To You . . . . . . From Ignatius This letter is written in the name of Ignatius of Loyola for the person who desires to make the Spiritual Exercises journey according to notation [19]. This is a meditation intended for many purposes: — to explain what are Spiritual Exercises, — for prayer, — to prepare for the Spiritual Exercises journey, — to study the Ignatian charism, — for a multiplicity of creative uses. Please Note --- This is a copy of Chapter 21 from Orientations Vol 2, Part B. It is complete in itself. However another copy of this same article with notes and links to various parts of the Spiritual Exercises and the Glossary of Working Definitions can be found by clicking here. As you know, my great desire was always to tell people about God and God's grace, and about Jesus ... both crucified and risen, so that my brothers and sisters would experience the freedom of God. I wanted to bring the same message as the church had always brought ... and yet, I felt I could put this in a new way. Why was this so? I had a direct encounter with God, particularly during those months at Manresa, where, as I told you in my autobiography, God personally taught me like a school boy. Yes, I, Ignatius of Loyola, Inigo as they called me, I knew God ... Father, Son and Spirit ... nameless and unfathomable, mysterious and yet near ... bestowing themselves upon me in a manner beyond all concrete imaginings. I knew God clearly in such nearness and grace as was impossible to confound or mistake. God, God's very self ... I knew God, not simply human words describing God. I knew the Divine Majesty. I knew God, as you would say in your modern world -- experientially, even if knowing God face to face, as I do now, is again different ... and yet ... somehow the same. This is grace ... gift ... I believe that God ... Father, Son and Spirit ... desires to give this gift of God's self to all who desire to be open to it. This grace that I received during those days at Manresa, was not something that I considered a special privilege for myself or a chosen few. Therefore, I set down the structure of this experience in a little manual which I called The Spiritual Exercises. I gave these exercises to anyone for whom such an offer of spiritual help might seem profitable. I did this as a lay person, long before I went to school to learn theology for ordination. I gave these Exercises on the conviction that God desires to communicate directly and personally to the generous person, eager to discover God's will and ready to act responsibly in the world with deliberate choice. Over the years, it has been observed that, if persons are willing to dispose themselves generously according to the directives of these Exercises, in time ... God personally leads them. God can and does communicate personally to human creatures who are open-hearted. A person knows God truly when this happens, and that person will experience the sovereign power of God's freedom in one's own life. This very simple and yet stupendous conviction of mine is a key to my spirituality. Unfortunately, over the years, people have thought of my spirituality as being too rigidly methodical. They did this because they separated the exterior structure and content of the Exercises from their interior dynamic, sometimes misinterpreting and misunderstanding the very simple approach that I have always believed in, namely ... We do the best we can, only by way of disposition and by way of creating an openness. In the meantime, we know that only God's Spirit can give us what we are seeking. My spirituality would be betrayed if it were reduced to methods ... but the Exercises contain many methods. My spirituality would be betrayed if persons were not led, ultimately, to abandon all tangible assurances, including my methods -- thus growing in confidence toward the inconceivable where there are no longer paths or methods, and thus entering their final, fearful, creaturely choice at the end of their lives. To help others to experience God directly, and to realize that the incomprehensible mystery we call God, is near ... and ... we can talk with God -- this is the goal of the Spiritual Exercises journey. Do you desire that the Father, Son and Spirit, share themselves with you? Do you desire to base your life choices and decisions on this personal sharing and communication? Then, by all means, enter into these Spiritual Exercises. But you will have to pay a price -- the price is your time; the price is your patience; the price is putting aside, for almost a year, frenetic occupations, pressing decisions, that will scatter your energies and leave you so unfocused that you will not be able to give yourself to the daily moments of solitude that my Spiritual Exercises presume. The price is commitment to prayer, each day, at a special time; perhaps the best time. More prayer, possibly, and more focus in your prayer than you have been used to. The price is waiting for God to influence your being and trusting God to do so. The price is that you will have to surrender your own personal methods ... and wait ... at least, for a time. Occasionally, you will feel that you should never have begun, and you will experience a variety of reactions towards which you will become more and more sensitive. Reactions that are interior, some of which are spiritual movements ... ... turmoil, anxieties, joy, pain, uplift, peace, enthusiasm, comfort, happiness, sadness, dryness, discouragement, tears, hope, enlightenment, temptation, fear ... In my Spiritual Exercises manual, I describe them in Spanish as "agitaciones" -- spiritual movements caused by the good and evil spirits. Modern psychology undoubtedly will have a different explanation of how they arise. I have discernment guidelines that will help you and your prayer guide sift through these reactions. At the beginning of the manual which I wrote for your prayer guide, I included twenty-two different introductory notes or comments that apply to the whole of the Exercises. In time, these comments came to be known as Annotations. The way you are receiving the Spiritual Exercises is according to Annotation 19, or as some of your contemporaries call it, Spiritual Exercises in Daily Life. The journey you are about to make will take you many months, and you will be doing the Spiritual Exercises in the midst of your everyday life. If you were to do this same journey according to Annotation 20, you would be doing so in the closed setting of a retreat house, away from everyday life, from your usual activities and occupations. You might feel that this is a better way of making the Exercises. I used to think that way myself, particularly in my time. Remember, however, we didn't have retreat houses then, and the person who made the Exercises, even in a closed setting of thirty days, had to take lodging in a boarding house, away from home, and had to go to church several times a day for mass, vespers and benediction. The directee had to go outside for one's toiletry needs, go to the