Ignatian Spirituality:
The Spiritual Exercises

By the Rev. Larry Gillick, S.J.
Director of the Ignatian center for spirituality

There is an increasing emphasis on the Creighton campus — and in society — on the importance of exercise for physical health. Likewise, we are gaining a greater realization of the importance of nourishing our spiritual health.

Here, we can turn not to a gym but to a little book — The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

Developed by the founder of the Jesuit religious order, the Spiritual Exercises is a method of prayers, meditation and contemplative practices designed to bring us closer to God.

Born in northern Spain more than 500 years ago, Iñigo de Loyola spent his young adulthood engaging in military exercises, preparing to do the deeds of gallantry and courtly advancement. He was of the family of the Loyola Castle. He was quite successful and became a captain, leading his forces against the French, who had invaded the Spanish territory. During a particular battle, Iñigo was struck in his leg by a cannonball and so ended one career. He was taken back to his home to recover and, as it happened, to discover.

As Iñigo was literally laid low, his daydreams were spent trying to reverse his nightmare. He found himself dreaming about how he would dazzle the women of the court once more and rise in fame as a gallant warrior. Little by little, he grew tired of his vanity fair and was forced to read the only books in the castle: ones on the life of Christ and others on the lives of the saints. These were not his usual interests, but he made the best of them, the very best. He began finding his daydreams centering on the excitement he felt when thinking of how he would like doing saintly and heroic things for Christ.

When he would have other thoughts of the court and military life, his spirit drooped, but he was moved to a soul’s delight when pondering the possibilities of doing the more noble deeds. Upon recovery, he desired to find out what kind of battle was going on between his dreams, his sense of himself and what he was really all about.

After his convalescing, Ignatius — with a limp serving as a constant reminder of his war injury — made his way to a mountain cave near the town of Manresa, close to a Catholic monastery. There he began to ask the big questions. Through this process, he was forced to face his answers. For him, and for us as well, the questions asked and the answers received begin to form an attitude. When we stay faithful to our answers, the attitudes will reveal themselves in actions. So this soul-searching warrior became the first member of the spiritual “Triple A Club”: answers, attitudes, actions. This can be a scary process, because it might involve — and for Iñigo it did — real life-changing ways.

One change he made was his name. He wanted to be known as Ignatius, after an early-Christian saint and martyr, and he no longer considered himself as from the castle and family of Loyola but of the family of God. There were other changes, more dramatic and profound. He retired from his fine clothing of royalty and draped himself in the poorer garments of a pilgrim, for this is what he subsequently called himself. He had asked the big questions about God and who God was and what God did. His answers led to other questions about who he was, who others were and what all these things around him were really about. All his answers began forming his attitude or spirituality. How he lived his attitude, based on his faith in a loving God, would eventuate in what we know now as Ignatian Spirituality. Living with our answers will cause us tensions, as they did for Ignatius. Once he realized that all creation, including his own life, was a tremendous gift from a loving God, the resulting tension was to reverence, rather than abuse and misuse, these God-given blessings.

While on the mountain, he began writing little snatches of insights and reflections. He felt he had experienced something very special, like a wonderful secret, and he wanted to share it. He came down from the mountainside after a little more than a year with his little book and a song in his soul, a song he wanted to teach the world to sing. Remember, he was not a theologian or very educated. The church officials heard that he was preaching this new form of spirituality and refused to allow him to continue. But, upon review, the Church’s thinkers gave the book back, blessing him and it. Though new, in some ways his ideas were also ancient and real.

Just as physical exercise helps the body stay lively, so the Spiritual Exercises assist a person to reflect upon big questions — which will readjust certain “mis-attitudes” and aid in choosing appropriate actions. The Spiritual Exercises are formulated into four weeks, not seven-day weeks, but more biblical weeks.

I warn you: Just as doing physical exercise might inform you of certain muscular deficiencies, and the need for further and intense work, so making the Spiritual Exercises can be a rigorous process. We have to face our truths! We have to face how we have not faced our truths! We have to face the real truths of a loving, patient, laboring, inviting and personal, eternal and mysterious Being.

