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
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 - 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.