameworks; the modern equivalent is sports, e.g. there are only two teams on a field). The grace is to examine the opposing mentalities- honor and pride vs. poverty and humility-, to penetrate the meanings of these words, and to realize the sometimes subtle differences between worldly ideas of success and how they can cause one to stray from the ultimate end.

III. Third Week
The focus of the third stage is the Paschal Mystery. It follows upon the first two phases as a deepening of the relationship by accompanying Jesus through his work of redemption. The Second Week begins with contemplating the Incarnation focused on the person of Jesus, but the subsequent contemplations are distinctly trinitarian even when focusing on the earthly life of Jesus.
The grace of the Third Week involves overcoming personal selfishness to a higher degree and identifying personal suffering more closely with Christ's Passion. Part of this is realizing the effect of personal sin, a connection back to the First Week and the "hard consolation" of learning the cost of love.

The following exercises are not fixed but can fall anywhere after the Second Week:
One is meditation on the Three Classes of Persons, a consideration of natural attachments and how they can prevent full commitment to God. Three types of people come into a large sum of money; the first feels attachment and, although desiring to make the right decision in regard to it, they never act on this desire and simply procrastinate. The second person feels attachment and, acting impulsively, preempts the will of God in the matter. He has an awareness of his inner dynamics, but although determined to do the "right thing," this is done without consultation to ascertain what God is asking. The third class of person will make a definitive decision, but without forcing it. He will take time for prayer and contemplation and not act until he has attained the freedom of embracing God's will, which might be in keeping the money as much as giving it away, not confusing the will of God with human intuition.

The other is the meditation on the Three Degrees of Humility and Love. This, like the previous exercise, is not something that is grounded in personality traits or temperament but is more of a test to see how far one has progressed in spiritual maturation; these degrees are a concrete illustration of love's process of becoming identified with whom is loved. In the first type, eternal salvation is so important that nothing can entice seriously to offense of the Beloved, love to the extent of never going against the Beloved's explicitly stated desire, something only possible after a deep experience of love. The second type builds on this and involves the sensitivity to detect the implicit, unstated desires of the Beloved and an eagerness to respond to those desires. This degree of love presumes the freedom of indifference to natural goods such as honor, wealth, health, longevity, etc. The third degree is a class of its own: the desire of imitation has been shed for the desire of unity, the desire for identification with the Beloved and the experience of joy when sharing poverty, contempt, and humiliation with Christ.

IV. Fourth Week
The last stage in the Exercises starts with the Resurrection and focuses on daily life, how life is affected by this deeper encounter with God and what things look like going forward. This is the stage of resolutions for daily life, but resolutions centered on being, not doing; this stage is about a new realization of who the exercitant feels called to be from this experience, a discernment of personal vocation distinct from discerning state in life.

The Contemplation to Attain Love is a rich revisitation of the previous stages of the exercises and the grace to be attained is complex, touching some or all of the previous experiences.

*It is important to note that, while the exercises are presented in a linear and consecutive manner for the formal Exercises, spirituality in daily life is never so neat. In a daily experience of prayer, one may experience some or all of the stages or 'weeks' of the Exercises in no particular order.

Spiritual Thought: Sentire and Sapere

Novitiate is an experience that is difficult to describe, partly because much of it is deeply personal, but also because of its nature as raw experience, a direct communication through sense powers.

Saint Ignatius expressed this in the Spiritual Exercises by using the verb sentir rather than saber to express what is important in the spiritual life. (The words in Latin are sentire and sapere, which correspond to French sentir and savoir and Armenian kidenal and imanal).

The neat difference between the two verbs is something difficult to describe concisely in English, but roughly it is the difference between experiential knowledge and pure intellectual knowledge; sentir knowledge is felt and experienced through the senses, whether the external senses or the internal senses of imagination and memory. It is knowledge acquired through first-hand rather than second-hand experience, and can therefore be more difficult to communicate because it comes through wordless sensation rather than a verbal formula.

Saint Ignatius explains this in his Second Annotation to the Exercises, in which he instructs the retreat director to relate the points for meditation briefly in order to allow the exercitant more freedom for the experience that occurs in the meditation, 

For, if the person who is making the Contemplation takes the true groundwork of the narrative, and, discussing and considering for himself, finds something which makes the events a little clearer or brings them a little more home to him -- whether this comes through his own reasoning, or because his intellect is enlightened by the Divine power -- he will get more spiritual relish and fruit than if he who is giving the Exercises had much explained and amplified the meaning of the events. For it is not knowing much [saber], but realizing and relishing things interiorly [sentir], that contents and satisfies the soul.

-Spiritual Exercises, Second Annotation

His insight into prayer and how the human person experiences God through the senses relates what many consider arcane mysticism to the life of everyman. By the sixteenth century, Christian spirituality in the west threatened to split into scholastic intellectualism and spiritualist quietism, but his understanding of an integrated person calls for balance between sense experience and intellect within the mind.

