Ignatian Spirituality

During the fall of my second year at Loyola, I took a class on Ignatian Spirituality and the Spiritual Exercises created by St. Ignatius of Loyola.  St. Ignatius was born in Spain in 1491, and he was the founder of the Society of Jesus, otherwise know as the Jesuits.  Among many other impressive things that Ignatius did in his short life, he wrote the Spiritual Exercises.  Basically the Spiritual Exercises is a collection of guidelines and suggestions to help people deepen their faith, find God’s will for their life, and then have the courage and strength to follow that will.  There are rules to be followed, readings to read, meditations to meditate on, and prayers to be prayed.  If you want to learn more about the Spiritual Exercises check out this website.

For this class I took, we wrote a series of five essays reflecting on how our personal experiences related to or helped us understand the different parts of the Spiritual Exercises.  Writing these essays was very helpful for me.  They helped me understand the class material, the Spiritual Exercises, and perhaps most importantly they helped me better understand my spiritual journey.  I have gone back and reread these essays a few times since I wrote them, and each time I find that these reflections continue to speak truthfully about my spiritual journey and expose areas where I still struggle as well as areas where I have grown.  I’d like to share these essays with you to help you better understand my spiritual journey and encourage you to think about your own spiritual journey.

You’ll notice that my reflections include a lot about El Salvador.  In these assignments we were instructed to use personal experience to illustrate our understanding of the Spiritual Exercises, and my time in El Salvador has provided me with many experiences that have shaped me as a person- spiritually and otherwise- so it only made sense that El Salvador be a part of these reflections.

I’m going to edit my original essays a little.  Some editing will be to include more background and information so that someone who hasn’t taken the class the essays were written for will easily understand the essays.  Other revisions will reflect any changes over the past year in the way I see things.  And I’ll take a few things out that I’m not ready to share with the whole world.

I’ll post these five essays, one at a time, over the next few weeks.  And I’m also working on a conclusion to these essays.

Enjoy.

(And now you have to wait in suspense.  Sorry.)