St Ignatius of Loyola

By Renee Dreiling OP ~ July 31, 2008

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Society of Jesus and is the patron saint of retreats.  His Spiritual Exercises focused on guiding the retreatant in the imitation of Jesus in order to discern the will of God in one’s own life.  In 1608, the 6^th General Chapter determined that all Jesuits should annually participate in an 8-10 day retreat using the Spiritual Exercises.  Other religious orders followed this pattern of requiring all members to make an annual retreat.  Because there weren’t enough directors to guide each person individually as the Spiritual Exercises intended, preached retreats began to be offered.

The Spiritual Exercises mirrored Ignatius’ own conversion experience.  They are apostolic in tone, meaning the focus is on how one serves other people to help them reach salvation in contrast with a contemplative examination of one’s personal relationship with God.

 The Ignation retreat has four main elements: 

Silence and solitude

Focused prayer and asceticism

Discernment of spirits

Spiritual guidance

The retreat itself is divided into four themes:

Sin and God’s loving mercy

The Incarnation and Jesus’ life, prior to the passion

Jesus’ passion and death

Jesus’ resurrection

The hallmark of the retreat is in personal adaptation, direction, and discernment.

Probably the most popular part of the Ignation spirituality is the practical exercise for discernment.  It is by discerning God’s movements in us, inviting us to be aware of how God the Potter is shaping us into vessels of love and grace for the world, that we will be the plump, healthy fish that will be saved when the net is hauled in to shore.

It is by using the daily examen and looking over our day at what we are most grateful for and at what we are least grateful for that we can discern where we need to focus our spiritual disciplines, where we let the Potter shape us and where we stubbornly hang onto our own agenda.

God is calling us to live a deeply spiritual life.  To do that we need not only to live well our prayer life, we need to serve others; we need to learn to listen to and discern the voice of God with our whole heart, soul and body.  We need to live our spiritual life until it becomes truly real.