Discovering God’s Love in the Ignatian Exercises
reflection by Ashley Brooks
We’re often told that God loves us. Yet even if you believe in your mind that this is true, it can be difficult to let yourself experience God’s love in your heart. Experiencing this felt sense of God’s love can be transformative. But how? Many of us have felt this gap between head and heart when it comes to spirituality. The Extended Ignatian Exercises can be one way to bridge that gap.
Ignatius of Loyola developed his Spiritual Exercises to be completed as a thirty-day silent retreat. However, Ignatius recognized that this isn’t accessible to the average person. The Extended Ignatian Exercises—sometimes called the Nineteenth Annotation—are designed to be experienced over the course of seven to nine months.
Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises are designed to bring us deeper into relationship with God and to experience God more fully in the ordinary moments of life. Let’s explore three ways that the Extended Ignatian Exercises can lead to a deeper experience of God’s love.
Letting go of disordered attachments. In the language of Ignatius, disordered attachments are an emotional dependence on something other than God, even things that could usually be considered good, such as health or family. When disordered, we become attached to these things in a way that pushes God to the side. These attachments can be a barrier that separates us from God.
The Ignatian Exercises invite us to cultivate the discipline of indifference: not a lack of care, but a loosening of our grip on these things so that we can fully hand them over to God. When disordered attachments become rightly ordered, we place our trust in God and become more available to the fullness of freedom and the gift of love that God offers us.
Speaking to Jesus in colloquies. “Colloquies” are simply an Ignatian term for “conversation.” The Extended Ignatian Exercises invite participants to engage in many colloquies with Jesus throughout their time in this extended spiritual retreat.
We so often don’t speak freely with Jesus because we think, “He already knows what I would want to say.” But engaging in conversation with Jesus, sharing your feelings openly with him and listening for his response, can change your relationship with God. This can be an incredibly powerful spiritual practice that draws you closer to God’s love.
Looking at God looking at you. In Ignatius’s “Additional Directions” for making the Spiritual Exercises, he invites retreatants to adopt a posture of seeing themselves as God sees them. Robert R. Marsh calls this “looking at God looking at you.”
So often we hold onto our childhood images of God. Perhaps this God is watching for you to do something wrong, or is easily angered. But Scripture tells us that God delights in us (Psalm 18:19) and loves us so deeply that nothing can separate us from that love (Romans 8:38–39). Imagine for a moment God gazing upon you, his beloved, someone he created and called good. Taking this perspective can connect us more deeply to God’s unending love for us, just as we are.
Continue Exploring God’s Love with Sacred Ground
You can experience the transformative power of the Extended Ignatian Exercises for yourself. Sacred Ground can help connect you to a spiritual director or Spiritual Exercises group. Learn more about making the Extended Ignatian Exercises.
We all have the ability to love, given to us by the Source of love itself. Join us at our upcoming Groundings lecture, The Restorative Power of Love with Felicia Murrell, to explore how the practice of beholding Love returns us to ourselves and more fully to a love ethos that can be embodied as a way of being in the world. Learn more and register here.