IGNATIAN SPIRITUAL EXERCISES TRAINING (ISET)
2023-BLOCK TWO – SESSION 14
THE CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF THE FIRST WEEK
Annemarie: [00:00:00] So welcome. Russell, as you may remember, is in Spain in the Ignatian immersion experience. I think this particular piece of the course they are busy looking in some detail at a whole lot of different things around how the exercises function and the constitutions and how it all links together. He’s gaining lots of pearls of wisdom for us. And Trevor, unfortunately, isn’t able to be with us this evening. He suffered a bereavement in his family. His wife’s mom passed away, so we keep him in our prayers. He did say just to please tell you all that he is sorry not to be with us tonight, but he’ll be with us next week.
So, I’m going to hand over to Brenda to lead us in a time of prayer. Thank you, Brenda. [00:01:00]
Brenda: Thank you, Annemarie. I wonder if we can take a moment at the beginning of the day or the end of the day depending on where we are, just to be still and as normal, if you would like to turn off your video and make sure you are muted. Let’s just gather ourselves as we come to pray.
You may want to close your eyes and using your sense of hearing, notice what sounds you can hear beyond the room where you’re seated.
Perhaps you can hear traffic. Maybe you can hear the birds singing [00:02:00] or the wind in the trees.
Listen to one sound. Focus on it and then release it. See what else you can hear.
Now draw your attention inside the room where you’re seated. Listen to the sounds of this space. Maybe the buzz of a light, or the breathing of a pet,[00:03:00] the rustle of a curtain. Focus and release.
Move your attention to the sounds of your own body. Listen to your breathing. Don’t try and change your breath or your breathing. Just notice as your body draws in breath and releases.[00:04:00]
Allow yourself to settle into God’s love, to look at God who looks upon you with love.
As we gather this evening, what is the grace you ask of God? What is it that you long for that only [00:05:00] God can give?
We’re going to share in this poem that is part of the resources Kathi has for the first week for us.
Unknown to you, upstream, poison enters the river. The life in the river begins to take it up.[00:06:00] In the plant life, the fish, the trees along the banks.
One form of life after another becomes infected in the ecological train. One link after another.
See how everything is connected, interdependent. Each link of the chain, the natural system, Poisoned, weakened, debilitated.
You are standing in the river. You did not ask to be there. But
You are in the chain of life. This stream of life And you cannot [00:07:00] dispossess yourself of it. You belong to it. You are part of it. You find your home in it. It is yours. You cannot be what you are, a woman, a man, A creature formed from the earth in the stream, A human being, and not be part of it.
You find yourself in a stream, In a world that is poisoned and diseased.
Choices have been made even before you entered the stream. Structures have been set, Idols have been worshipped, [00:08:00] Extensions of man’s ego which have resulted In gas chambers, atomic eruptions, Decayed cities . . . hunger, Social systems of untruth and injustice.
But you are in the stream And cannot get out of the stream And be what you are— A creature of the stream.
Notice the movements. Listen to what chooses you. And spend time with it.
Unknown to you, upstream, poison enters the river. The life in the river begins to take it up.[00:06:00] In the plant life, the fish, the trees along the banks.
One form of life after another becomes infected in the ecological train. One link after another.
See how everything is connected, interdependent. Each link of the chain, the natural system, Poisoned, weakened, debilitated.
You are standing in the river. You did not ask to be there. But
You are in the chain of life. This stream of life And you cannot [00:07:00] dispossess yourself of it. You belong to it. You are part of it. You find your home in it. It is yours. You cannot be what you are, a woman, a man, A creature formed from the earth in the stream, A human being, and not be part of it.
You find yourself in a stream, In a world that is poisoned and diseased.
Choices have been made even before you entered the stream. Structures have been set, Idols have been worshipped, [00:08:00] Extensions of man’s ego which have resulted In gas chambers, atomic eruptions, Decayed cities . . . hunger, Social systems of untruth and injustice.
But you are in the stream And cannot get out of the stream And be what you are— A creature of the stream.
So, as you pray or sit with whatever’s chosen you, whatever has stood or moved, you may want to talk with Jesus about that.
Be conscious of how Jesus looks at you.
We are broken and beloved. Bent and beloved.[00:12:00]
We entrust ourselves to love we cannot understand, but we know in the depths of our being. Amen.
Annemarie: Tonight, we’re going to take the first week just a little bit further. You will remember that last week Trevor helped us with a big picture [00:13:00] of the first week, and today we’re going to look in some detail at the actual text of the exercises themselves. So, if you haven’t got your text with you, now is the time to rush over to your bookshelf or wherever and grab it.
One of my directees has borrowed mine and hasn’t brought it back, but at least I have another translation with me, so that’ll have to do. But go and find your favorite translation, and I’ll give you a moment to do that.
So, we’re doing this first week in segments, in blocks, because there’s a lot that we need to cover. There’s a lot that we need to cover, partly because understanding how Ignatius sets up prayer, et cetera, in the [00:14:00] first week is something that’s going to set us up for all the subsequent weeks, so there’s quite a lot of groundwork that we’re covering in this first week.
We started off with that very big picture, that sense of the ongoing journey of conversion and repentance that we are called to, that consoling journey of God’s mercy. We’re now going to look in some detail at the text and at the bits that constitute that journey. Then after that, next week we’re going to look at the general confession and at the examen.
Then Brenda’s going to look at with us at adaptation of the material. How can we use this in our own modern contemporary context in a way that is life giving for our exercitants and then finally, we will look at the rules more appropriate for the first week in relation to discernment of spirit. So, we’ve got five [00:15:00] sessions We’re just building this slowly block by block.
What’s really important as we move into this particular section is to remember what the purpose is of looking at this text, of understanding the text itself, because we’re living in a very different context to the context of Ignatius, and he uses languages and images and some theology, some theological ways of thinking that are rather anachronistic and outdated. That can be quite difficult.
So, we have to see past that to see underneath that, to see what Ignatius is really trying to do, but we have to familiarize ourselves first with that original text, because Ignatius is following a particular dynamic or way of working that’s very, very powerful. We don’t want to lose that movement, that dynamic when we adapt, We don’t [00:16:00] want to adapt without understanding what it is that Ignatius is trying to do.
So, you may, as you listen to me, think, gosh, I didn’t hear of half of this when I made the exercises. Don’t panic. Some of your directors may have moved quite far from the original text and adapted quite a bit.
The first week is probably the one I would say that needs the most adaptation in our modern context. So don’t worry if you don’t recognize everything that I’m about to explain but it’s very important scaffolding. It’s worth slowing down and looking at it and trying to understand it, remembering that we will come to how it gets adapted in our own context when Brenda helps us with that.
So, let’s remind ourselves, first of all, of the essential consoling grace of the first week, which Trevor introduced us to and explored with us in some depth, actually, last week. That overall [00:17:00] grace to know that I am a sinner, loved and forgiven by God.
