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.)