The First Week
The first week of the Spiritual Exercises calls the person to reflect upon God’s love in creating everything. Then each person confronts that she or he also has been created personally as a gift. Then there comes the praying with the gifts of creation and how they are to be received and reverently used. Throughout the first week, there rides the big question: For what purpose am I, are we, created?

The rest of the first week offers the invitation to experience the loving response of God to us, even in our lack of reverently and gratefully responding to God’s gifts. The first week does involve personally reflecting on our disorderly conduct, aka sin. The week is not so much about sin as it is about how this loving God does not give up on bringing us to our creational status as God’s beloved family. The Exercises confronts us with the conflict between what we say about who we are, because of our sin, and who God says we are, because of who God is.

The Second Week
The second week is spent in going through the picture album of Christ’s life. Ignatius invites the person praying through the Exercises to receive what Jesus is doing, not just for the person or persons of the stories, but more personally for the retreatant, as well. Ignatius asks the person to get into the picture and see, hear and smell what is going on, both in the Gospel narrative and in her or his own life. It is about Jesus’ getting up close and personal and the retreatant doing the same.

Intimacy cannot be standardized. Each person meets Jesus according to how Jesus meets the person praying. God comes to us according to us. God’s love adapts to and reverences each person uniquely. There is no measuring up; there are no expectations to be met. The retreatant is invited to show up and be open to what is being offered in each exercise involving the life of Jesus. We cannot love what we do not know. We cannot serve or follow what we do not love. In a simple sense, we hang out with the person of Jesus and begin interiorizing His style, His interior.

The second week invites the retreatant to get in contact with the question of identity: Who and what are trying to define who we are, our value? The Creator is trying to give us our identity and so, too, is the world around and within us. There is a struggle that has to be faced about to whom we belong. This struggle to answer this big question does result in some kind of a decision or election to follow Jesus more closely, according to the person’s unique relationship with God.

The Third Week
The third week centers our attention intellectually and our hearts emotionally on the openness of Jesus to who He was as a “Suffering Servant.” The retreatant walks with, talks with Jesus as He experiences ultimate rejection even by His closest friends. We watch Him live His life gratefully even to the point of His physical death. We listen to His conversations with the Roman officials and with His disciples at His Last Supper. We listen to His words from the cross and stand with His mother and good friend at the foot of the cross.

We are invited to consider that if we decide to follow Him more closely, then we, too, will have to confront our own self-centered desires for the easy life, the successful life, the powerful life. Jesus died because He confronted the powerful and the pretentious. Those following Jesus will also be invited to a similar life and perhaps death.

There is a tendency during the considerations of His dying to be sad and guilty. There is some of that, of course, but ultimately our praying this week’s Exercises results in a deep sense of being so loved by a God who did all this for the love of us all. The invitation again is for the retreatant to desire to follow that love no matter what the cost.

The Fourth Week
The fourth week is spent in praying with the events of Christ’s Resurrection. He rises to raise the minds and spirits of His dispersed followers. He goes about collecting and reuniting the disappointed and discouraged. His death was not an ending, but a continuation. We watch Jesus offer peace, reconciliation and a sense of mission to His little group. We use the powers of imagination again to watch Him meet His mother, who had stayed faithfully watching at the cross. There is a sense of joy and meaningfulness to our staying faithful to our own decisions and crosses.

The retreatant is invited to consider the cost of discipleship. We are invited through the contemplations of this week to consider the investments we are being called to make and our subsequent sacrifices. The Cross will lead to the Crown, but each person has to consider the cost. Some of His friends want to take the “Jerusalem bypass” and live the la-la life of avoidance and noninvolvement. Jesus rose from the dead to bring us all to life. He was faithful to who He was. Watching Him during this week of the Exercises moves us to embrace our infidelities. Like the fleeing and denying friends of the third week, we continually find ourselves being found, blest and sent to continue His Resurrection in our lives and others’ lives.