The exercises of the first week draw us to gratitude. So, there should be a deep sense of gratitude when we come to the end of the first week. A gratitude towards this God who continues to love and to forgive, even though I turn away from that love. So, God’s loving mercy, remember, is the primary focus.
A lot of people, when they say, “Well, what is the first week about?” Their first answer is going to be “Well, the first week is about sin.” Not true. Okay, not true at the deepest point. Yes, it is about sin, but it’s about praying on sin that leads to mercy. Howard Gray, who’s a wonderful giver of the exercises, uses that phrase. We pray on sin that leads to mercy, but no matter what I have done, I’m never cut off from that mercy.
This is a God who restores us to dignity, [00:18:00] like the son, the lost sun in Luke 15. And Luke 15 could almost be a template of the whole first week journey. Mercy, Michael Ivens says, is the dominant theme. But there can’t be a profound sense of mercy without there being first a profound sense of sin. So, the one comes with the other.
So, let’s look now at what is it that makes up the stuff of the first week. First of all, if you remember, we said that technically the Principle and Foundation is the very first exercise of the first week. But these days we, as modern directors, tend to link the Principle and Foundation more in our minds with the disposition day material and the introductory material, but technically speaking, it comes under the heading of the first week. We really think of it more as being in the section leading up to the first [00:19:00] week. And then when we get to the first week, we get a number of different sections.
So, the first thing that we get is something called The Particular and Daily Examen. You’ll find that in paragraphs 24 to 26. So, if you open at the first week, you can follow along and see where I’m headed as you page through your text of the exercises.
The next thing we come to is called the general examen and then we get the general confession. Then we get five exercises—the first exercise which is on what we call the three sins which is really on the big picture of the history of sin in the world Then we get a second exercise which is on personal sin; a third exercise, which is a repetition with a triple colloquy. and we’ll talk about what that means later.
Then we [00:20:00] get the fourth exercise, which is a summary or a resume with a triple colloquy. We get a fifth exercise, which is a meditation on hell with an application of the senses in a colloquy. Then we get some additions or helps for prayer, and we’ve already looked at those so you’re way ahead of the game here. We’ve already done those.
Then we’re going to come to guidelines for the discernment of spirits in a couple of weeks’ time. Those aren’t in the first week material themselves, but they’re in the supplementary material at the back of your text.
So, today we’re going to look at the five exercises. We’ll come to the other stuff in some of the other sections that we’re doing on the first week, but we’re only going to concentrate on the five exercises that make up the first week. Before I take you into each of those five exercises, I want to introduce [00:21:00] you to the structure of each of the prayer times of those five exercises that Ignatius recommends.
Now, this talk today is going to be “chock a block full of jargon,” I’m afraid, because this is where we get introduced to a lot of Ignatius’s special words and terminology. Don’t stress if you don’t understand it all immediately. We’re going to talk through each bit. So hopefully by the end of today, you’ll have a handle on most of the words that we’re going to use that might be unfamiliar.
Do you remember that when we were doing the additions, we had that addition that was about looking at God, looking at me? Yeah, ring a bell. Okay, that was paragraph 73, the act of the presence of God. So, we always start with the act of the presence of God. Ignatius doesn’t explicitly say that when he writes the text of these five exercises, [00:22:00] because it’s something that he thinks we’ve got now. So, it’s a general principle, but don’t forget it when you’re giving the exercises.
Then we have something called the preparatory prayer, which we’ve also mentioned before, and this connects us back to the Principle and Foundation. That preparatory prayer is to ask the grace of God that all my intentions, actions, and operations (operations being an old-fashioned word for decisions), may be directed purely to the service and praise of the Divine Majesty.
So, it’s basically saying, as I start this prayer, I want all that I am, all that I’m going to be doing in my life and in this time of prayer, to be directed solely towards what you want, God. Okay. So, this is a thread that we see throughout the exercises, because every single time, that preparatory prayer is important and is done [00:23:00] starting from now until the very end of the exercises, so it’s there the whole time.
I just want to go to this other translation and show you how that works. Okay, so that’s been paragraph 46. Can someone read me Fleming’s version of paragraph 46? I can’t see you all on my screen. So maybe Brenda, you can help me see who’s got their hand up there. Can someone read us paragraph 46? Olga?
Olga: Okay.
In preparation, I always take a moment to call to mind [00:24:00] the attitude of reverence with which I approach this privileged time with God. I recollect everything up to this moment of my day. My thoughts and words, what I have done and what has happened to me and ask that God may take and receive all of this as praise and service.
Okay, great. So that’s a more contemporary translation of the same prayer. So, we’ve got a preparatory prayer, and then we’ve got something called the first prelude. If you’re going to get something that you want, if there’s anything that you can relax about and not worry about too much, it’s the first prelude. It’s not that important.
It’s very important to do the act of the presence of God and preparatory prayer. The first prelude is something called a composition of place. And a composition of place is to imaginatively construct the backdrop of the prayer that we’re going to do, according to the subject matter. So, it can be represented by an aspect of one’s [00:25:00] situation before God, like a sense of loneliness, of seeing oneself in exile, or alienated by sin from God, or it sometimes can be a physical place. It’s easier when we think of this in relation to some of the second week contemplations, because then it might say something like, imagine the place of the road to Bethlehem. Much easier to have that as your backdrop than to have something that’s quite abstract. But Ignatius has got in there this abstract bit. Fleming leaves it out. Fleming doesn’t bother to separate out this first prelude.
Then we come to a very important one—second prelude, and that is something that you know very well. It is asking for the grace. We’ve been talking about the grace being so important, and every single one of the five exercises in the first week has a distinctive grace that we are asking for. [00:26:00] So I ask for what I want and desire.
If you remember way back when we did the dynamic of the exercises, I said to you that the dynamic, the movement of the exercises is put into action by the grace. We ask for a grace. We receive that grace, and that grace almost propels us into asking for the next grace. The grace and the colloquy, which is the heart-to-heart conversation are the most important pieces of all of these bits of prayer.
Okay. Then you get to the content of the meditation itself, which we call the points of the meditation. So, the points of the meditation are the kind of substance of what this meditation is about, and we’ll unpack it as we get to each of the prayers and look at it one by one.
After the points, you get the colloquy— [00:27:00] underline, underline, underline—really, really important. So, we’ve introduced the idea of colloquy before, but maybe not formally to this point. Colloquy is the heart-to-heart conversation with God as one friend speaks to another or as a servant speaks to the one who is their master or an authority. Probably in our own time and age, we find it easier to think of the part of as one friend speaks to another; that probably resonates most with most retreatants.
But it’s a heart-to-heart spontaneous, personal engagement, and it’s the most important part of the prayer time. It’s not an add on. It’s not something optional. It’s not an appendix. It’s the culmination of the prayer. It’s the place Ignatius is trying to help us to get to. So, all the bits that come before, all the building blocks, the act of [00:28:00] the presence of God, the preparatory prayer, the composition of place, the asking for the grace, the points of the meditation, are all building up to the most important thing, which is this heart-to-heart engagement with God.
