I went to a rehab center today to visit my cousin George. He’s eighty-four and had just had his second joint replacement. I accompanied him to the exercise room to chat and watch, and what I saw was remarkable. People in their eighties and nineties, with some younger, were working themselves into shape, and it was not easy, but what surprised me, the exercise was renewing their strength. It made me think, when I was a young seminarian I was introduced to spiritual exercises. We were told that the mind and the soul has to be exercised as well as the body, in order to keep our minds and hearts focused on God and on spiritual things, otherwise our awareness of God and things of faith fade from our consciousness and as time goes on, the spiritual world no longer seems real. So we did spiritual reading each day for at least a half hour. Often it was readings from the gospels, and as we read, Jesus became more and more real. And then during our hour of meditation each day, as we relived Jesus’ life in our contemplative prayer, Jesus became even more alive to us, which eventually developed into a beautiful friendship that not only inspired us, and gave us strength, but provided comfort in difficult and painful times.
When there were times in our lives when we were not faithful to those spiritual exercises, thought of Jesus and spiritual things which were always so beautiful and real, gradually began to fade, and lose their sharp image in our minds. I think that is a problem with many people. They may be good people, but it is not just being good, because being good can be fruitful or a purely natural activity unrelated to God. If our goodness comes just from a kind heart, it may not necessarily be inspired by love of God. We see that kind of natural goodness in people who do not believe in God. But, our goodness as Christians must be an expression of our deep awareness of God in our lives, and a manifestation of our love of God which inspires us to live out that love in what we do and how we treat people, and how we want to make our community a better place to live.
Probably the most famous spiritual exercise is the Spiritual Exercise of Saint Ignatius who founded the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, over five hundred years ago. The famous exercise to rehabilitate the souls of his canditates for the priesthood was a strenuous retreat in which an intensive study of Jesus’ life and live-in with Jesus together with prayer and contemplation for a period of thirty days brought the soul to an intimacy with Jesus that was a spiritual Olympic training. That same process was repeated frequently in the life of Jesuits, sometimes for even longer periods of time. In fact for three years before they are ordained to the priesthood, they go through that intensive exercise for that whole period of time. A program similar to that will be conducted by Deacon Gary Riggi who works with me. We will announce when that session of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius will begin, plus all the relevant information.
