Meet Ignatius.

In 1517, a young German professor nailed 95 theses to the door of his neighborhood church. He was beginning to rethink his relationship with Jesus Christ, and he was eager to share his findings with others.

He wasn't the only one.

A little over a thousand miles away, in a northeastern corner of Spain, Ignacio Lopez was hit by a cannonball. It broke one of his legs and badly injured the other, and we was sent home to Loyola to recover.

For the next several months, Ignacio found himself with little to do but read. And so he did. He worked his way through a commentary on the life of Christ that encouraged the reader to imagine herself inside the Biblical stories. Ignacio tried it. He was never the same.

Ignacio spent the rest of his life developing and promoting a series of "spiritual exercises" based on the ones he had read about. He found companions along the way, and eventually formed the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits, who at the very least provide us with some pretty fantastic universities today.

Of course, we are Lutherans. In addition to knowing more about that German fellow than about Ignatius, we also carry around some hard-won principles about magical recipes for getting right with God.

God comes to us! we say. Not the other way around. We don't need to do some spiritual Stairmaster to find our way to some mountaintop Jesus.

Indeed. God loved us first, and washed us in a holy bath to a new life in Christ. God has freed us, freed us to: Live among God's faithful people! Hear the word of God and share in the Lord's supper! Proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed! Serve all people, following the example of Jesus! Strive for justice and peace in all the earth! New life! Amen!

And yet, and yet. As each of us knows all too well, life is complicated. It is full of ups and downs, rainy seasons and dry seasons. We get distracted and discouraged. Our energies run low, and we find ourselves a little less able and a little less willing to follow Jesus out of the gracious waters and into the new life, the new season, the new day to which he is calling us.

I think Ignacio's spiritual exercises can help us with this. They can help us deepen our inner wells, filled by God's stream as they are, and stoke our inner flames, lit by the Holy Spirit as they are.

Of course, if we are to deepen our "inner" lives, we must be careful not to let our "outer" lives dry up. We must not become navel-gazers. We must be sure we our spiritual exercises are part and parcel of the new life are living day by day, a life for the life of the world. To this end I have found it useful to adopt a particular angle on the spiritual exercises best articulated by Ignatian scholar Dean Brackley in his book The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola.

Brackley is a Jesuit priest and professor who served in Manhattan and the Bronx before volunteering to take the place of one of six assassinated Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989. He had a middle-class upbringing in upstate New York, had a spiritual crisis that fractured the faith he was raised on, and finally found renewed hope by deepening his relationship with Jesus Christ through the exercises of Ignatius. But he did not do his exercises while hidden away from the world.

He writes (2-3):

[The Exercises] helped me notice that when I drew near to suffering I experienced a sense of solidity and some relief. Letting the drama of life and death break through my defenses - the drama of down-and-out adults and youth at risk in Lower Manhattan where I lived and worked - helped me gather together my scattered self. It did me good to get close to these people. Since then, that kind of experience has continued to nourish me. The crucified people of today lead us to the center of things. Eventually they helped me rediscover Christianity. Through those difficult years and ever since, the Ignatian path, Ignatian spirituality, has been crucial for finding my way.

Like Luther and like Ignacio, Brackley is unable to keep these experiences to himself. He hopes to share what he has found with us, that in Christ we might find new life for the life of the world.

He writes (p. 8-9):

With major institutions in crisis, we find it hard to say where the world is headed. Some believe this affords groups of deeply committed people a better chance to shape the future than they would have under more stable, less fluid conditions: an encouraging way to think about this state of uncertainty. In any event, we urgently need a critical mass of such people to make this century the century of solidarity and turn the swelling tide of misery, violence, and environmental crisis.

The good news (gospel) assures us that it makes sense to struggle against the odds and to celebrate along the way. I do believe, as the song says, that we shall overcome some day. I hope these reflections will stoke the inner flame of generous readers and provide them with resources to help bring that day closer.

It is my hope that our shared reflections on the themes of this book might deepen the wells of grace that sustain us - over a season, over a year, over a lifetime - for our daily work in God's world. It is my hope that they might challenge us to go deeper into the world that surrounds us, with all of its pain and all of its beauty. And it is my hope that they might deepen our understanding of the mystery of Christ, and of his journey to the cross and beyond.

May God bless and keep us on our journey throughout these forty days.