The Spiritual Exercises

By Barbara D. Kiernan, M.A. '90

In Fr. Thomas McMurray's opinion, God is an excellent tailor. It's a conclusion the Jesuit has come to after 20 years in the ministry of spiritual direction. In this, he serves as a companion and guide to persons seeking to deepen their spiritual lives through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Fr. McMurray, who graduated from Fairfield in 1969, returned in 2005 as associate director of mission and identity and, in that capacity, focuses on making the Exercises available to faculty, staff, administrators, and others in a variety of retreat formats.

During the Exercises, which the Office of Mission and Identity offers in three adaptations (eight weeks, five months, and eight months), retreatants commit themselves to a daily period of prayer and weekly meetings with one of several directors trained to share in this ministry. Not unlike the exercises and repetitions a varsity athlete does to fine-tune his or her skills, the Spiritual Exercises require discipline, diligence, and commitment if they are to bear fruit.

"At first, I found it hard to carve out the time for focused prayer," says Valerie Vincent, the mother of five school-age children and a part-time student in University College. "It was difficult to push aside my ‘to do' list, which always seemed so urgent." Once she decided to spend her prayer time in the (far-quieter-than-home!) parish church, she found a rhythm that worked for her.

For Bill Murray, an adjunct professor of mechanical engineering, making time was less of an issue. "Being the efficient type, I chose the eight-week format. At some point around the sixteenth week, I noticed that I hadn't stopped," he laughs. "So Fr. Tom and I decided to keep going!"

One of the beauties of the Spiritual Exercises, written by St. Ignatius while he was still a layman, is their flexibility. Jesuits make them in a retreat setting during a 30-day period of silence. Yet wanting the Exercises to benefit as many spiritual seekers as possible, Ignatius recommended a number of ways these could be adapted to the circumstances of a retreatant's life.

Rose Olexovitch, a program assistant in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, found herself looking forward to her Tuesday morning meetings with Fr. McMurray. "I had never really read Scripture in this particular way," she says, "so I thought of it as storytelling. As I learned to read meditatively and imagine myself in various gospel scenes, the stories began to relate to me – to my need for healing. I came to realize that Jesus's wounds did not go away, and neither would mine. Although pain can remain, human feelings about that pain can be healed."

"It is both humbling and energizing to see people drawn more and more deeply into Christ, and He wanting to engage them," says Fr. McMurray.

"I find that each person I direct is a tailor fit for me. I am blessed through their honesty and I discover a clear grace for myself."

Vincent found journaling about her prayer an especially fruitful exercise. She swears the pencil wrote by itself, so absorbed did she become in her reflections. During the course of her eight-month retreat, she began to notice that every time she imagined herself in a gospel scene, she placed herself in the background: as a maid walking behind the donkey on the way to Bethlehem, at the edge of the crowd during the miracle of the loaves and fishes. "I began to get frustrated with being at a distance from Jesus, with always being a follower. My desire to move closer to Him grew, and I prayed to move into his inner circle and be with Him as an apostle," she says. "I wanted to see His face."

Because each retreatant is unique, the retreat unfolds differently within each. "In general," says Fr. McMurray, "the Exercises create a movement toward greater inner freedom. They gently reveal negative self-images and constraints that arise from false notions of God. They create a movement away from fear and toward harmony with the authentic self."

Murray's family and friends now tease him, telling him he's lost his fire. What he's really lost, he says, is his insatiable desire to win – be it a chess game or a point in conversation. "I thought I didn't have any fears and false notions," he says. "But a memory kept coming up of my mother playing cards with a longtime friend who had Alzheimer's. When the others in the group became annoyed, mom would remind them, ‘It's only a game.' That memory became a source of reflection, grace, and change for me."

Murray began trying not to win arguments and engineer conversations, but to listen to others with his heart. "It felt uneasy for a while, which is normal when you give up old notions to try on new ones. Gradually I saw that while I could win, I could also hurt others while doing so. I'm not nearly as aggressive because I now choose to err in favor of the relationship. Others may tease me about losing my fire, but I have more energy than I've had in years. The fire is burning inside."