Deciding to begin the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is a bit like deciding to become a parent; it's best to be a little ignorant or you're apt to talk yourself out of it. As a fairly new employee of Le Moyne College in Syracuse and a lifelong Protestant, I was probably a little more ignorant than most when I signed up for the Exercises. I was certain of only one thing: something was lacking in my spiritual life that Sunday church-going did not fill. What I found, like parenthood, were intensely rewarding moments alongside moments of great self-doubt, all of which culminated in an experience that can only be described as life changing.
The Spiritual Exercises are a program of prayer and reflection that grew out of the experiences of Ignatius during his religious conversion. Consisting of four sections, or "weeks," they lead one through experiences of God's love, of companionship with Christ, of Christ's love for us, and of Christ's victory over evil. All Jesuits undergo the Exercises in a 30-day retreat.
The Exercises can also be made over an eight-month period. Participants in this program of the Exercises in daily life are asked to spend 45 minutes to an hour a day in prayer and reading, to meet weekly with a spiritual director, and to keep a journal. This version of the Exercises has been in existence at Le Moyne for the past three years.
Pamela Ethington is editorial assistant in the office of communications at Le Moyne College, in whose magazine this story appeared in shorter form. An organist and choir director at Rockefeller United Methodist in Syracuse, she attended the College of Wooster in Ohio and Penn State. |
During the eight months all of life's distractions are still there, which makes the experience not worse than the original version but definitely different. Especially in 2001. I signed up for the Exercises just before September 11-in addition to the tragic events of that day, we saw over the next eight months war in Afghanistan, scandal in the Church, suicide bombers in Israel, and escalating war in the Middle East. Thoughts about current events and Ignatian meditations couldn't help but intersect.
That there are distractions galore at home goes without saying. Ask any mother. I have a teenage daughter who has to go through a metal detector every day at school (she tries to assuage what she thinks are my fears by telling me that her bellybutton piercing has never once set it off). And my son, in college, is a backpacker intent on seeing the world-sleeping in a cave in Mozambique, slogging through a Central American jungle, or spending spring break in Bosnia. He visited the Indian Parliament over Christmas break, two days before the bloody shootout there, midway through my eight months in the Exercises.
I worry and wish for world peace not altruistically, as I imagine the Jesuits to do, but selfishly, because my children insist on walking through the world despite my best efforts at getting them to stay in their rooms.
My spiritual advisor was Fr. John Breslin, SJ, then the rector of Le Moyne's Jesuit community. My first "Oh-what-have-I-done" moment came when I went to the Jesuit residence for the first of our weekly meetings. Standing in the foyer, waiting for someone to open the door, I experienced what can only be described as a panic attack. Short of breath, pounding heart. What if I said something wrong . . . or, worse yet, stupid? I remember at one of our early meetings telling him I wasn't quite sure I had understood a passage and asking him if he would explain it to me. He just smiled and said, "Why don't you tell me first what you think it means and then I'll say something about it?"
What I found, like parenthood, were intensely rewarding moments alongside moments of great self-doubt, all of which culminated in an experience that can only be described as life changing Gradually I came to relax and to look forward to our Wednesday afternoons. I look back through my journal and see interspersed with my thoughts various random notations: "Questions for Fr. B" or "Fr. B said to think about . . ." It was a gift having this person to myself for an hour a week, someone who never seemed offended by my questions, who suggested outside readings, who loaned books to me. There were days we'd sit for long stretches in silence; he never seemed in a hurry to announce the session over. I'd look out the window at clouds; eventually one of us would gather up the threads of our conversation and begin again.
There were things I stumbled over. Ignatius was, after all, a man; one who lived several hundred years ago. Some of his images seemed to come from his male, soldiering background. Fr. Breslin helped me come up with other images that were more compatible with my female sensibilities. One afternoon during one of the "weeks" I was particularly stuck, his suggestion touched on something so far back in my childhood that I'm still not convinced it wasn't God talking to me and not Fr. Breslin.
That particular week I had been contemplating the idea of the two different value systems. Ignatius used the image of two armies facing each other on a plain, one in darkness, the other in light. Fr. Breslin asked me what I had thought about that week. I had to confess, nothing-other than maybe the obvious opposites of light/dark or good/evil. We sat in silence for a little bit. Finally, he said gently, "There's not much point in going on until you feel you understand this." I felt sure I must have been a source of frustration for him at that point.
We sat a little longer in silence, and then he suddenly started talking about images of good and evil in fairy tales-how the wicked queen in Snow White had power and money but lived isolated from human contact in a cold castle. Silly as it may seem, that's when I felt like looking over my shoulder.
I was obsessed with fairy tales as a child. Forty-some years later, I could go to the library in my hometown and lead you past the circulation desk and into the first room on the left, around the first stack of books to the middle of the bottom shelf where the fairy tales were. I was allowed to check out one book, and after my mother collected me and took me home, I would pile pillows in my closet, shut myself in, and read. When I got older, I graduated to Boccaccio's Decameron and Tolkien's stories. But they were just more sophisticated versions of the same thing-tales -and I loved them.
That next week I thought about Snow White. If she had gone up against the wicked queen's henchman on his terms, she would have been overcome. He was more powerful physically and armed with a knife, but her power lay in her loving nature, a different kind of power but ultimately stronger. The problem I had with Ignatius's image was that he had two groups of men with equal weaponry out there on that field. Powerful forces are at work in the world, but they are different kinds of forces, as different as wind and water. Not the same weapons at all. And if Snow White could unwittingly exert that kind of force, how much more could we do by loving intentionally? Love can induce people to lay down weapons; it can heal resentments. Love can transform lives. I kept going.
What I found especially meaningful throughout the Exercises were the themes of freedom and healing-freedom from whatever inhibits our relationship with God, whether material attachments or emotional attachments or the hurts we all experience in life, and allowing God's love to heal and restore us. But what I found most important was just spending time with Christ-taking the time to contemplate his life: his birth, boyhood, ministry, friends, suffering, death, and resurrection; pondering what all of that means for each of us; and thinking about how I want, in my life, to respond to that gift.
Now that my experience of the Exercises is over, what am I left with? A feeling, first of all, that this is not an ending but a beginning. A desire to read more, think more, pray more-to try to live a more Christ-centered life. I think that wonderfully Christ-repetitive section of St. Patrick's breastplate sums it up best:
