Week 10: Visualizing Your Workout

As we approach Easter Break (just one more week!), we also approach the end of our lectures on Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. As such, for this week’s blog post Fr. Ted has requested that we select four images – one representing each of the four Weeks.

For those of you not in the know, the four Weeks of the Exercises do not correspond to four seven-day-long periods. Rather, they are stages within the Exercises, to be done at whatever pace the director deems necessary for the retreatant.

So, without further ado, here are the four images which I believe best represent the Spiritual Exercises.

Week One is all about introspection. It starts off with the Principle and Foundation, which basically says that God loves us and has created the world for us out of this love, and so we should love him in return. This sparks the series of personal reflections on our strengths and weaknesses in this goal, which characterizes the First Week. In short, I guess I thought of a word that best represented the Week (introspection), and then chose this image as a visual manifestation of that.

In all honesty, part of what drew me to this image (of a real-life statue) was the shock factor. I mean, what kind of twisted person would think to put Lenin, Mickey Mouse, and Jesus walking hand-in-hand? The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that they all fit the criteria of what the Second Week is all about: our heroes. Jesus is inherently in there, since he is ultimately the one we are asked to follow. But even Lenin and Mickey are leaders of their own kind, who have characteristics that I’m sure many people across the world can look up to. Plus, with them all holding hands, it gives off an air of friendship, which leads into the Third Week.

With the third week focusing on the Passion and Jesus’s death, it evokes a complex amalgamation of grief and gratitude. After becoming friends with Jesus in the first two Weeks, we now contemplate how he is dying for our sins. We have to ask ourselves, would we do the same for him, and are we willing to share in his suffering? It took me a good while before I finally thought of a similar sense of sorrow and thankfulness, and that’s how I feel towards the men and women who put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe and free.

Finally, the Fourth Week is – in the words of Fr. Gerald Fagin – one of joy and hope. I thought this particular image captured the nuances of those two better than simply a smiling face or someone jumping in the air. Not only is the person in this image excited and joyous, but he’s also looking out on the horizon with the whole world in front of him, ready to take it on with confidence. So, too, can the retreatant move on in life with faith in Christ and the knowledge of God’s endless love.