The final contemplation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is the Contemplation on Divine Love, or the Contemplation on the Love of God. It captures all of the movements we’ve been praying through during our retreat in daily life.

In the video below, Kevin O’Brien, SJ, explains the exercise as contemplating God’s love, which is given to us so freely and generously. We are first asked to contemplate how God creates out of love, creates everything in this world and our very lives, and sustains everything by God’s labor and God’s love. We are called to see all things as a reflection of God’s love and give gratitude. And that gratitude should inspire in us a natural response to give back.

This video is part of An Ignatian Prayer Adventure, Week 8. If you’re receiving this via e-mail, click through to watch the video The Contemplation on Divine Love.

Gratitude is the key to Ignatian spirituality and the topic for my final video for An Ignatian Prayer Adventure. The Spiritual Exercises end with a vision of generosity and gratitude called the Contemplation to Attain the Love of God. How can we respond?

If you’re receiving this via e-mail, click through to watch the Week 8 video Gratitude.

The first contemplation in the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises involves Jesus appearing to his mother. Can you imagine being Mary, sitting in her house, overcome with grief and despair at losing her son? Can you imagine Mary, fully immersed in a “Holy Saturday” moment, pondering what happened, absorbed in her grief? Grief that we can relate to because of loss in our own lives.

Ignatius invites us to contemplate the interaction between Mary and her beloved son, who she watched die on the cross. What would the dialogue sound like?

“Woman, why are you crying?”

“I thought I had lost you.”

“I am here. I am here. I am risen, Mom. I am risen.”

“You are here, Son.”

Being a mom, I cannot even imagine the depth of joy Mary felt at seeing her son again. I have no doubt that her heart burst with joy and that she was radiant with love and hope. Can you imagine the depth of her consolation in that moment?

But what does Mary’s experience have to do with our lives? EVERYTHING!

In this Easter season we celebrate Mary’s joy that her son is here. We celebrate that Jesus is alive in each of us, in our world, creating us moment by moment. We celebrate that we can experience the joy Mary felt at seeing her son because Jesus lives within us. Easter reminds us of the reason to hope in the first place—because of the Resurrection of Mary’s son!

Happy Easter! We’ve come to the final week of An Ignatian Prayer Adventure. Jesus is risen! And in exploring our theme of “God’s Love and Our Response,” we take the lessons from the entire retreat and go forward, changed by the experience.

This retreat has been introduced during Lent and Easter, but it will have a permanent home on this site. You may wish to return to the entire experience or select portions in the future. Or invite a friend to experience the retreat at a convenient time.

Please share your questions and reflections in the comments section throughout the week.

For Good Friday, pray this colloquy from The Spiritual Exercises 53. This is a contemporary paraphrase by David L. Fleming, SJ.

I put myself before Jesus Christ our Lord, present before me on the cross.

I talk to him about how he creates because he loves and then he is born one like us out of love, so emptying himself as to pass from eternal life to death here in time, even death on a cross. By his response of love for God his Father, he dies for my sins.

I look to myself and ask—just letting the questions penetrate my being:

In the past, what response have I made to Christ?
How do I respond to Christ now?
What response should I make to Christ?

As I look upon Jesus as he hangs upon the cross, I ponder whatever God may bring to my attention.

Image by carulmare under Creative Commons license.

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius Loyola teaches ways to pray with our feelings. Engaging our emotions in prayer is key for conversion and discernment. I explain in today’s video contribution to An Ignatian Prayer Adventure.

If you’re receiving this via e-mail, click through to watch the Week 7 video Praying with Your Feelings.

Kevin O’Brien, SJ, explains that the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises is an extended meditation on the passion, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ. This week can be difficult, because we are accompanying our friend Jesus Christ whom we have gotten to know throughout the Exercises, through our days of prayer. We are accompanying our Lord in suffering and in death.

But we are not to inflict amnesia on ourselves, because we know as Christians that the shadows of Good Friday will yield to the dawn of Easter morning. And so the suffering and death of Jesus must always be remembered and lived in context of the hope that springs eternal, the hope of Easter morning.

This video is part of An Ignatian Prayer Adventure, Week 7. If you’re receiving this via e-mail, click through to watch the video Accompanying Jesus in His Passion and Death.

Holy Week begins today and so does Week 7 of our Ignatian Prayer Adventure online retreat.  You might think about following the retreat this week even if you haven’t done it so far.  The readings follow Jesus through his passion and death.  They will help you pray during this sacred time.

Next week the retreat ends with scripture readings and reflections on the resurrected Jesus and God’s boundless love.

Please share your questions and reflections in the comments section throughout the week.

I’ve been thinking about Ignatius’s  Presupposition lately.  This is a ground rule for the Spiritual Exercises that he puts right at the beginning of the book.  It’s about the relationship between the spiritual director and person making the retreat.

To assure better cooperation between the one who is giving the Exercises and the exercitant, and more beneficial results for both, 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.  If this does not suffice, all appropriate means should be used to bring him to a correct interpretation, and so to defend the proposition from error.

Note that Ignatius isn’t saying that we should play Mister Nice Guy and ignore mistakes and false beliefs.  Error should be corrected—but “with all kindness.”  But before we start correcting other people, we need to do something else, and that is to do everything we can to understand how the other person understands the proposition that bothers us so much.   This is the part that’s so often skipped.  We think we already know why someone is spouting dangerous nonsense: they’re ignorant, or selfish, or afraid to admit the truth.  They’re bad.

How good it would be if spouses, politicians, business associates, and fellow Christians did what Ignatius advised, and were more ready to put a good interpretation on another’s statement than to condemn it as false.

What kind of relationship do you have with God? Think about the possibility of having a friendship with God. That’s our topic in today’s video contribution to An Ignatian Prayer Adventure.

If you’re receiving this via e-mail, click through to watch the Week 6 video Friendship with God.