And that engagement with God can come not only at the end of the prayer, but it might start earlier on in the prayer. It might spontaneously start to begin as one is moving through parts of the prayer earlier on, but it’s the most essential thing and I’m going to come back to it again later.
Okay, so having talked you through that, I’m now going to show it to you as it applies to each of the exercises. So hopefully it’s going to become clearer and clearer as we go through.
The first exercise in the first week is very much epitomized in that prayer that Brenda led us in of The River. [00:29:00] What Ignatius is doing here is Ignatius wants us to look at sin and the history of sin, the pervasiveness of sin, the context of sin, how we’re embedded in that river of sin.
The person who actually wrote that meditation, Ron Darwin, is someone that I once gave the 30-day retreat with a long time ago. He was a wonderful man, and he’d given the exercises many, many times and he was a very down to earth Lancashire Jesuit who was kind of rough and ready and when I asked him about it, he said, “Well, you know, if you’re swimming in a river of shit—excuse the language, it was his—you’re bound to get some on you and I think there’s something about that, that we are affected by the sinful context into which we are born, in which we are a part.
And Ignatius wants us to look [00:30:00] first, to start with the big picture, to look outside of ourselves, to look at the panoramic view of what is going on and to think about, in a sense, the sin of the world, and the consequences of sin, and how we have been saved from the consequences of sin. We start with the act of presence of God. Then we go to our preparatory prayer. Then we go for the grace, which is, if you want to use the technical language, I’m jumping to the second prelude.
The grace I desire is the gift of shame and confusion before God as I consider the effects of even one sin as compared to my own sinful life.
I’m going to look at what happens when in history there’s been a deliberate turning away from God and the impact of that. Now the word shame can be a trigger word for a lot of people, but what Ignatius is talking about [00:31:00] here is not the kind of shame that is that negative sense of self-worth that kind of denigrates us. He’s rather talking about a mix of sadness and the kind of embarrassment and confusion that the consequences of sin can be so horrific, and yet I have been protected from those consequences. Ivens says it this way. He says, “it puts the experience of the self-aware sinner in the presence of a God who is merciful and faithful. That when I am aware of my own lack of love, my own lack of response to God, and I can confront it with God’s love, God’s infinite love—which remember in the Principle and Foundation, I’ve been brought right into connection with. There is the sense of how can this be? How can God keep loving me so much when I keep turning away from [00:32:00] God’s love?”
We get the grace and then we move on to the content. Remember the content is all points, the points of the meditation. Meditation, which I didn’t really explain is a way of praying that involves initially pondering, thinking about, grappling with; it’s an exercise that involves the intellect and leads us to the affect or the emotion, but it starts with thinking, with that place in the intellect, and the retreatant is asked to pray about three different situations. It’s almost like Ignatius is not wanting the retreatant to unpack each of them in minute detail, but rather to get a kind of a sweep of experiencing this kind of all pervasiveness of sin throughout history. [00:33:00] The first point is the sin of the angels who rebelled against God, and the retreatant is asked to pray over the decisive rejection of God’s love, freely chosen by those angels who chose to reject God’s free offering of love forever. They’re encouraged to grapple with this first with their mind, with their intellect, and there’s some scripture texts that sometimes can go with that. There’s one from Peter; there’s one from somewhere else, I forget now, and then with the will, the intellect, the emotions, and their will as they look at their own rejections of God’s love.
Then the person making the exercises is invited to look at the sin of Adam and Eve—so, the sin of humanity right back at the very beginning of time. At the beginning of creation, Adam and Eve reject God’s love; they disobey God, and then they try to shift the blame. The consequences of [00:34:00] that impact on us even now, that there’s been a beginning point there that has continued into our own reality. The idea is if one sin can wreak such havoc, what about my own sinfulness?
Then there’s the third point, the person who goes to hell. The retreatant is being invited to think of the consequences, the possibility of someone making a definitive and permanent no to God, closing themselves off from God. You might think of some of the people in history who really unleashed evil on the world. I think of someone like Adolf Hitler or whoever and if you think about if they were to never repent, if they were to continue to choose that evil over God’s love, they would be closing themselves off to that love. They would be locked into an alienation, and how powerful that would be, how devastating that would [00:35:00] be.
So, these three points may or may not be helpful for your particular retreatant. I’m one of those people that doesn’t cope well with angels or with the sin of Adam and Eve particularly because I can’t really connect. I can’t really relate to it to be perfectly honest. So, my director would need to find a way of creatively helping me to grapple with some of those concepts and to think about sin in its big picture, in its historical sweep, from some other way—some different points of view, and Brenda will help us think about that in due course. This is the way Ignatius does it, in his own context and in his own time and some people do find it helpful.
Then we come to the colloquy, that intimate conversation between Jesus and myself. Ignatius invites the [00:36:00] retreatant to put themselves in front of Jesus, hanging on the cross in this particular colloquy, and to ask, “What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What will I do for Christ?” And these questions are the beginning of a heart-to-heart conversation between me and God as one friend speaks to another. And as I see him hanging there in love on the cross as a result of my sin, I am moved to want to respond in love. Those questions are really just the starting point of whatever surfaces for me as I have contemplated the sin of the world in contrast with Jesus, who is hanging there on the cross in this incredible act of love.
So, the points of a meditation are only a lead into this personal encounter with Christ on the cross, which is the [00:37:00] ultimate revelation of both sin and mercy. Colloquy is about an intimacy of encounter, and just by the way, it doesn’t imply that it will always be about actual speaking even though it says it’s a conversation. Conversation also includes listening, contemplative listening, taking time to listen. What is Jesus saying in response to me? And sometimes it can be a silent exchange of hearts that is going on in that space. Then I end the time of prayer with the Our Father.
So, it’s a lot that’s in that first meditation and I encourage you to go back and read it. and read it in detail. We don’t have time to read each of these completely in this 45 minutes but go back and read it slowly for yourself. When we’re giving the exercises, often a director might break [00:38:00] those pieces up and Brenda will help you see how that can be done.
So, what is Ignatius trying to get at in this exercise? I’ve already said most of what I want to say, but just to kind of recap. There’s this big picture of the history of sin, that river of sin that we’re embedded with. We’re starting from the outside before we move towards my own sin. We’re looking at it from an objective place. What has sin done to humankind, to the world, to my context?
We don’t have to get too hung up if people believe in angels or not or whether Adam and Eve are literal or if it’s figurative or how this actually happened. The idea is that we’re surrounded by myths that try to give us some religious explanation of why we live in such a tired and broken and wounded world. We might have to adapt some of the points of the meditation, but we don’t want [00:39:00] to lose the preparatory prayer, the grace and the colloquy.
