Ignatian Symposium
The Ignatian Symposium is a monthly meeting of Spiritual Directors who review and discuss a variety of Ignatian topics.
Topic - Third Week of Exercises
April 17, 2025
Assignment - What, exactly, are we doing when we accompany someone through the Exercises? How are we representing God? What is the real aim of our work? Ignatius tells us our task is “helping souls.” Howard Gray deepens this, urging us to claim our role as “helpers”—but helping the one making the Exercises do what? Become what?
Consider this: St. Irenaeus wrote that “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” That image—fully alive—has captured my imagination. I believe that helping souls come fully alive may be the most faithful expression of our calling. It is what Jesus invites in the story of the rich young man in Matthew’s Gospel: not merely to obtain eternal life, but to enter into life. The Exercises are, at their core, an invitation to live more fully and freely in the Spirit.
Our role, then, is to help remove what blocks this aliveness—habits, false narratives, fears—and to create space for grace. We help the person encounter the God who is already present and inviting them to deeper life.
To deepen this reflection, I invite you to read the lead article in the July 2025 edition of The Way titled “The Problem of the Fifth Week.” It explores how the Exercises can take root beyond the retreat—how the Fifth Week is not simply a time after the Exercises, but a new way of living. It suggests that the Spirit of the Exercises must become enfleshed in the person and in their community. This may be what it means to live from Christ Consciousness—a phrase that echoes Teilhard de Chardin’s reflections on the war front, where urgency stripped away distraction and allowed a new freedom, a new consciousness, to emerge.
Please come ready to engage the following question with prayerful thought and concrete examples from your experience:
How do we, as givers of the Exercises, help those making the Exercises come more fully alive—so that they might live the Fifth Week as “other Christs” in the world?
Topic - Accompanying seekers with embedded trauma (part 1)
August 21, 2025
Assignment - Read the Prologue and Part I of the book The Soul Also Keeps Score: A Trauma-Informed Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, Author Robert McChesney, SJ along with the case study of Willy.
Review the people you have helped over the years -either in direction or other ways of caring for experiences of moral injury and spiritual injury. Along with that, consider how you understand “soul” and how a soul can be said to be wounded or to carry a wound.
Questions to consider:
What is a soul? (McChesney, St Thomas, St Augustine, St Ignatius, and modern thinkers and seekers may have different ideas)
How is soul different from spirit?
How can a soul be injured? What does it mean to talk about "spiritual injury" which McChesney says is "rupture of one's relationship with God". This language may be familiar to some of us as a description of "sin".
How can a soul be healed? How are the Spiritual Exercises a method of facilitating healing, where the act of healing is with God/Christ/Spirit and not with the spiritual director (except as an instrument of God/Christ/Spirit?
Does it make more sense to focus on "moral injury" (which may be a subset, at least in part, of a hyper-sensitive response to a traumatic event or events) than spiritual or soul injury? McChesney says the Inigo was a survivor of "moral injury trauma" defined (summarily) as "a severe violation of one's conscience and moral code." How can we use the Spiritual Exercises as a healing modality to address "moral injury"? (which seems to be the ultimate question of McChesney's book).
How has McChesney's reconsideration of Inigo's honor-seeking battle rage at Pamplona, that resulted in grievous physical injury to himself and injury and death to his companions, changed your understanding of the origins of the Exercises along the Camino de Ignacio? (Can we let go of that "cannonball moment" thing?)
Topic - Accompanying seekers with embedded trauma (part 2)
September 17, 2025
Assignment - Read the Part 2 of the book The Soul Also Keeps Score: A Trauma-Informed Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, Author Robert McChesney, SJ
Addressing Moral Injury through the Spiritual Exercises – Revisiting the Principle and Foundation
“The Principle and Foundation . . . is described in the 1599 Directory as ‘the groundwork of the whole moral and spiritual edifice’ of the Exercises.” (Ivens, 25) The groundwork of the whole moral and spiritual edifice of the Exercises.