This is why I contend that Ignatius has an Eastern Soul, one that transcends the dichotomy between mystical experience and intellectual definition and bridges the gap between the pietist and rationalist world views that later sprang up and have come to dominate modern thought. 

People versed in Catholic theology would be puzzled if Ignatius were referred to as a theologian; he studied but never taught nor wrote what are considered works of theology. But in the original sense used by the Cappadocian Doctors, a theologian is one who has a deep experience of God and shares it with others, in which sense the Spiritual Exercises is a profoundly theological work and Ignatius a theologian par excellence. 

Spiritual Thought: "Skandala"

After my daily meditation, there is often a thought that stays with me. Sometimes it is a clear message that came in prayer, sometimes it is a summary of what I experienced; a "spiritual thought" to take and carry through the day. Sometimes these are themes that surface repeatedly during a period of days, weeks, or months.

One of those recurring has been about skandala (obstacles) in the spiritual life. "My sins and faults are obstacles for me; they are not obstacles for God."

This is something worthwhile for meditation in moments of discouragement and failure; simply calling this to mind can allow me to access God's mercy and be reminded that humanity is an instrument not an obstacle for God.

Consider that temptations, faults, and sins are allowed by God as occasions of humility to remind me of my constant need for him and allow me to grow in my desire for him. This becomes an opportunity to enter into deeper prayer and be reminded that God is infinitely greater than my sins and limitations.

The Lanterian Charism of the OMV, Part II

In response to a query I have previously elaborated on the OMV charism, but as I admitted then, a religious charism is something rather difficult to summarize briefly. But as I continue to learn I can further flesh out the details and share more depth.

This week was the first study of consecrated life and we began reading a commentary on Vita Consecrata, Saint Pope John Paul II's encyclical to religious. In another address to men an women religious, he delivered a message that goes to the heart of the charism of our congregation:

More than ever in the lives of Christians today, idols are seductive and temptations unrelenting; the art of spiritual combat, the discernment of spirits, the sharing of one's thoughts with one's spiritual director, the invocation of the Holy Name of Jesus and His mercy must once more become a part of the inner life of the disciple of the Lord. This battle is necessary in order not to be distracted or worried and to live in constant recollection with the Lord.

John Paul II Speaks to Religious, Vol. XII, no. 270

This message for the renewal of religious life in the twenty-first century is closely parallel to the spiritual mission espoused by Ven. Bruno Lanteri two centuries ago: formation in the discernment of spirits, the importance of spiritual direction for people in all states of life, living a life of recollection, and invoking the mercy of Jesus in a constant call to repentance. In fact, our words Nunc Coepi are a reminder of renewal, the constant rededication that draws consecrated souls deeper into the mystery of God.

Adventure in The Exercises

The word "exercise" used as a title for St. Ignatius of Loyola's spiritual methodology gives one the idea of challenge, rigor, and regimented repetition. While the outline for prayer and meditation does include those, it also has much more. It is, in fact, more of an adventure than anything.

The word 'discernment,' even for what is supposedly Ignatian-style discernment, is often used as a synonym for decision. But the two things could not be more different. Discernment in prayer is about relationship, and relationships are not problems that are resolved or issues that are decided, but entrances into mystery that cause us to stretch and grow. They are areas of tension and ambiguity, which inherently include discomfort exactly because of imprecision and indecision.


Thus adventure. The Exercises is about encounter; shedding everything non-essential that prevents encounter with God and initiation into the mystery of the Trinity, an encounter that can absorb me deeper and deeper and never be exhausted.

God's proposal to me during this novitiate has not been to solve the problem of the future or to reach a decision, but to embark on an adventure; to enter deeper into his mystery and discover myself more fully by sharing in my Creator's knowledge of me. 

When I begin contemplating the Gospel, I begin with a map and have some idea of where I want to go, but often I reach an unexpected fork in the road and have the opportunity to surrender to the Holy Spirit. I am the receiver of prayer, not the initiator; the follower on the adventure, not the leader. It has been a wonderful experience of learning to listen and follow.

It is a process of growing in knowledge and freedom: knowledge of myself and of God, of who he is creating me to be and how he is calling me to follow him; freedom of knowing God as the Master of creation and the One who draws all to fullness in himself. 