Okay. So, moving on to the second one. The second exercise is about personal sin, and in this one, the grace that is asked for is slightly different. Now, I move from asking for a sense of shame and confusion in the first exercise to now asking God for the gift of a growing and intense sorrow, even to the depth of tears, if grace so moves me for my sins—a growing and intense sorrow, even to the depth of tears. Remember Ignatius prayed for the gift of tears.
So, remember that we do all of our bits. We’ve done the act of the presence of God. We’ve done the preparatory prayer. We’ve asked for the grace, and I’ve just told you what the grace is and then we have the points.
So, the first point is around bringing to mind the sins of my [00:40:00] life. looking at the places that I’ve lived, the people who’ve been part of my life, the various jobs and responsibilities that I’ve had. I look back over my life and allow God to reveal to me the sin that is part of my life, part of my choices.
The second point is a weighing of my sin. I let the weight of such evil, all stemming from me be felt throughout my whole being. That’s quite heavy language, and you might choose to adapt it for some retreatants. I let the weight of my sin kind of settle into me, and I recognize how much it weighs on me, and the consequences of it.
In the third point, to gain even greater perspective on my sins, I reflect that out of me, one person among millions and millions of people, so much that is not good, so [00:41:00] much that is not life giving can come forth.
Can you see why it’s really important that the person has a solid foundational experience of the love of God before they move into the first week? Otherwise, they’re not going to be able to do this. If the image of God is skewed, if they see God as a harsh judge, this is going to be damaging. It is not going to be a good exercise to lead people into. It’s not going to be helpful.
Then the fourth point, can somebody read me the fourth point, which is paragraph 59 in Fleming’s text, and I can’t see you all, so if someone has their hand up, please let me know or just start speaking.
Brenda: Elizabeth has her hand up.
Annemarie: Thanks, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: I put myself before God and look at the contrast. God, the source of life, and I, a cause of death. God, the source [00:42:00] of love, and I, with all my petty jealousies and hatreds. God, from whom all good gifts come, and I, with my selfish attempts to win favor, buy attention, be well thought of, and so on.
Annemarie: Great, thank you. And can someone read me the fifth point, which is paragraph 60, please? In fact, you can carry on, Elizabeth, if you don’t mind.
Elizabeth: I look at my world. Everything cooperates to continue to give me life and strength. I look at the whole support system of air, water, warmth and coolness, light and darkness, all the produce of the earth, all the works of human hands. Everything contributes to my well-being. I think the people who have prayed for me and love me, the whole communion of saints, as interested in my salvation and actively works to try to help me. [00:43:00] Everywhere I look, the more astonished I become, seeing so much good coming in on me while I issue for so many evils.
Annemarie: Wonderful. So, you can see there that cry of wonder that Trevor alerted us to last time. The sense of, oh wow, even though I sin so much, even though I have so often turned against God, I have so often not responded to God’s love, still, all of creation, all of those around me, the communion of saints, God, are holding me, working with me, loving me.
It gives me goosebumps. It’s that cry of wonder. Wow. Wow. How can this be? Incredible. The gratitude that I feel when I see that, when I understand that.
And then we’re led into paragraph 61, which [00:44:00] is called the colloquy of mercy and of wonder. Thanking God, wondering at God’s forgiving love, which continues to give me life up to this moment and by responding to God’s merciful grace, I want to amend my life.
Remember the colloquy is not an appendix; it’s a culmination. The thinking about my sins and weighing them and immersing myself is important, but it’s not as important as the cry of wonder and the colloquy of mercy and wonder. That’s what it’s taking us into. Okay.
So what Ignatius is getting at here is I also sin and yet God and all God’s gifts continue to sustain me. This whole thing of looking at my sins is not about a detailed list of every sin I’ve ever committed in my entire life, but it’s more getting a real sense of how trapped and alienated I am by sin. It’s the overall impressions [00:45:00] and patterns that are important to notice, and then the contrast with God’s love. Our tears should be connected to that gratitude and wonder and not to a self-centered preoccupation with my own sense of failure. I’m not crying in a self-centered way because I’ve figured out that I’m such a bad person. No, that’s not what it’s about, or that I’ve sinned so much, or whatever. It’s about the recognition that despite my sin, God continues to love me and accept me. I’m being led to a new appreciation of God’s gratuitous mercy.
Now we come to the third exercise. Remember there are five and we may go a tiny bit over our time because there’s a lot to cover.
So, the third exercise is a repetition and a triple colloquy. So here in this third exercise, we see a gradual [00:46:00] assimilation of the material of the first week and the development of the prayer towards a more simple, receptive, personal quality, almost a more contemplation like feel than the meditation like feel of the first and the second exercises.
Now repetition, as you probably know, but it’s important to repeat this, does not mean simply making an exercise over again. It’s concerned not with repeating the material given, but with going back to one’s own significant responses to it. It’s staying with what has moved me, what has touched me, what has stirred me, and allowing it to deepen and settle within me.
So, this is where you personalize the material more and more. It’s a going deeper. I recognize my sins, and I start to also wonder why do I do these things? Why do I talk too much about [00:47:00] other people or get angry quickly? Maybe because I really don’t feel like I’m as good as other people. Maybe because I feel insecure.
What lies beneath my sin? And suddenly we might realize how much our sin comes from insecurity, fear, false images. We’re going deeper now. So, we’re doing the same thing. Act of the presence of God. Preparatory prayer. Asking for the grace. The grace is the same grace as the second exercise grace. Except it says, I continue to beg God for the gift of a growing and intense sorrow, even to the death of tears, if grace so moves me for my sins.
The retreatant is now to go back to the thoughts and the feelings that struck him or her most powerfully from the first and second exercises; to go back to the places where they felt the strongest consolation or desolation. Fleming explains [00:48:00] that the idea of repetition is to let sink further into my heart the movement of God through taking up again those aspects of the subject matter that have already stirred inner movements within me.
And then we have a colloquy, but this time we have a special colloquy. Okay. It’s an extra special colloquy because Ignatius is wanting us now to really get into that heart centered place. And whenever something is really important for Ignatius that he really wants us to get, he takes us to do a triple colloquy. Hang in there if you’re coming from a background that’s a bit wary about Mary. We’ll talk about this more, but just hang in there.
So, the first thing that Ignatius asks us to do is to go first to Mary; Mary, another human being just like me and to ask her to pray to [00:49:00] request on my behalf, three graces from her son. Asking Mary, will you pray for me? Will you go with me? Will you pray for me for three graces?
These are the three graces. A deep realization of what sin in my life is, and a feeling of abhorrence at my own sinful acts. Okay. The second one is some understanding and feeling for the disorder in my life due to sin and simple tendencies so that I can begin to know how to amend my sinful life and for insight into the world that stands opposed to Christ so I can distance myself from it.
So, there are three specific petitions that Ignatius suggests, but your colloquy might unfold a bit differently. But go first to Mary and ask her to pray for this, to ask God for this for me on my behalf. And then I go with [00:50:00] Mary to Jesus. and ask Him if he would pray to the Father for those three gifts for me and I end with the soul of Christ prayer.
