The Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life

The Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life 

All are welcome to journey to find God in all things through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. St. Agnes and St. Ignatius Parishes in San Francisco welcome the opportunity to extend to you the Spiritual Exercises through the 19th Annotation, known as “a retreat in daily life,” September 2024– June 2025. The 19th Annotation Retreat is a way of making a retreat during the course of ordinary living without having to forgo, for a time, one's commitments to work, family and friends. Many people who have made the Spiritual Exercises have attested to its powerful influence to give direction to their lives and to help them grow in faith, in knowledge, and love of the person of Jesus Christ.

Important in the discernment process is the completion of a questionnaire. Feel free to reach out to the coordinator, Cate DeGraw with any questions you might have: [email protected], or 781-718-3709.

If you are already feeling called to experience the Exercises for yourself, fill out the questionnaire and begin discerning. The questionairre has some basic informational questions as well as some opportunities for deeper reflection. Please complete the questionairre by August 31, 2024.

Apply / Begin Discerning

About the Exercises

Ignatian Spirituality has the simplest of premises: seek to find God in all things. But the language associated with it can seem daunting if you don’t know what it means. So in plain English, here is a guide to understanding the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.

Saint Ignatius designed a retreat to help people deepen their relationship with Jesus Christ and grow in the inner freedom they need to discern where God is truly calling them. The freedom sought in this retreat is a freedom from anything that disrupts our ability to experience what our heart most deeply desires. The retreat is known as the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius because it includes a series of contemplations (meditations or visualizations), reflections and prayers - quite literally “spiritual exercises” - to use in daily spiritual practice. Ignatius structured it in four “weeks” because he envisioned that his exercises would be undertaken during a thirty-day silent retreat and directed by an experienced companion on the journey, a spiritual director. These are not literally seven-day weeks, but "movements" or “stages”. The four movements include:

1. God’s love and mercy and the reality of our sinfulness, in all its complexity,
2. Jesus’ life, from the moment of his incarnation and throughout his public ministry,
3. Jesus' last days, from his arrest to his passion, crucifixion and death; and finally,
4. Jesus’ Resurrection, his Ascension, and the coming of his Holy Spirit, and his ongoing mission which we live out.

Ignatius realized that not everyone could make a thirty-day silent retreat and so he wrote into the structure of the exercises a provision (the 19th Annotation) for busy people who wanted to make “the retreat in daily life”. It is still experienced through a one-on-one relationship with a spiritual director. You meet weekly and make a commitment to in-depth daily prayer using Ignatius’ contemplations. Over the course of about nine months, you make your way through the four “weeks” at your own pace with the guidance of your director. Even the 19th Annotation (or Retreat in Daily Life) is not for everyone. Though it is for busy people, it is an incredibly significant undertaking but a richly worthwhile one.

Are you feeling called to experience the Exercises for yourself? Fill out the questionairre and begin discerning if the 19th Annotation may be right for you. The questionairre has some basic informational questions as well as some opportunities for deeper reflection. Please complete the questionairre by August 31, 2024.

Apply / Begin Discerning

Questions? Contact Cate DeGraw; [email protected], 781.718.3709
 

Reflections from past participants

The 19th Annotation retreat allowed me to integrate St. Ignatius’s four-week spiritual journey into my daily life, spread out over the course of several months with the support and guidance of a spiritual director. Through the Spiritual Exercises, I deepened my understanding and perception of God’s love and acquired the tools to continue developing my faith. My spiritual director guided me throughout the retreat with care, understanding, and friendship. I will always be grateful for the experiences and memories of the 19th Annotation retreat and highly recommend it to anyone with the curiosity and desire to build a more meaningful spiritual life.

John Echeverria

I am very glad I undertook the retreat. The word “transformational” gets over-used, no doubt; but it fits my experience I completed RCIA and I wanted to go deeper, and so signed up for the 19th Annotation Retreat I have been taking an hour or so mostly each morning to read, pray and journal and meeting with my director weekly. It works!

My experience has been that on almost a daily basis I experience some kind of deeper insight into myself, my faith, the Church, and/or God/ Christ. I have experienced a growing sense of peace in everyday life and a substantial increase in my ability to love and have compassion for others. Gradually, I have found myself opening up to God in my life, centering on Jesus, and experiencing the fruits of joyful surrender to the Divine. Along with my relationship with God, I have also experienced a real improvement in my relationships with others, as manifested by their direct feedback.

Marcus Thygenson

While there are many distractions in our daily lives, the Exercises drew me to pay attention to my heart, which over time learned to listen and receive what God was showing. Initially, I recognized particular gifts I believe I had been given, but also recognized subtle ways in which habits had become more self-serving. Taking up a daily examen – looking for traces of God’s actions in my daily life – heightened my capacity to see where God’s love leads each day. Through Ignatian readings, scripture reflections, journaling and the weekly one-on-one guidance of a wise and dear spiritual director, I was amazed over and over to see how God has graciously been working in me all these years through events and people, drawing me to Love, to be fully and uniquely who I am.

Further, I have a new awareness for the ways others have been hurt and the gifts through which God works in each of us. The 19th Annotation retreat is a way of moving towards a meeting of a magnitude so great – yet subtle and gentle -- that one’s whole life finds itself involved, touched and transformed.

Jean Molesky-Poz