What are you doing for Lent? Am I the first to ask?  Ash Wednesday is only two weeks from today–a date I’ve been keenly aware of because I’ve been very busy lately putting together our Ignatian Prayer Adventure.  This is an eight-week online retreat that can be completed during Lent and Easter. It’s a version of the Spiritual Exercises.  We’re using materials from The Ignatian Adventure by Kevin O’Brien, SJ.

The retreat actually begins on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday–February 19.  It will continue through Lent, concluding the week after Easter.  Eight weeks in all.

We’ve designed a retreat that you can adapt to your needs and circumstances. You can pray it every day–as much as 30-40 minutes if you have the time, or less if need be.  The Prayer Adventure is full of scripture readings, meditations, reflections, and prayers that you can use however you wish.  It follows the general arc of the Spiritual Exercises.  If you stick with it throughout the Lent-Easter season, you will experience many of the graces of Ignatius’s great retreat.

I’ll join fellow Loyola Press bloggers Paul Brian Campbell, SJ, and Vinita Hampton Wright in offering weekly reflections on An Ignatian Prayer Adventure. We’ll be doing this on our blogs, so you should be sure to subscribe to them: dotMagis, Days of Deepening Friendship, and People for Others.

I’ll have more to say about the retreat in the coming weeks.

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 men and women today, that we all feel this same broad range of needs.

Very commonly, retreatants report a mild depression. They know that they are getting nowhere, sunk in consumerism. People find the same help that Ignatius found in feeling a sense of moving along, of getting somewhere. Ignatius organized the Exercises for that purpose, “to make progress.”

Read the whole thing.

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.)

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, writes that we’re faced with a paradox:

We see this paradox throughout the Gospels: he calls us into poverty, to take up our cross every day and to renounce ourselves. He tells us that if you really want life you are going to have to lose your life and if you want genuine richness you have to be poor. It may be challenging, but once we make that step, then we begin to share in the richness of God and to see that all we have in this world is given to us by God. When we appreciate these gifts as gifts, rather than something to which we are entitled, we can learn a genuine sense of gratitude, wonder and awe for these gifts, and we can begin to realise that the only possession we ever need is God. In this relationship I see myself as I really am and more importantly know that I am loved for who I am, not because of status, title, job, money or possessions – none of these lasts and ultimately none of these matters. That is what the Meditation on the Two Standards is showing us.

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 question of truth as well.  Moreover, attributing motives to others always strikes a false note for me because knowing someone’s motives requires knowing their internal psychological states, a rather dubious proposition.

He’s commenting on St. Ignatius’s Annotation 22 in the Spiritual Exercises, which is about civility in discussion:

It is necessary to suppose that every good Christian is more ready to put a good interpretation on another’s statement than to condemn it as false.  If an orthodox construction cannot be put on a proposition, the one who made it should be asked how he understands it.  If he is in error, he should be corrected with all kindness.

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 who make the Exercises today do it over the course of six to eight months while living their normal lives.  These “Exercises in daily life” involve daily prayer and a weekly meeting with a spiritual director.  These are called “19th annotation” retreats after a note (the nineteenth!) that Ignatius wrote in the preface to the Exercises.

If you are interested in this approach to the Exercises, I’d recommend reading The Ignatian Adventure by Kevin O’Brien, SJ, just published by Loyola Press.  The book offers material for a 32-week experience of the Spiritual Exercises that Fr. O’Brien has used with both individuals and groups.  The book is also full of short, pithy essays on many Ignatian topics.

You can see what the book is like by clicking the blue see inside button for the book on Loyola Press’s website.

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 be a Carthusian and even permitted members of his order to transfer into that order and return later.)  Ignatius borrowed from a very long tradition of spiritual exercises, of which Hadot writes the following.

What’s interesting about the idea of spiritual exercises is precisely that it is not a matter of a purely rational consideration, but the putting in action of all kinds of means, intended to act upon one’s self.  Imagination and affectivity play a capital role here: we must represent to ourselves in vivid colors the dangers of such-and-such a passion, and use striking formulations of ideas in order to exhort ourselves.  We must also create habits, and fortify ourselves by preparing ourselves against hardships in advance.  (Philosophy as a Way of Life, Blackwell 1995, p. 284.)

What the ancients understood, and what Ignatius recaptured, is that people are not really governed by reason.  We are governed by passions, and we can learn to master them or be mastered by them.  Spiritual exercises are about choosing to act only on those passions which originate in God and lead us back to God.

Image: Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, from the Glyptothek, Munich, courtesy of Bibi Saint-Pol.

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 and personal.

Here’s a sample:

Ignatius suggests that when theology becomes an experience of the heart it evokes greater reverence. It is in the heart where life decisions are made and transformation takes place. The heart is the sacred ground where we truly encounter and experience the Divine.

To me, this means that in my day-to-day interactions with people I should strive for a union of hearts more than a union of minds. With our hearts in union, Ignatius believes that even when we disagree with another, or with their understanding of life and truth, we will always listen with greater reverence and respond with greater respect.

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, by my own means, attain such simplicity.”

But this very difficult retreat had a good end:

I was deeply grateful for an essential lesson that could not have been learned any other way: that my energies, for so long directed at self-preservation and achievement, could not win me God, or, which is the same, love. I had learned that, indeed, all is God’s gift, and over time even my heart would begin to grasp that too. It’s true: I was no longer the same.

Read the whole thing.

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 and wrote out the 12 Steps in about 20 minutes. To this Fr. Dowling said, “If it were twenty weeks, you could suspect improvisation. Twenty minutes sounds reasonable under the theory of divine help.”

I recently ran across an article Fr. Dowling wrote showing the parallels between the Exercises and the 12 Steps.  A sample:

St. Ignatius starts with a presumption that our power of faculties are bound by sinful tendencies and addictions to the wrong things. The Spiritual Exercises, therefore, work on the soul in both a negative and positive way. The first section, the consideration of my sins and of their effects in hell, is the negative part. It aims by self-denial to release our wills from our binding addictions, to enable the will to desire and to choose rationally.

The second part of the Spiritual Exercises, start in with a consideration of the Incarnation and going through the Passion and Resurrection, is an effort to see how Christ would handle various situations.

A priest alcoholic, who has written with discernment on the Spiritual Exercises, first pointed out to me the similarity between them and the twelve steps of A.A. Bill, the founder of A.A. recognized that those twelve steps are pretty much the releasing of myself from the things that prevent my will’s choosing God as I understand Him.

Read the whole thing.