Joseph Tetlow, SJ, says that he had to learn to listen, as Ignatius did. I had to learn about others’ needs. Some need solid instruction. Some need a way to reform a life that has gone bad. Some need to hear what God wants with their whole lives. You find, when you listen to enough [...]
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Anyone interested in the Spiritual Exercises should read Fr. Kevin O’Brien’s book The Ignatian Adventure. He talks about why he wrote the book in this short interview with Vinita Hampton Wright. (Click here to watch it on YouTube.) Share or bookmark this post:
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The meditation on the Two Standards is one of the key moments in the Spiritual Exercises. We’re invited to imagine two armies on a battlefield. One under Satan’s standard; the other under Christ’s. Each army operates in completely different ways with sharply contrasting values. What Christ thinks is important is humility and poverty. Roger Dawson, SJ, [...]
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Here’s some good advice from Anthony Lusvardi, SJ, writing on the the Whosoever Desires blog: Stay away from motives. If you find yourself attacking somebody’s motives, you are almost certainly violating Annotation 22. Attributing presumed motives to others shifts the discussion away from the issue and onto the person—and thus shifts it away from the [...]
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The great river of Ignatian spirituality flows from The Spiritual Exercises, the guided conversion experience developed by St. Ignatius Loyola. Most of the time Ignatius gave the Exercises as a silent retreat of about 30 days, and for centuries that was the way most spiritual directors offered them. That’s changed in recent years. Most people [...]
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The French philosopher Pierre Hadot has studied the origins of spiritual exercises among Greek philosophers. There seems to be a straight line from Hellenistic philosophy and its influence on Church fathers like Ambrose and Augustine, to the early monastic tradition, to the medieval monks who influenced Ignatius of Loyola. (At one point Ignatius wanted to [...]
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Paul Coutinho, SJ, has just published a new book. It’s called An Ignatian Pathway: Experiencing the Mystical Dimension of the Spiritual Exercises. Coutinho is an Indian Jesuit who has been teaching at St. Louis University for several years. He brings an Eastern sensibility to his reflections on the Spiritual Exercises. He’s different, provocative, always probing [...]
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Years ago, Austen Ivereigh, executive editor of The Tablet made a 30-day Spiritual Exercises retreat when he was a Jesuit novice. He spent most of the time in a state of desolation. “I grasped the paradox at the core of this desolation: you can only know God through simplicity of heart, yet I could not, [...]
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Fr. Edward Dowling, SJ, a friend of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was convinced that the Spiritual Exercises influenced the 12 Steps of AA (which guide many other 12-step programs). Bill Wilson said he had never heard of Ignatius or the Exercises. He said he sat down at his kitchen table one day [...]
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This is the time for resolutions to accomplish great things in the year ahead, so it’s a good time to think about what the word magis means. Magis is one of the more mysterious Ignatian terms. It’s a Latin word meaning “the greater, the excellent, the best,” as the tagline for the masthead for this [...]
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