During our August meeting, as we reflected on fear-based trauma and moral injury trauma, and the potential for healing through the Spiritual Exercises. Monica noted, in reflecting on comments from other directors, the following:
“So you know, . . . like when we talk about the 1st Week and the Foundation, the Principle and Foundation and all the pre-work that’s about really building a worldview and a kind of checking on a worldview. Do we even know that that’s what we’re doing when we’re doing the P & F with people? But it is. “and then how has that worldview been threatened by that, you know? [Separately, another director had described trauma as a “shattering of a belief system and a worldview” that leads to persistent suffering.] That’s kind of what we’re talking about here. Because, you said it too; healing is really about being able to reconstruct a sturdy worldview after a traumatic experience.
And the second week is when you ask people, . . . . ‘What have you done wrong? What are you carrying? What are your sins?’
And I feel like that an area of such ambiguity, . . . , sin language and guilt and shame that he [McChesney] brought up that were really symptoms or signs of moral injury . . . .
Had I had a little bit more of this language, I would have listened differently to people."
I’m struck by how, following the thread of our discussion and Monica’s comments quoted above, it might be essential for us to reconsider our approach the Principle and Foundation and the 1st Week when we are accompanying a person who we know or suspect has experienced moral injury or fear-based trauma. (Understanding that these are very different experiences with different complications and sufferings.) These persons (and maybe all persons to some extent) present with a shattered worldview, a worldview sometimes shattered at their own hands.
I can’t recall any of the usual commentator on the Exercises – Ivens, O’Brien, Aschenbrenner, et al. – considering how to approach the Principle and Foundation with a person whose worldview has been shattered. Elizabeth Liebert does emphasize the necessity for seeing Ignatius’s Principle and Foundation as unreflective of the experience of women, especially women in the 21st Century. Liebert argues that Ignatius presented a “cosmological worldview that was static, ordered, hierarchical, dualistic, and anthropocentric, or human centered [and in that vein] . . . . also clearly androcentric and male centered.” (Liebert, 75)
Here’s the text of the Principle and Foundation (Puhl translation) – which we might think of as Ignatius’ post-Manresa worldview:
“Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.
The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created.
Hence, man is to make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hinderance to him.
Therefor, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition. Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things.
Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created.”
Questions:
1)In light of our consideration of McChesney’s book, is this formulation of a Principle and Foundation helpful? Should we discard it?
2)Should we approach the presentation of the Principle and Foundation differently when accompanying a person who has experienced moral injury or fear-based trauma?
3)Might we reinterpret the consideration of the Principle and Foundation in a way that anticipates moral injury – a disconnect between moral expectations of what the world was to be about and the reality of a particular life – and makes room for sharing the shattering of fear-based trauma?
4)What might (3) include? Peggy’s spiritual autobiography? More extensive unearthing of what the person’s worldview was when they were a child, an adolescent, a young person etc? This approach might be fruitful but it is more psychological and less theological/cosmological.
5)Are questions like the following from Elizabeth Liebert sufficient to get at the worldview that the person making the Exercises brings with them, shattered or not?
“Each person making the Spiritual Exercises needs to answer the implicit questions in the Principle and Foundation: How would you describe your world and how it influences you? How do you imagine God? What is your relationship to others and all of God’s creation? What is your part in creation? What are the dominant influences on your sense of God, humans, heaven, and earth? What does it mean to exist in this unfolding universe? (Liebert, 80)
6)What else should we be asking and helping the retreatant to consider or unearth?
7)How does the work of considering a shattered worldview as part of the process of reflecting on “the” Principle and Foundation help us as we move a retreatant into the 1st Week?
Topic - Helping Souls Come Fully Alive – Living the Fifth Week
July 17, 2025
Assignment - As Ignatius put it, the graces we beg for in the Third Week as “sorrow, compassion, and shame because the Lord is going to his suffering for my sins” (SE 193, see also SE 197 as well as 48, 50, and especially 53) Many of us struggle with Ignatius’ theology of sin and the cross but the movement he is inviting us into here is a profound movement of the Exercises, presenting an opening into humble union with Christ through the reality of the direct connection between Christ’s humiliation, pain, abandonment, and suffering and my sins -- what I have done and what I have failed to do.
So, the invitation is to dig in with us at a personal level as we also consider the impact of these Third Week contemplations on our directees. Here we might imagine how we would accompany Carlos, Helen, and Patrice through the first contemplation of the Third Week -- SE 190-199 (The Last Supper). It would make sense here to read Ivens 146-153, Matthew Chapter 26 and John Chapters 13 - 17.