So, the first one I can end with the Hail Mary. You don’t have to, but that’s what his original suggestion was. The second part, I’d end with the soul of Christ prayer, the Anima Christi. We’ll explain what that is later. And then I go to the Father, Mary and Jesus accompanying me, maybe one on each side of me, walking with me to the Father, to make the same request directly from God, from the Father. It’s like really getting help with asking for what I need. We end the prayer with the Our Father.
The fourth exercise is called a resume or a summary. It’s like another repetition; another layering of repetition. [00:51:00] We’re going to go even deeper, and the idea is that gradually the prayer becomes less active, and content based and more a prayer of the heart. Okay. So, in the fourth exercise, I’m going to just find the fourth exercise in my text quickly It says very little. “By resume, I mean that the understanding carefully and without digressing should range over the memory of things contemplated in the previous exercises.” So, I go back to what has touched me in the previous exercises and I make the same triple colloquy. It’s a repetition of a repetition. A repetition of a repetition is a resume. Okay?
[00:52:00] Then we get to the last exercise, which is a way of praying about hell. Okay, again, just hang in there. Even if we don’t believe in hell necessarily these days, or if we do, we may not believe that anyone’s in hell. It’s an exercise that can be a very powerful one, and I’ll explain why.
We start again with the act of the presence of God. We do the preparatory prayer, and we ask for the grace. The grace is, “I beg for a deep sense of the pain of loss which envelops the damned, so that if I were ever to lose sight of the loving goodness of God, at least the fear of such condemnation will keep me from falling into sin.”
Then the retreatant is invited to use their senses, their sense of sight, hearing, touch, and taste, to enter into the experience of hell. Not necessarily as a place with the fires of hell as in a physical place, but an experience that is devoid of God. What would that be like? [00:53:00] They try to experience the breath, the length, the height, and the depth of hell.
Then there is a colloquy, not a triple colloquy this time, but just a colloquy. I talk with Christ about the experience, and I thank him for his love and his mercy that he has saved me from such a reality that I have been saved from any eternal separation from God.
So, what is Ignatius getting at here? He lived in a context where hell was talked about a lot, so that’s part of his frame of reference and his mindset. But for Ignatius, hell is not the starting point of conversion, but a confirmation of it. It comes after the experience that the retreatant has had of God’s merciful love and its purpose is to deepen gratitude. God in God’s mercy has saved me and continues to save me from the terrible consequences of sin.
I once had the [00:54:00] experience, not that long ago, actually, in my flat when I first started to use a gas heater because we have load shedding in South Africa. So, the electricity, as you know is very, very tricky. I decided to get a gas heater, and I obviously didn’t realize that how I had connected it was not right and I switched it on, and I ignited it, and the flame started pouring out of this heater. I live in a block of apartment block of flats, so the entire place could have gone down, and it was only by the grace of God I managed to find the thing to switch the gas off and stop the fire and there was a sense of “thank you, God, that I’ve been saved from the horrific-ness of what could have happened to me. It’s kind of like that with this meditation on hell, I think, that we imagine the context in which something could go so badly wrong, and we know that we have been saved from that reality.
Okay, we’re almost done, but I just [00:55:00] want to mention a couple more things. Notice that in the context of a 30-day retreat, all five exercises are made every day during the first week. So, if we’re going to do it as Ignatius did, you do the first exercise, the one that has those three points, sin of the angels, Adam and Eve, and the sin of one person at midnight. Then you do the second exercise on my own sins after you get up in the morning. Then you do the third, which is the repetition in the middle of the morning. Then you do the fourth, which is the resume in the middle of the afternoon, and the fifth on hell just before supper. It’s quite a hectic day, I have to say. And then the next day you start all over again and you keep on with it until you’ve got all the braces. The idea is that the first two exercises are more active, more filled with content, and as the day goes on, the prayer becomes simpler, less active, less cognitive.
The last prayer, the one on hell, is more a kind of a letting [00:56:00] the previous experience that I have been praying wash over me in a very passive kind of way. It’s almost like a summarizing of my thought response of all that’s gone before.
Just don’t forget to look at the additions. We did them already some time back. We looked at the additions, but also pay particular attention to the addition that refers to penance, which is number 10, and be aware that penance in our context is maybe a little more; we have to be a little bit more adapting of it; and I’m sure that Brenda will pick that up when she speaks to us in two weeks’ time.
The inner pedagogy or logic is that thing from the general from the big picture to the particular—to my situation, from more content to less content, from more active to more receptive. So, when you adapt, you don’t want to lose that dynamic.
The divine [00:57:00] mercy and the place of colloquy—so just a reminder that the dynamics of these exercises are found most powerfully in the colloquies. “The desire of God for me is greater than any sin. Howard Gray says that Ignatius wants to push us into finding consolation, joy, hope, and wonder, in that no matter what I’ve done, through God’s forgiveness, I can be with God again in a more wise, more loving, more human way than before I had sinned, because of God’s mercy.” So really to emphasize those colloquies.
A couple of tips. Remember as a director, be free to use the meditations, but don’t let the meditations use you. You are the one who is choosing what will be helpful for the person. Remember, too, the need for adaptation. [00:58:00] Partial adaptation in the first week is critical and it’s not easy. It calls for a lot of sensitivity and that’s why we’re having a whole session on it. Michael Ivens says that today presenting the first week covers a wide range and may go well, beyond the limited flexibility of early practice. It is impossible to pick out one single right way of giving the first week to contemporary exercitants.
What does Ignatius want? Look at the grace, look at the colloquies. Don’t be fundamentalist about giving the material. The material is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
And on that note, I am going to stop. You’ll be relieved to know and we’re going to take a little break, and we’ll come back at quarter past the hour. You’ve got some questions at the bottom of your handout that you can have a look at [00:59:00] and then we will come back and go into groups. So have a good break.
So welcome back and we now have some [01:00:00] time as usual to ask questions, share reflections, thoughts, and experiences. So, when you’re ready, please feel free.
Marie: Annemarie, thank you for your presentation this morning. For me it’s morning—very, very early morning. I really appreciated just understanding the global picture of what Ignatius was trying to do and how it came to the particular. I’m curious about how you’ve, through your experience and others, managed to work with those who are not very comfortable with the idea of hell or angels or Mary. How have you navigated that so that we still get the intentions that we are hoping for?[01:01:00]
Annemarie: So, I’m going to answer some of those things carefully because Brenda is going to do a whole session on exactly this around how we adapt. So, I’m not going to say a huge amount because otherwise you want to come at it from what Brenda shares with you.