The Final Week
The final prayer exercise is a consideration again of all the gifts with which this loving God continues to bless us. As with Ignatius, who came down from his mountain retreat, the modern maker of the Exercises will be moved to do something. The retreatant offers his or her mind, memory and entire will to the Divine Giver and trusts that only God’s love and grace are necessary, and will be riches enough.

As with physical exercise, when we stop and start again, we experience the muscles saying, “Don’t ever stop again; it is too painful.” One who begins the Spiritual Exercises is so influenced that he or she never stops making them. The Exercises are not a program or workshop, but a way of receiving life and living more freely what has been given. One does not actually make the Spiritual Exercises, rather the Exercises make the person a fuller receiver of her or his creation. Ignatian Spirituality flows from these Exercises into the personal lives and missions of those who do come face to face with Jesus and themselves.

Willing to Believe

Just as St. Ignatius was compelled more than 450 years ago to bring the world the “good news” of his spiritual understanding, so, too, is Creighton University committed to carrying forth that vibrant message.

The world, after all, is just as hungry now for the message of hope and God’s goodness as it was in St. Ignatius’ time. It is only our way of communicating that message that has profoundly changed.

Creighton’s Online Ministries website draws one million visitors each month from 125 countries. This remarkable response shows that our innovative approach to ministry has global acceptance — and fills a great need.

For more about Creighton’s Online Ministries, including the Ignatian retreat, go to the following website:

www.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/
online.html

For those wanting to follow the liturgical year, the online retreat begins Sept. 14.

And, for ways you can support Creighton’s Jesuit mission and Catholic identity through Willing to Lead: The Campaign for Creighton University, visit online:

www.creighton.edu/development/
ourvision/believe/index.php

Guiding the Spiritual Journey: Larry Gillick, S.J.

For the Rev. Larry Gillick, S.J., conducting retreats is close to second-nature, though anything but routine. The Creighton Jesuit says he has guided people — from students to adults, groups to individuals — in about 500 of these spiritual journeys. Spiritual direction has spanned his entire life as a Jesuit, now about 48 years.

“Most often,” said Fr. Gillick, “these retreats flow from the spirit and text of the Spiritual Exercises” of St. Ignatius, the 16th century source of all Jesuit spirituality.

For Fr. Gillick, the key strength of the Spiritual Exercises is clear: “They assist us in allowing God to find us wherever we are, hiding or searching, or lost.”

This means one’s life takes on “a more personal relationship with God and with others,” Fr. Gillick adds.

“I enjoy doing so many things which involve God’s meeting students, faculty and staff, as well as alumni and alumnae, through my being a simple instrument. I enjoy watching God do the great work and listening to such good people trying to respond to the mysteries of God and their own lives.”

And, while Fr. Gillick came to Creighton to direct the Deglman Center for Ignatian Spirituality in 1991, his outreach has extended far beyond the Creighton campus.

It includes 20 years of helping to direct the Catholic bishops of the upper Midwest in their eight-day annual retreat.

And, lest readers think the retreats have been for Catholics alone, Fr. Gillick directs non-Catholics, as well.

“The presiding bishop, or primate, of the Episcopal Church in the United States has been coming to the Jesuit Community at Creighton for 18 years for his annual eight-day retreat,” said Fr. Gillick, “and I have been blessed by guiding his retreat.”

Fr. Gillick, like his fellow Jesuits, is often a retreatant, as well. As a Jesuit, he has made two 30-day retreats (the full cycle of the original Ignatian version) and each year makes an eight-day retreat guided by the Exercises. For ordained Jesuit priests and brothers, the Spiritual Exercises are an essential way of life, though the length may vary from the eight-day to the 30-day form.

“The unique feature of the Exercises is that they are so personal and invite the person to be uniquely related to God and to life. Nobody is just like the next somebody in God’s eyes, and the Exercises allow a person to enjoy being just who they are.”