INTERACTIVE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
Welcome

Fr Rodney Kissinger, S.J.

This 19th Annotation Retreat was given on this website in real time two years ago. All of the Presentations are here so that you can make the retreat online. You determine how much time each day you will devote to it and when and how you will do it. You can print or download these Presentations and share them with others. If you want to download the files, please send me an E-Mail and I will send you a link to download.

You may want to make the retreat together with friends and share your insights. If you have any questions or difficulties you can email me: kissingersj@gmail.com

Happy New Year! How many times did you hear that? How many times did you give that same greeting to others? Was it just a conventional greeting or a real wish? In other words is it really possible to find happiness in the New Year?

Yes, it is possible to find happiness because God wants us to be happy. We all have this innate, insatiable desire for happiness. We also expect to be happy as is evident when something goes wrong and we are disappointed and sad. Unfortunately this desire for happiness does not identify the object that will bring us happiness. So happiness depends to a large extent on identifying this object. A good way to identify the object that will bring us happiness is to begin the New Year by making a retreat.

But you say, “I can’t take time off from my work and family to make a retreat.” Not to worry. Ignatius realizing that not everyone has the luxury of taking time off from their ordinary life to make a retreat has provided a way to make a retreat in every day life without curtailing or neglecting their regular duties.

This informal, unpretentious, least intrusive ONLINE retreat is woven into the fabric of everyday life and goes right to the heart of the human desire for spirituality in a culture permeated with materialism. Just like the Good News it proclaims, it is something you cannot keep to yourself. And so it spreads quickly, not by word of mouth, but by click of mouse.

I invite you to begin the New Year by making this kind of retreat. You don’t have to change a thing in your ordinary life. You don’t have to go anywhere. You can make it right at your computer. You can give as much time as you wish, fifteen minutes, half hour or an hour. Just make it a part of your daily schedule. The main thing is to pray every day.

We will have two Presentations each week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. At the end of each Presentation is an opportunity for interaction, for your response, questions or difficulties. You may wish to download the Presentations to your computer so that you can go over it again later. And you can make a print of it and share it with a friend who does not have a computer. Be sure to add this website: http://www.frksj.org to your Favorites list so that you don’t forget it.

This online retreat is rich in content. It is not just the text of the Exercises. It is the fruit of more than sixty five years of making and giving the Exercises, in all of it formats, to priests, religious, and laity. There has accumulated over the years a treasury of practical wisdom of how to live these principles today. The key meditations of the Exercises are presented not in the jargon of academia but in a language everyone can understand.

This kind of retreat, of course, loses the personal contact which is found in the other types of retreat. But this is not an unmixed evil. It stimulates more initiative, responsibility and independence on the part of the retreatant. St. Ignatius exhorts the director of the retreat to allow “the Creator to deal directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord.”

And in a way this type of retreat is more effective than a regular Retreat. The regular Retreat is made in an ideal situation where every thing is given over to the retreat and the retreatant has no other duty than to give himself completely to the retreat. But when it is over there is a “re-entry program” to get back to ordinary life. In the real world we see that things are not as easy as they were in that ideal situation.

In this retreat whatever changes are made are made during our ordinary life and therefore they will be more practical and will be easier to keep. After all we cannot lay down guide lines or blue prints for the Holy Spirit to follow. The Holy Spirit breathes when and where He wills. Besides the strong winds of Pentecost there are the gentle breezes of the present moment, all we have to do is to put up the sails.

Principle and Foundation.

St. Ignatius begins the Spiritual Exercises with the Principle and Foundation. This is the starting point, principle, and foundation, the infrastructure and the context of the Exercises. It gives us a world view, an overall and fundamental faith vision that will permeate the whole of life. What has been the Principle and Foundation of your life? Have you ever really articulated it? This may be a good time to conceptualize it in your mind and write it out so that you will be able to compare it to what Ignatius says.

Why not invite some friends to also make this retreat and then compare their reaction with your own. By sharing the experience of the work of the Spirit in us and listening to the experience of the work of the Spirit in others we are able to discern how God is actually working in our lives. It will deepen our faith by challenging us to conceptualize it and articulate it. It will help us to become the unique person God created us to be and to give God the praise, service and love that only we can give.