You want to be able to adapt. So, let me take one example. Let’s take the example of working with Mary maybe because we’ve talked a bit about the triple colloquy and not everyone is very comfortable with the idea of Mary. So sometimes it’s a little bit about unpacking what Ignatius is actually saying, because sometimes the language can be quite alienating and quite difficult. When you actually think about what is he saying, he’s saying, go to Mary as a friend as you might ask another friend to pray for you in a difficult situation. Go to [01:02:00] her and say, “Would you pray for me for this?” And I think that, coming at it that way allays any fears about putting Mary on a different kind of level in any way because it’s not about that. It’s about Mary as someone who was close to Jesus, who knew him as a mother knows her child, who was a human like us who grappled with life like us and has an understanding both of our human experience, but also of her son.
And so sometimes talking about it can be helpful. Sometimes people have such a strong gut response, like I really cannot do this because they’ve got a history of stuff around Mary that’s just too difficult. And then you might think of something like Mary putting the Holy Spirit in that space and saying, “Could you do it with the Trinity? Could you do it using Mary and then going with the Spirit instead of Mary to Jesus? [01:03:00] and then going with the Spirit and Jesus to the Father. So, you can be creative; you can adapt. You do lose something in doing that because I think you lose the humanness part that Mary brings but there are ways around it.
I’m not going to talk too much more because I don’t want to go through all of the bits because Brenda’s going to really talk us through how do we adapt it when we come up with retreatants who are coming from particular backgrounds or particular context. But I think you’re highlighting a very important point, that this material does have to be adapted. It has to be applied to the person in front of us because we want them to get the main thrust of what Ignatius is saying and not be so put off by the packaging that they don’t receive the gift.
Is that okay to leave it there for a moment?
Marie: Yes, thank you very much.[01:04:00]
Annemarie: Did any of you experience the five meditations in this way? Is it something very different than the way you experienced the exercises? I’d be really interested to hear what your experience has been, how much your director stuck with the dynamic of the text and how much they maybe managed to capture that in other ways that were creative, but how much they drew on the kind of unfolding dynamic that Ignatius was trying to get at. Liz.
Liz: My director let me [01:05:00] substitute the Holy Spirit, which I found so much better because I grew up Catholic and there was an idolatry of Mary. And I felt very alienated from that, and I appreciated using the spirit and all the attributes of the spirit, but I was thinking you could substitute Ignatius for that as a friend. You could have him go to God for you, and that would seem to be okay.
Annemarie: Thanks, Liz. Thanks for sharing that experience. So, the kind of sense of jarring, like that image of using Mary wouldn’t have been helpful for you. So, trying to think what would be helpful in terms of approaching God ultimately for this gift? Yeah. Thanks for that.[01:06:00] Monica and then Heather.
Monica: I had a question. In our group, we talked a lot about the point of the first week is experiencing God’s mercy and how difficult that is to achieve and that we get stuck a lot in our own sinfulness or that being the point of the first week. I was noticing in the second exercise that of receiving that cry of wonder.
I think when I was doing the exercises, I was more focused on what my response instead of wonder. What can I do? What can I do? [01:07:00] And I know that’s in the first colloquy of asking what can I do for you, Jesus? But I also wonder if that was a bit of like a skewed view, not fully receiving God’s mercy but trying to figure out how I can somehow fix this, or how I can somehow save the world, or something of my efforts, and I noticed as I was looking through my journal, that that was the question I was asking more than the emphasis of receiving God’s mercy and just resting in that. And I just wonder how to deal with that or was that just specific to me or is that common?
Annemarie: I think that’s something that a lot of us really struggle with Monica, if not most of us. It’s the sense of almost wanting to be in control [01:08:00] because we’re struggling with the enormity of what we’re seeing and realizing and facing. I think the grace of the week is really that point at which we kind of surrender to the sense of actually, “I can’t do anything.” God is the one who has to help and give me that mercy.
I remember when I was making the first week of the exercises when I did my exercises in 30 days. I remember coming towards the end of the first week and I realized that I couldn’t forgive my father. He was stuck going on in my life around my relationship with my father and I felt so stuck because I couldn’t make myself feel forgiveness towards him. I was trying, and I was trying, and it felt like the big block between me and God. This was the sin that I was struggling with, and I remember eventually just sitting on the carpet and lighting a [01:09:00] candle. It was one of those candles where the light just filters out through the holes in the pottery thing and just having the sense of “you are loved and forgiven anyway, even though you can’t yet do this.”
It’s those kinds of breakthrough moments, I think when one kind of just has that moment of surrendering, of letting go, of saying, “I recognize that I can’t fix anything” and God doesn’t need me to fix anything. God needs me to just receive that love and forgiveness. It’s almost like that in receiving the love and forgiveness and that grace, out of that come the changes and comes the kind of way of trying to live differently. But we can’t try and live differently in order to receive the love and the grace and the forgiveness. We have to receive that first, so I think that it’s often having to be really, really patient with the people we [01:10:00] are accompanying, because that’s such a natural place to go, to want to make it better, to make myself better—all of that sort of thing.
It’s constantly trying to help the person turn their focus from an introspective inward focus, which often leads to that sense of, “I have to fix this. I have to make things right.” And rather, the turning towards—look at Jesus on the cross, look at Jesus; look at God. So, the colloquy can be a place where you can encourage that person, not so much to focus on themselves, but with bringing what they’re holding into the presence of God and looking at God.
When you do that, it’s more likely that that moment of breakthrough and grace is going to happen. And when that happens is a release and a joy and a [01:11:00] wonderful sense of grace that just floods in. Often, I think it’s also about the director kinda of holding their nerve and keeping, just staying with it and continuing to invite the person to turn towards looking at this God and sometimes it’s things to do with the adaptations; maybe just an image from scripture that is going to help or something else. Brenda will talk more about that. Does that help at all, Monica?
Monica: Oh, yeah, very helpful. I think that especially that focus from being introspective to just continually turning it back to God and having patience, because I did experience in the end an experience of deep grace and forgiveness. I see that at the end of my week and just trusting that that’s going to come and directing the directee back to God. That’s helpful. Yeah.
Annemarie: Sounds like your director [01:12:00] stayed with you well. Thanks, Monica. Heather. Brenda, if there’s anything you want to say, please just chip in.
Brenda: Will do, Annemarie.
Annemarie: Heather?
Heather: I think tonight was such a gift. I think it just showed me when we got into our group, how each one of us has experienced everything so differently, and yet we were all on the same journey, but it was completely different. I think that just showed me and I think you speaking brought the structure, but it wasn’t structure that was cast in stone. It’s structure that’s gently offered. I think I saw that in the group; it is unique is. It is the Creator dealing with the Creature differently. So, there was like an awakening for me in just seeing how we’ve [01:13:00] all experienced it differently and it was just so beautiful. It was such a gift. Thank you.
Annemarie: Thanks for sharing that, Heather. Yeah, I think you put it so beautifully; the kind of sense of there is this process that is so powerful—the scaffolding—this kind of process that allows for a deepening and yet each person experiences it in a different way. We have to help our retreatants in different ways to be able to experience it with different things that we bring to those different meditations or the movement of the first week. Yeah, special to see how the diversity and how unique it is for each one. Thanks, Heather. Josie.
