by Fr. David Haschka, SJ

A retreatant prays at St. Ignatius Retreat House in Manhasset, New York, one of the more than 36 Jesuit retreat houses and spirituality centers in the United States that use the Spiritual Exercises in new ways.

Spiritual Exercises - the phrase conjures up visions of muscular souls sweating it out in ethereal weight rooms.

I first heard it as a Jesuit novice back in 1965. The novice master explained to us that we were to spend a month (month!) doing the Spiritual Exercises. It's the "long retreat" he explained. Retreat? Isn't that what the blue-clad cavalry does when their feather-clad foes become overwhelming, and then to the sound of a bugle?

Fr. George Winzenburg SJ, directs the Sioux Spiritual Center in Rapid City, South Dakota. He works to develop Native clergy and leadership on reservations with retreats and spiritual programs for Native people and summer institutes for mission personnel entering the field of Native Ministry and for Native-American catechists.

No. After eight years in Jesuit educational institutions, I did know what a retreat was. That's where you have to keep silence for some days while being regularly instructed in prayer and Christian conduct. It's a time when you go ape on churchy stuff-Mass, Confession, Benediction, Stations of the Cross-all in one day. It's when you are supposed to reflect on your life and your faith and to make resolutions (that have small likelihood of being kept). A retreat was three days each year to be endured, part of the cost of a Jesuit education.

How things have changed! Today we find, in the United States alone, tens of thousands of people doing the Spiritual Exercises voluntarily. If one were to produce a television program entitled "A Day in the Life of the Spiritual Exercises," it might have scenes such as these:

Scene 1: On a brisk afternoon in Minnesota, 65 men walk together around the grounds of the Demontreville Jesuit retreat house praying the rosary. When finished, they proceed in silence into the chapel to listen to another of the fourteen instructions that punctuate their traditional three-day silent retreat. Most have been here before, some coming for 30 to 40 years. For many it is an annual event that renews and strengthens their faith while bonding them to the Church and to each other. The retreat guides, Jesuit priests, may change, but the companions, the place, the prayers, the daily order, even the menu, remain the same-comforting constancy in a changing world.

Scene 2: At Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a young woman sits down with her retreat director to discuss the progress of her prayer over the last 24 hours. She has been doing this for two weeks-praying for five to six hours every day and meeting with her guide for another hour-and she will continue for two weeks at least. This is a crucial time in her life, for she is trying to discern whether God is calling her to religious life and, if so, to embrace that call wholeheartedly.

Marian Rubin is among the 50 students who have taken part in two eight-day silent directed retreats for John Carroll University students each year. "They respond very, very well to the retreats," says organizer Fr. Joe Schell, SJ, whose involvement with student retreats at John Carroll dates to the early '50s. "I screen the students pretty carefully-six or so interviews-to make sure that they are serious about it. They end up enthusiastic about the experience, usually talking up a storm over breakfast on the last day," Fr. Schell proudly comments.

Scene 3: In Missoula, Montana, a dozen men and women meet with their Jesuit pastor in the Saint Francis Xavier parish rectory. They are not on retreat themselves, but together they are responsible for guiding 35 other people doing the Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life-an adaptation of the Exercises whereby the retreatant prays for about 90 minutes a day and meets with a director once a week. The twelve meet once a month for "peer supervision," some guidance and encouragement from the pastor, and to learn from one another's experience.

Scene 4: In St. Louis, another small group of lay people gathers in one of their homes. They are on retreat in much the same manner as the 35 mentioned above, only this time they are going through the experience together, relying not on an experienced guide but rather on a book of directions and on the wisdom present in the group.

Scene 5: In southern Louisiana, a permanent deacon preaches a weekend retreat at a parish to 30 friends and neighbors. His prayerful enthusiasm is refreshing and new. His material sounds a lot like what has been going down for many years at the Manresa Jesuit Retreat House up the road in Convent.

Marriage: the Fifty Year Journey is just one of many different retreat programs offered at El Retiro San I¤igo in Los Altos, California. Others are aimed at businessmen and women, teachers, or recovering alcoholics, in silent and nonsilent settings. Many different constituencies find common ground here with the Spiritual Exercises.

Scene 6: In California, a judge meets with an attorney in his chambers-a common enough occurrence. But he is not instructing this attorney in the intricacies of the law but rather in the Ignatian "three degrees of humility," a challenging exercise in the second "week" of Ignatius's spiritual program.

Scene 7: In a run-down neighborhood near Chicago's Loop, a Jesuit priest meets with a group of homeless men being guided to pray in the manner of Ignatius. For them, identifying with a savior born into poverty is easy, but believing that God really does love them-now that's a special struggle.

Scene 8: And finally, from all over the world, every hour of every day, thousands of people are logging on to "An Online Retreat" - a 34-week retreat for everyday life provided by Creighton University in Omaha (see below). They pray via their computers-bringing up images, music, prayer guides, and Scripture and share the experience in online "chat groups."

Each of these scenes illustrates another way in which the 450-year-old spiritual legacy of the Society of Jesus has been adapted to the circumstances of modern times. To many, the first two scenes are familiar, or at least expected. The others, though, may be surprising.

