An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 1: Love, Freedom, and Purpose. The Principle and Foundation Holy desires are at the core of the first key meditation of the Exercises, the Principle and Foundation.
It reads like a mission statement for the human person: “I am created to praise, love, and serve God.” Of course, this vocation is specified in each unique human life. When we live out of this vocation, we are truly happy and fulfilled. When we allow disordered loves and self-preoccupations to clutter our lives, we find ourselves out of balance, unhappy, and discontented. An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 2: Finding God in All Things. Pray over Significant Feelings In the third step of the Examen we look at our feelings.
Ignatius believed that God communicates with us not only through mental insight but also through our “interior movements,” as he called them: our feelings, emotions, desires, attractions, repulsions, and moods. Feelings are neither positive nor negative: it is what you do with them that raises moral questions. Lunchtime Examen. Reflection and Our Active Lives. By David L.
Fleming, SJ From What Is Ignatian Spirituality? The goal of the spiritual life, as Ignatius conceived it, is to “choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.” This is a dynamic goal. We are to choose—to freely unite ourselves with God. Rummaging for God: Praying Backwards through Your Day. By Dennis Hamm, SJ About 20 years ago, at breakfast and during the few hours that followed, I had a small revelation.
This happened while I was living in a small community of five Jesuits, all graduate students in New Haven, Connecticut. I was alone in the kitchen, with my cereal and the New York Times, when another Jesuit came in and said: “I had the weirdest dream just before I woke up. It was a liturgical dream. The lector had just read the first reading and proceeded to announce, ‘The responsorial refrain today is, If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ A little later in the day, I stumbled onto a clue. The try-try-again statement sounds like the harden-not-your-hearts refrain, yet what a contrast! Yet how do we hear the voice of God? The phrase, “If today you hear his voice,” implies that the divine voice must somehow be accessible in our daily experience, for we are creatures who live one day at a time. A Method: Five Steps 1. An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 3: Something’s Broken.
My Own History of Sin For the next two days you will reflect on your own history of sin.
We aim for our understanding of sin to be heartfelt because conversion involves a change in thinking and feeling, in choosing and desiring. With this deepening understanding may come strong affective reactions, including sorrow for sins and gratitude for God’s mercy. Try to be very concrete. Note specific actions or patterns of acting that are sinful, and then go beneath actions or habits to discern the attitudes, tendencies, and intentions that cause them. An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 4: Knowing Jesus. An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 5: What Do I Really Want?
Jesus Calls the Rich Man End this week by listening to what God is saying to you.
Recall your reaction to the meditations on the Call of the King, the Two Standards, and the Three Types of People. Review your journal notes. The Grace I Seek I pray for the following grace: to grow in interior freedom so that I’m able to respond wholeheartedly to Christ’s invitation in my life. Read Read Mark 10:17–31 (Jesus calls the rich man to follow him). An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 6: Public Ministry of Jesus. Join Jesus on a Busy Day.
An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 7: The Suffering Jesus. This week we pray through the Passion of Christ.
This is the third phase of the Spiritual Exercises—the Third Week. In the Second Week, we asked for the grace to know Jesus more intimately, to love him more dearly, and to follow him more closely. This love leads us to be with Jesus in his suffering. The grace we seek this week is compassion. We reflect not merely on the physical pain he endured but also on the emotional, interior suffering of a person who is misunderstood, isolated, rejected, and alone. An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 8. The Contemplation of the Love of God, Part One We conclude this retreat with three days of reflection on the Contemplation of the Love of God—the last meditation in the Spiritual Exercises.
This is the culmination of the retreat. In this contemplation, we let God’s overwhelming love empower our lives. We see that the whole movement of the retreat has been rooted in and oriented toward love. Before he offers this contemplation, Ignatius says two things about love: 1. 2. The Grace I Seek “I ask for what I desire. Thank God for So Many Gifts. An Ignatian Prayer Adventure – Spiritual Exercises Online Retreat. Welcome to An Ignatian Prayer Adventure.
This is an adapted version of the Spiritual Exercises. Materials are modified from the longer retreat in The Ignatian Adventure by Kevin O’Brien, SJ. The eight-week schedule makes it perfectly timed as a Lent and Easter retreat, but the adventure can be started at any time, on your schedule. Join in a flexible experience of daily prayer and reflection. Choose to commit to a regular period of prayer each day, or start with only one day a week.