Josie: Thanks, Annemarie. Just kind of continuing on that thread that Monica had. Why do you suppose when you’re in that [01:14:00] space of looking at Christ on the cross, he inserts those questions of what have you done? It feels like that’s going back. It’s a movement back inward. I know. What is your thought on that?
Annemarie: I think it’s a really good question, and to be honest, it’s one that I grapple with and I’m not sure I’ve really fully got the answer. In reading around it, it’s not so much the thing of an interrogation of, list all the things you’ve done or haven’t done, list all the things you are doing, list all the things you’re going to do.
It’s much gentler in the sense of trying to bring the contrast between my lack of response and just an awareness of it—a gentle awareness of it with the love that is flowing out at me from the cross; and feeling the gap between the two and that eliciting in me [01:15:00] maybe a desire to say, “Sure, you know, Lord, I’m just recognizing how much you love me and how little I’ve responded in the past and how much I long to do for you, how much I long to be with you.”
There’s almost a way in which the questions are trying to unlock a new level of desire to serve God, to love God, to be present to God as I face the contrast between the inadequacy of my response and this love that is just so powerfully evident in Jesus, giving all of himself to me on the cross.
I think with a lot of these things, it’s similar to that exercise in the second exercise where it’s about, go back over the sins of your past, where were you, who were you were, those sort of things. It’s not about detailed responses in a kind of [01:16:00] checklist kind of way. It’s much more about the overall feeling that is evoked when I hear those questions. Does that resonate at all? Make sense?
Josie: Yeah. Almost like asking the question of, what is the longing in your heart that is your response to this love coming from the cross.
Annemarie: Yeah, absolutely.
Josie: Well, now what have you done for me and what are you going to do? What is this? What’s your response? Thank you.
Annemarie: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Josie. Brenda, did you want to add anything?
Brenda: I was very conscious as you were talking that sense of my response and how easily stuff gets in the way and how easily I get distracted and then that longing just to fully be giving myself. So, it’s that as you’ve described it
I’m conscious that sometimes we have to call out patterns of thinking for lots of [01:17:00] people. So sometimes people are so used to feeling so bad because Jesus is on the cross and I’ve put him there and it’s my fault and he’s doing this that sometimes you’re needing to hold this whole attitude that we’re talking about this. This soaking in the love and actually name some of the things that get in the way. So actually, name what’s going on for people as they get hooked into the, what have I done and the list to actually just talk about it.
Annemarie: Thanks, Brenda. Vivianne.
Vivianne: Just on that same topic, I know we don’t always share our own personal experiences, but in that colloquy for me, it was very striking. I had come to it a few times, and my face was down, just his feet, I felt very bad, and it sort of took me a few prayer times to even kind of [01:18:00] look upward and it was so striking what he said to me, and you always know it’s a God thing when it’s just totally off the script. You just couldn’t have even planned it, and I consider myself a pretty creative person; and he just reprimanded me. He said, “Would you stop thinking that you’re the initiator of this? You think you’ve put me up here? No, no, you haven’t. I’m here because I want to be here. This has nothing to do with you. I’m the initiator of all of this. So would you just be responsive.” And it was just like, “whoa,” totally. It was very moving for me because I realized, what have I done. I’ve thought it’s all about me. What am I doing? I am continuing to be the center of this whole thing, like Monica’s talking about.
And now what do I want to do? I want to see that this is actually all about him and his love is holding him there, not my sin. So, I’m not holding him hostage on the cross. And it was just like in a moment, this [01:19:00] huge paradigm shift for me that, that really helped to free me in a lot of ways from overestimating my power in our relationship in my sin. It brought like that whole being loved and being a sinner, the weight was on the love side.
Maybe that’s helpful for people who have that experience of what do you say with the questions or how to help people to engage with those. For myself, it was just something that happened in that moment from just being available, but it was very freeing and difficult.
Annemarie: Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that, Vivianne. It really helps me, and I think it’s just such a gift for us to be led into that experience and it unfolds what that colloquy is all about in such a powerful way. So, thank you very much for sharing it.[01:20:00]
Shirley: May I ask a question? My question is. What about the person who is sitting in this space like Vivianne was saying before she receives the grace of being able to look up and understanding that, and they’re sitting in that space, and it goes on for a while. What do you do because that can be a very downer space? How do you encourage to stay there? What about the person who is there and isn’t moving forward? Have [01:21:00] you ever had that?
Annemarie: Oh, yeah. That really happens. It’s particularly unnerving when that happens on a 30-day retreat because you’ve only got a certain number of days. If someone is really stuck and not receiving the grace of feeling that love and forgiveness coming, but only feeling the weight of their own sinfulness, you can’t move on to the second week until they’ve received the grace of the first week, which is that experience of knowing that I’m loved and forgiven. And so, it’s really an act of trusting the Creator, that God is going to touch this person, and that sometimes you have to wait. Sometimes it’s really difficult to wait with that person, encouraging them to continue to ask for that gift—that gift of knowing God’s merciful love. And you know, just not to be tempted to move the person on if they [01:22:00] haven’t yet come to that place.
One maybe has to eventually come at it from different angles and be a bit creative. You might find something like an imaginative contemplation is going to unlock something for them—a poem, a piece of music, other ways; the ways that we’ll talk about when you look at adaptation a bit more.
So, if you’re finding that they’re stuck and what you’re offering is not helping you, you might need to be creative. You might go need to go looking and thinking about your retreatant into what you think might just shift something; and often it’s really about praying to be led to something that might be helpful for that person so that as you’re looking and thinking, you’re trying to tune into God and saying, “What would help, what would unlock this for this particular person?”
But I think right from the [01:23:00] very beginning, as you’re bringing a person through the exercises, you’re noticing which way they lean towards. Are they someone who gets too stuck in their sinfulness? Are they someone who gets very stuck in their head? Whatever it is, you’re trying to look for the counterbalance to that to help them. So, a lot of it’s around this issue of adaptation. But also, around trusting that God is at work, trusting it is going to happen.
Do you want to say any more about that, Shirley, or respond to what I’m saying?
Shirley: No, that’s helpful. That’s helpful. I can just see from my own background, that there could be a spiral effect into the worthlessness of self, especially if you come from a traumatic background or from some sort of trauma, and I see [01:24:00] where there has to be safeguards, but I also see where there has to be the trust of the spirit in me as a director going, “okay we are going to get through this,” but that waiting process could be very difficult, I’m thinking.
Annemarie: Yeah, it can be. And Brenda, you will be saying more about this, won’t you? Yeah? That’s good.
Brenda: I’m taking notes.
Annemarie: Thank you very much for that, Shirley, Angela.
Angela: I just wanted to say thank you for that right there. I think I needed to hear that because I know that sometimes as a spiritual director even, it is really hard for me sometimes to sit while the spirit moves in really hard spaces. So, I love that Shirley brought that up. cause I hadn’t even really thought deeply about that question yet, but I know in my [01:25:00] own heart how sometimes it’s “I can want to let them off or let them go” and the work isn’t finished yet.
