Enter the Silence and Learn to Hear

Perhaps you have been circling this tradition for a while. You have read a book or two, maybe heard someone speak about the Examen at a retreat, and something in you leaned forward. Or perhaps you made the Exercises years ago and that interior landscape has quietly gone fallow — and you feel the distance. Wherever you are arriving from, I want you to know that I understand the particular ache of wanting more than information about God. You already have enough information. What you are looking for is encounter.

That is precisely what St. Ignatius built the Exercises to do. He was not a theologian constructing a system. He was a man who had been broken open — by a cannonball, by a slow convalescence, by the strange movements he noticed in his own soul — and who discovered, almost accidentally, that there is a way to pray that changes you from the inside out. Everything I have built in this course is in service of that discovery becoming yours.

We will move slowly, and deliberately. We will begin where Ignatius began: with the First Principle and Foundation, which is not a doctrine to memorize but a posture of freedom to inhabit. We will learn the methods — imaginative contemplation, the Examen, the Colloquy — not as techniques but as thresholds. We will sit with the hard things the First Week asks us to face, and we will sit with mercy when it comes. We will learn to read the interior life the way a careful reader reads a text: noticing what is actually there, not what we expected to find.

I want to be honest with you about one thing: this is not a passive course. Ignatius was clear — the Exercises are not given to a person, they are made by a person, with God. You will be asked to pray before you are asked to understand. You will be asked to bring real questions to the discernment framework, not hypothetical ones. The course will ask something of you every day. But what it asks for is not performance. It asks for presence.

By the end — by the time you reach Finding God in All Things — my hope is that you are not holding the Exercises as a course you completed. I hope they are becoming the grammar of your ordinary days: the way you review an evening, the way you sit with a difficult decision, the way you enter Scripture. That enduring interior freedom is what Ignatius spent his life pointing toward. Come and see if it is also what you have been looking for.