Heart of the Spiritual Exercises

“Yes, I think you say it well because you’re speaking about how we’re drawn into that self-giving and self receiving a dynamic. So, I receive the other as a gift and I give myself as gift. So, as the father completely gives himself to the Son and holds back nothing. And the father is all about the Son. And even if you’re going to use technical Trinitarian language, I taught a course on the Holy Trinity at the seminary here. St. Thomas Aquinas says the father doesn’t have a relationship with the Son, the father is that relationship with the Son. It defines his very person as to be the father of the Son. And so, to the Son doesn’t have a relationship with the Father, as if he’s substantial of himself without the Father, but he is that relationship with the Father. All of this in the Holy Spirit, which is the spirit of love, that walls up between both of them.

It’s the spirit of complete self-gift in receiving. The other is gift. So, the Son receives himself eternally and at every moment as a gift from the Father. So, this is the dynamic of receiving oneself of gift, receiving all of creation as gift.

And then I have no greater desire than to do what? To give myself back as a gift, as I allow myself to be overwhelmed with the love of God and the greatness of God and the majesty of God and the ever greater. He loves that phrase ever greater. That ever greater ness of God. This is key to my healthy response of complete surrender and self-gift. Part of that goes back to the Lateran Council IV. It’s a definition in 1215 about what an analogy is. So, what the church defined there in 1215 was that between God and his creatures, within every similarity, there’s a greater dissimilarity. So, God is loving and I can be loving, God is wise, I can be wise to some degree. So, there are similarities between us and God. But within that similarities, there’s an ever greater dissimilarity. That’s a beautiful gift though, and it’s an invitation to love to receive that ever greater love, the divine love, and to live from that divine love and respond in divine love.”

“Yes, that’s right, many different orders. Saint Francis de Sales founded five different religious branches based on the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius. So they’re not unique to the Jesuits. They’re not our property. This charism is diffused in many different ways. But many different orders, Sisters of Saint Joseph, Sisters of Loreto that Mother Teresa was part of before she began her own order, were also rooted in the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius. So they’re a gift to the church. They’re a gift to the church to help us reorder our lives, to help us find the Lord’s will in our life. For Saint Ignatius, God is a choosing God. He was very enamored… I’ve spoke about the different charisms. But he was very enamored by this God who kept choosing men and women to follow Him, to enter into His company, to be conformed to Him.

So when you read the spiritual exercises, and ponder the various meditations therein that Saint Ignatius composes, you’ll notice how this is a very active Jesus. It’s not so much the preaching Jesus, which would be more appealing to a Dominican charism, the preaching Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount. It’s an active Jesus who goes out and finds people, who moves, who performs these miracles, who’s drawing everyone towards this Jerusalem experience of self-gift and sacrifice. This is a gift given to the whole church though.”

“St. Paul says all fatherhood comes from God, the father. Some of us have really not had good fatherhood examples. Everyone has a dad, but you don’t necessarily have a father when you grow up a biological father.

St. Ignatius is such a spiritual father. The root word, for instance, of a father exercising his authority, the root word of authority either comes from auctor, which means author or augere, A-U-G-E-R-E. Augere, which means to help flourish, to help thrive.

Like a farmer who had bend over the plant and offer the plant everything that it needs to thrive, water, sunlight, nutrients, so too any true fatherhood helps us to flourish. Experiencing St. Ignatius for me was an experience of his fatherhood and anyone, layperson or not, who prayed to St. Ignatius, begins to read St. Ignatius, when they experience full flourishing, he indeed might be their father. It’s amazing how that works.

I, for instance, had a personal desire to be a spiritual son of Padre Pio, whom I admire and still very much, but I am not a spiritual son of Padre Pio. I’ve tried many times, novenas and whatnot, and still admire him so greatly, and yet I know I’m not his spiritual son. That’s not the angle at which I’m supposed to follow Jesus. It’s a beautiful angle, I appreciate it very much, but it’s a different color of the rainbow, if you will.

It’s not the angle at which my heart flourishes as much as I will always admire him. I’ll always admire different saints as do you, Kris, but we have to find our particular charism. What is that particular saint, and there are various saints, not just one, who cause us to flourish. When we read their writings, oh, we just feel the fire of the Lord’s love entering into us and burning away the draws and giving us this zeal that’s very similar to their own, to surrender ourselves yet more to the Lord.”