I just wanted to thank you guys for talking about that because I could feel that in my own body. I could already feel like that’s going to happen to me and so to have this conversation of like, “No, I can trust.” I found that in spiritual direction, but to be reminded that I have to take that posture of trust and creativity and trusting the Lord to lead us both to what’s best for them.
You’ve shared so many things today, Annemarie that have been so helpful—the repetition. Our group just really was able to talk about that deeply and how helpful that was and the understanding of tears as consolation, I needed to hear that too. That was my experience, but I thought I missed something, that my tears were all when I thought about Jesus and so I feel like today has been very helpful in settling me in my own experience [01:26:00] of the first week and I feel like I have a little bit of an exhale about it. it still feels a bit nervous, like leading somebody in this, but I feel a little bit more settled from what we’re sharing today.
Annemarie: Sure. Thanks, Angela. I’m really glad that there’ve been some things that have been helpful in sort of grounding and settling. Yeah, that’s really, really good to know. I also struggled as you’ve said you might struggle with that thing of staying with the hard stuff until the breakthrough happens. I think that the gift there when we can do that is that if we try and move people out of the uncomfortable space too quickly, we may rob them of the fullness of the gift and the grace and the breakthrough that’s awaiting them. So, it is that really hard space.
Trevor spoke about the fact that there’s going to be times of desolation probably during the [01:27:00] first week, that we can expect that. Looking at sin is not a comfortable reality, but we’re trusting that because we’re doing this in the context of God’s merciful love and we’re holding that, that there will be a moment where that consoling grace is just going to flood in, and you feel it when you’re giving the first week. You can feel the shift that happens—that there is this grappling and the struggling and this wrestling—very often a sadness, a sorrow that can be very painful in many ways and then there is his moment where it clicks in, or sometimes not a moment, but a series of incremental shifts.
And when that grace comes, it is one of the most profound, consoling graces that a person can ever have. Just remembering that helps one maybe not to be tempted to rescue [01:28:00] people too quickly from the desolation, but it’s a tough one, and that’s where supervision comes in and just praying, and asking God to help us as directors to trust that we are taking care of this person.
As Shirley says, if someone’s really coming from a traumatic place, we want to be very careful not to push them any further into a traumatic space. That’s not the idea at all, but it’s that tentative balance. It’s that sensitivity, and that’s why I think the first week is the hardest of all weeks, by a long way to give well. But it’s a huge gift to do as well. So, thank you, Angela.
Annemarie: We’ve got about five more minutes before we need to draw to a close. So, I’m wondering if there’s anyone else who would like to say something [01:29:00] or who might be waving their hand and I haven’t found them yet,
I think for me, just in thinking about this whole thing again, what’s really become clearer and clearer to me as I’ve journeyed has been how critical the colloquy is, that too often it’s been presented with this thing of well, yes, and at the end say something to Jesus and have him say something back to you Almost as though that’s the kind of just the wrap up; whereas in fact, it’s the heart of it. It’s the meat of it. It’s the place where the grace will be received. So, we don’t want to shortchange that colloquy. We’re going to make sure that the people we are accompanying give it [01:30:00] space. Anything else?
Vicki: I really want to thank you, Annemarie, for once again shifting the focus of the first week from sin to mercy and this kind of way about understanding the first week as sin, and that’s kind of prevalent in our culture over here with Ignatius, but you know, that shift to mercy. And for me, when I went through the exercises, the understanding and the experience of God’s mercy and how it differs than God’s grace on my life and that mercy is like God coming from behind me and picking me up underneath my arms when I’m in the dirt is this relational aspect of mercy, this kind [01:31:00] of relational tactile love of mercy that is different than grace. And how that is the focus of the first week is experiencing God’s deep love of mercy for us and just the language that you used today deepened that for me, even though I’ve heard this how many times? It doesn’t matter. So, thank you.
Annemarie: Thank you, Vicki. Thank you for sharing that with us. Yeah, mercy, such, such an important. word and yeah; thank you.
Okay. I’m going to stop us there because I want to say one or two things about organizational things [01:32:00] if I may. The first is thank you for getting your assignments in. I think we’re just very grateful that they’re all in and just going to start marking them. I’m not sure if I’ll get through all of them before I leave for Spain, but I’m going to do my best. I’ll keep you posted in the next week about how far I’ve got.
And also, to say that we are going to start putting you in supervision groups now. So, in the next week, you will get an email connecting you with a person who will be your supervisor. You have a mentor, but you will also have a supervisor and I’m sure all of you know about supervision in terms of your ongoing spiritual accompaniment work, that it’s a space where you can reflect on your practice, on your experience of guiding someone when things are being triggered in you and you can talk about it, where you’re grappling and not quite sure [01:33:00] where to go with the person because this is the first time you’re doing this, where you can get some support, some advice, some encouragement.
So, supervision is a wonderful space. It’s a space that you will share with another three people and a supervisor who is someone who’s given the exercises many times before who will journey with you as you journey with your person. You’re now far enough ahead in terms of getting a head start on your retreatant that you will begin to be able to start with them in the next little while.
Your first supervision meeting will be hopefully in the first half of June, and you can start from the end of May to take someone into those disposition days, because you will have a supervisor who will journey with you and meet with you once a month at a separate time [01:34:00] to this.
You will be put in a group and your supervisor will liaise with you and the other three people in your group about a time that will work for all of you. I’m putting you in groups with taking into account time zones to try and make sure that nobody is having to be in a group in the middle of the night, but that there’s possibilities of times that will work for each of you.
Just so that that’s coming—that you’ll look out for an email about that and that you’ll begin to start thinking of starting with somebody at the end of May. Don’t panic if you don’t have anyone and you aren’t able to start on the 1st of June exactly or whatever. We’re just saying now you can begin to move into that phase.
So, you’ve got the next 10 days or so to just begin to get your head around it and from then on, you can gently begin. Okay, if you have any [01:35:00] questions or concerns, please drop me a line. We’ll talk about it again a little bit next week, just so that we know we’re all on the same page. Okay, so let’s just take a moment to end with prayer.
I invite you to sit comfortably, to just relax, and I’m going to just read a short piece from Julian of Norwich, who I think has a beautiful sense of God’s mercy. So, I invite you to just be still. You want to switch your screen off, you’re welcome and to become aware of God who is attending to you with great love in this moment and [01:36:00] as you rest into that love, I share with you Julian’s words.
If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me, but this was shown, that in falling and rising again, we are always kept in that same precious love.
If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown me, but this was shown, that in falling and rising again, we are always kept in that same gracious love.[01:37:00]
Loving and merciful God, bless us now as we hold these words, and what we have experienced together and be with us as we continue to move in this week. Make us ever more conscious of that grace and gift of your merciful love. We make our prayer in the name of Jesus as we say together. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the [01:38:00] love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.
Take care. Have a good week. Be blessed.