Contemplation of Things Divine

Now the perfection of the religious state consists in the contemplation of divine things. For Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. vi) that they are "called servants of God by reason of their rendering pure service and subjection to God, and on account of the indivisible and singular life which unites them by holy reflections," i.e. contemplations, "on invisible things, to the Godlike unity and the perfection beloved of God."
                                                                                                                 Summa Theologica, Q 188, Art. 2, Obj. 1


The first and principal duty of all religious is to be the contemplation of things divine and constant union with God in prayer.
                                                                                                       Code of Canon Law, Bk 2.3, Canon 663 §1

    In one of our conferences this week, the novice master reminded us that the fundamental calling of religious is the contemplation of divine things, a calling that is prior to any institutional charism or apostolic work. Our focus all month has been receiving the gift of prayer, and this was another reminder that prayer is principally a gift from God that is initiated by Him, not me. It is also important for remembering that religious life is not dependent on nor defined by apostolic work. If a religious from an apostolic institute is incapacitated for any reason, they are still called to live their vocation to prayer.
     It is a matter of human habit to get wrapped up in having or doing and neglect the very fundamental state of being. In every spiritual life, the first call is to relationship with God and everything else follows upon that. Novitiate focuses on prayer for that reason; it is the beginning of religious life and the time of building a foundation on which every subsequent aspect of that life depends.

The Lanterian Charism of the OMV

The charism of a religious institute is something that can seem difficult to describe, partly because they all spring from the same source (the Church's apostolate) and also because many of their distinguishing characteristics are shared. But each religious institute is founded in response to a specific need tied to a place and time, so understanding the history of an institute and particularly the history and spirituality of its founder(s) is important to understanding its charism.

The founder of the Oblates, Ven. Bruno Lanteri, was a priest from Piedmont (now northern Italy) who lived from 1759 to 1830. During this period, Europe was in political turmoil due to revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, and in spiritual turmoil due to widespread heresies, especially moral rigorism. Many governments, including the Piedmontese Republic in the early nineteenth century, were hostile toward the Church in general and religious orders in particular; governments viewed them as more difficult to control than the secular clergy and a third column in social engineering because of their pervasive presence in schools, hospitals, and other social institutions. Progressive thinkers expended much energy in attacking them and attempting to turn popular opinion against them. In the spiritual realm, there was widespread moral rigorism: the teaching that heaven is attained with great difficulty by the few who lead morally blameless lives and that the remaining masses of sinners should not expect God's mercy. It was not uncommon for penitents to be refused absolution until they had completed harsh penances and frequent reception of the Eucharist was unheard of.

This was also during the Jesuit suppression when members of the Society of Jesus were either in exile or working within dioceses. This is how Fr. Lanteri met Fr. Nikolaus von Diessbach, an Austrian Jesuit who worked in the Turin diocese during this time and became his friend an mentor. It was under the direction of Diessbach that Lanteri made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and had a profound experience of God's mercy, something that he used widely in his ministry and later as a cornerstone of the Oblate congregation.

Lanteri became a member of Diessbach's friendship groups (amicizie), a new phenomenon that connected lay people and priests who were interested in spiritual formation and spreading wholesome literature. At that time, the printed word was the mass media and every bit as widely sought as internet access is today. Intellectual debates were conducted via printed tracts that people would disseminate in order to advance their ideas. Lanteri was involved throughout his life in arranging the writing, printing, and distribution of 'good books,' books that were both morally edifying and faithful to the teachings of the Church, to counteract the harm of modernists who attacked Christian faith and morals. 

Through his ministries of preaching popular missions and offering the Ignatian Exercises, spiritual direction and confession, circulating Catholic books, supporting associations of lay and priestly formation, and providing care for those in need, Fr. Lanteri became a well-known and well-loved priest in Turin. His mission was to guide people who were sincerely seeking holiness, always insisting that fidelity to the Church and her teaching and devotion to the Mother of God were the sure guides to Christian perfection. He became a champion of the moral theology of St. Alphonsus Liguori and became instrumental in translating his theology into French and disseminating it in France for the first time. 

In 1814, three young priests sought out Fr. Lanteri and asked him to guide them in forming a new priestly fraternity for preaching retreats and reviving spirituality in their region. He eventually agreed and entrusted the group to the Virgin Mary, whom he always called its foundress and teacher. Despite setbacks, the Oblates of the Virgin Mary were approved by Pope Leo XII on September 1, 1826, four years before Lanteri's death. The congregation spread throughout Italy despite antagonism from the local government in Piedmont and, although never numerous, missionary zeal has taken Oblates all over the world. 

The OMV charism can be described as working toward a rebirth of spirituality in the contemporary world 

1) in mercy (by preaching God's mercy to penitents and reconciling them), 

2) through Mary (the foundress and teacher of the congregation who never fails to bring seekers to her Son), 

3) with fidelity (remaining faithful to the Pope and the teaching of the Magisterium of the Church), 

4) by discernment (using the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and spiritual direction),

5) for today's world (using the media to evangelize the culture, combatting whatever errors are current and making authentic Church teaching widely available).

"Even if I should fall a thousand times a day, a thousand times I will get up again and say Nunc Coepi (Now I begin)."
-Ven. Lanteri