All of these retreat experiences have their roots in the parish mission and laymen's retreat movement in which Jesuits in the United States participated so enthusiastically in the middle of the last century. In those years the content and form of these retreats differed little, except in length, from the annual retreats of Jesuits in formation. The retreatants kept silence throughout the three days-a Jesuit general congregation had declared that three full days were necessary in order to be called a retreat. They were guided in their prayer by several talks each day-"points" for meditation-given by the retreat master, always a veteran Jesuit priest who had demonstrated comprehension of the Spiritual Exercises, a gift for preaching, or both.

Each day included several periods of common prayer, the Mass, of course, but also recitation of the rosary, the Stations of the Cross, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and other devotions. This is quite descriptive of the first "scene" portrayed above.

Seeds of change, though, had already been sown in 1938, the year the Jesuits' 28th general congregation included this in one of its decrees:

"In his encyclical letter Mens Nostra, Pope Pius XI has graciously extolled the Spiritual Exercises of our holy father Ignatius with new and most abundant praise and has stated that they are in a special way suited to the needs of our times. Thus the general congregation, with most grateful spirit towards the Vicar of Christ, now once again stresses to all of Ours the supreme importance of the Spiritual Exercises as a most excellent ministry for today, one that we should use more fruitfully each day for the salvation and perfection of ourselves and of others, particularly priests and apostolic laymen. In giving the Exercises, Ours should faithfully abide by the method used by our holy father Ignatius; they should therefore become most conversant with both the book of the Exercises and the Directory."

Stations of the Cross were part of a day of reflection, a follow-up to a retreat given at Bellarmine Retreat House in Barrington, Illinois, for people 60 and older struggling with illness, either their own or a spouse's. The retreat used the Spiritual Exercises to help participants discover how to find holiness in suffering.

It took another 30 years for this objective to even begin to be achieved. In the intervening years, scholars of Ignatius insisted that the method used by Ignatius was a one-on-one experience, with the Exercises tailored to the needs, circumstances, and prayer experience of each retreatant. Jesuits themselves began to do the Exercises in this much more intimate and demanding fashion and to share the experience with lay colleagues. Other religious communities inspired by Ignatian spirituality, such as the Religious of the Cenacle and the Religious of the Sacred Heart, began to do likewise. And hence, our second "scene" became much more common.

Among the rediscoveries was Ignatius's 19th Annotation, one of a series of instructions for the person guiding the Exercises, this one allowing people to do the Exercises without withdrawing from day-to-day life but rather doing them in the midst of their regular lives. They were expected to do the full four "weeks" but over a much longer period of time-rather like earning a BA at evening college. Hence, our third scene becomes familiar.

But were Ignatius's Exercises now to become the exclusive "haute couture" of personal spirituality, accessible only to the spiritual elite? That might have been were it not for two persistent phenomena and one other rediscovery.

First phenomenon: Those Jesuit retreat houses with traditional programs continue to thrive, finding a consistent, even increasing demand for the three days of quiet, filled with talks and devotions. As an example, Manresa Jesuit Retreat House in Convent, La., mentioned above, offers 57 three-day retreats for men each year. The capacity is 120, and they are always fully booked with waiting lists.

Second phenomenon: Lay folks are constantly taking the Exercises, adapting it to their own purposes, and sharing it with friends-hence our 4th, 5th, and 6th scenes. An Ignatian Spirituality Conference held at Saint Louis University in July 2002 drew over 500 people from all around the United States, only about 100 of them Jesuits. Most but not all have connections with Jesuit parishes, high schools, and universities. They are young, old, and in between. Almost all are regularly involved in "giving" the Exercises in one form or another.

The other rediscovery: Another of the annotations in Ignatius's text receiving more-careful attention in recent years is the 18th, which offers instruction for sharing the Exercises with a variety of people "adapted to the dispositions of the persons who wish to receive them, that is, to their age, education or ability . . . by which, [each] according to his wish to dispose himself, may be better able to help himself and to profit." Hence, if thousands of lay men and women want to use some simple version of the Exercises for an annual renewal of their practice of religion, this is as it should be. And certainly it cannot be inappropriate to attempt to make this spiritual experience available to the poorest in our society.

So, the practice of the Exercises today is as diverse as the variety of people giving and using them. Some worry that the "franchise" may be diluted or distorted. This is possible, perhaps even likely. But the Exercises are not proprietary. They are a gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, freely given and freely received. It remains important to refer constantly to "the book." But there is little danger in overuse, just insufficient use of this great spiritual legacy.

Fr. Joseph Tetlow, SJ, the Secretary for the Promotion of Ignatian Spirituality at the Jesuit Curia in Rome, loves to tell a story of when Ignatius asked Peter Canisius how the Spiritual Exercises were being used in Germany. Canisius replied that he didn't know since he himself had given the Exercises to only a few people but that they in turn were giving them to many others. Ignatius, as Joe tells it, was quite pleased with that answer. One way or another, it seems, the Holy Spirit is leading this diverse ministry of the Spiritual Exercises back exactly to the place Ignatius intended.

Fr. David Haschka, SJ, secretary for pastoral ministries at the Jesuit Conference in Washington, D.C., served as Wisconsin Province's assistant for pastoral ministry. Prior to that he worked in campus ministry and as pastor at St. Luke in St. Paul. One of Fr. Haschka's goals is to give a retreat at every Jesuit retreat center in the United States by the time he finishes his term of office in 2006. Seven down, seventeen to go.