stream to wash one's clothes, and sometimes cook and shop for oneself. There were many more distractions for the person of the 20th Annotation in my time, than for the person of the 20th Annotation in your retreat houses today. Another difference in my time had to do with the culture. Society, then, was not what you refer to today as schizoid ... separated. There was a more unified way of looking at life. In the past seventy years, you seem to have discovered what is called the unconscious, and, I believe, you experience this phenomenon as being separated from your conscious self. Your life in various areas seems to be divided. The public and private spheres of life in my time were not experienced as disparate, as I believe, they are for you. Nor did we speak of secular and sacred as if they were separate, as you regard them now. For persons of my time, the process of integrating their spiritual experiences with their secular experiences was easier. Therefore, when they went away for thirty days, they would more automatically experience a unity between their experiences. Not so with the people of your time. The advantage of doing my Spiritual Exercises according to Annotation 19 is that you will be taught to integrate the experience of God's Spirit with your daily life. In the next several months, many of your activities of work, family and leisure, even if you adapt them for this journey, may appear to take you away from God. I assure you, however, that if you are faithful in your committed prayer times and to what you will learn in the course of the Exercises journey, you will begin to find God in all things. This is the goal of the Spiritual Exercises journey ... to find God ... to experience God ... to return love for love ... in the choices you make. Your prayer guide is a companion on your journey. She is neither your superior nor your judge. You do not have a subject/superior relationship, a slave/master relationship, nor a sacred obedience relationship with her. She is a sister pilgrim. She is a sinner as you are. She is a person whom God will use, at this point in your life, as an instrument for your guidance. I have given her very special instructions on how to apply my Spiritual Exercises so that she will not interfere and will allow God to communicate personally with you. I presume, then, that you and your guide are companions on the journey, that each of you is coming out of good will, that each of you is coming out of generosity. Your relationship will be one of friendliness and gentleness. On your part, you are being asked to be deeply faithful to the exercises for each day and faithful to the reflection upon the experiences of these exercises. Then, when you meet with your prayer guide, you will share what has been transpiring in your experiences ... ... the ups and downs ... the insights ... the struggles ... the success feelings ... the failure feelings ... By listening to your prayer experiences, she will be able to guide you and help you to proceed on your journey. Her very first task is to help you get beyond the barriers that prevent God from being personal with you. This may take a long time or it may proceed quickly; there may be teaching, explaining, dialogue, and possibly some experimenting. However, once you have allowed God to be personal with you, once you are free enough to allow your mystery to be touched by God's mystery, then your guide moves into the second task. Her second task is to be more passive, sitting on the sidelines, as it were, but attentive while God leads you. I describe this in the 15th Annotation: ... while one is making the Exercises, it is much better that the Creator and Lord communicate directly with the directee seeking to discover God's desires, that God inflame him with God's love and praise, and dispose him to serve God better in the future. Therefore, standing in the centre like a balance, the director of the Exercises, should permit our Creator God to deal immediately with the directee, and the directee immediately with God. There are two obvious exaggerations which she will help you to avoid ... The first is that God is not able to communicate personally with you, and that you can never have a close experience with God. Against this exaggeration, she will teach you to take seriously what happens in your heart. The second is a growing exaggeration in your day ... growing because your society, like my own, is in transition; you may be tempted to look for black and white securities that are not God. This exaggeration states that every good feeling you have is a direct experience of God. Against this exaggeration, she will help you to become better attuned to what is more authentic within your heart. Often, it is with one or the other of these two exaggerations, that the enemy of our human nature will attempt to obstruct the good work that God desires to do in you, by seductively and persistently, attempting to trivialize your attempts to be open to God's initiatives. What is my hope? My hope is that week by week, slowly and gradually, you will develop a greater ability, a greater facility, in entering the mystery of God You can then experience God's love the way I was able to experience God's love. My hope is that you will grow in Spiritual Freedom and in union and love ... deep love with Jesus, my risen Lord and King. With all the communion of saints, I am interceding on your behalf ... that at some point in your life, you will be affected by God's power, that all the desires of your heart and the actions and decisions that flow from these desires, will be oriented towards God, who is more than both Mother and Father to us and towards God's service and praise. We pray that you may grow in the awareness of God's continuous presence in your everyday experiences and discover that presence in both the private and public worlds in which you live. Then, later, living in faith and meditating on the word of God, you will be able to find God always and everywhere, seek God's will in every event, and see Jesus, the Lord, in all people and in all their struggles for liberation; you will be able to make good judgements and correct decisions in all you do and in all you are. I finish here with two statements that will be given again to you towards the last weeks of the Spiritual Exercises journey. The first is that love is manifested in deeds, not just in words ... God's love, poured into your heart, will move you towards your sisters and brothers. The second is that love consists in a mutual sharing by the two parties involved ... the lover gives to and shares with the beloved all that the lover has, and the beloved acts towards the lover in the same way. On your Spiritual Exercises journey, you are the beloved, and God is your lover. Father, Son and Holy Spirit desire to share everything that they have ... even their intimate life ... with you. Hopefully, through the power of Jesus' love poured into your heart, you will be able to share everything that you have with them.