The Spiritual Exercises

My whole course here has been structured around St Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. This is a progressive, cumulative program which can be done as a 30 day silent retreat, or as I did it, by spending an hour a day in prayer for 35+ weeks. The structure and method is quite ingenious and has stood the test of time (nearly 500 years).

It begins with a statement called the Principle and Foundation, which states quite simply that human beings are created to know, love and serve God. Therefore we should use all created things in whatever way they help us to achieve our purpose of loving and serving God, and refrain from them whenever they hinder us.

This might seem rather obvious, but it is in fact a wonderful starting point and an anchor  for how we make decisions. In a completely secular worldview  there is no starting point for how to make decisions about my life. "Maximise happiness" seems to be the general goal, but what about when the short term happiness of spending money now conflicts with the long term happiness of buying a house later, or my happiness of making a large profit conflicts with your happiness of being paid a good wage? Have the goal of knowing, loving and serving God makes such a difference.

The rest of the Exercises are then ways to become free from attachment to things which hold us back from truly knowing, loving and serving God. But that's a story for another post.



Comments

  1. Dominic3 August 2018 at 14:13

    You would have liked the talk we had at our combined churches Men’s Bootcamp series this last Wednesday. It was on defining success. We had a pastor talk on how the goal of obtaining a material object never satisfies.
    I’m proud of the discipline you applied to these studies, I think you have really got the most out of it.
    Looking forward to hearing and sharing more on your return.
    Safe traveling
    D

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