Can the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola be adapted for a pilgrimage (say, the Camino)? Or even used when staying in one place, but with a pilgrimage or journey focus? Having just completed the Camino Francés (the “French Way”) for a second time, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, my answer is a strong, “Yes!”
This is a series to help people with this. Here are previous posts in this series – a good place to start:
How to Pray Like a Pilgrim – Camino Lessons from St Ignatius Loyola
Soul of my Saviour
In planning to walk the Camino again, when I first began thinking prayerfully about using the Spiritual Exercises as a focus on this pilgrimage, I looked for resources (online and offline) to help. I found several people thought that one could simply pick up the book, Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, and use it as a sort of “self guide” as they headed off on pilgrimage.
The Spiritual Exercises is not that sort of book, and people can become quite frustrated treating it like that. It is essentially a handbook for someone (a spiritual director) who is guiding a person (the retreating) through spiritual exercises (prayer, meditation, etc) to a deepening relationship with God, to discerning God’s will, and so forth. It is intended essentially for a 30 day silent retreat.
I have made such a 30 day retreat as well as 8 day and other adaptations, and drew from that, and my ongoing study and reflection, for my prayer walking the Camino, and now for this series on my website.
At the start of the Exercises, Ignatius has 20 “Annotations” or “Observations”. Numbers were first added to the Exercises in 1928 to help with referencing. While the 20th Annotation advocates for the value of seclusion, Annotations 18 and 19 suggest adaptations. 18 acknowledges that people have differing aptitude, intelligence, emotional disposition, and so forth – and the Exercises should be tailored to the person. The 19th Annotation suggests a way of praying through the Exercises while the retreatant lives their normal life, meeting with a spiritual director say weekly. It is often called the “Spiritual Exercises in Daily Life”. Such an approach usually sets aside an hour and a half daily for prayer, meditation, and reflection over several months.
It is the principle of adaptability that undergirds the 8-day (and 3-day) retreat tradition of the Exercises. It is this principle of adaptability that lies behind my using a Spiritual Exercises approach to the Camino (and other adaptations that you, the reader here, might draw from this). One way of using the Exercises on the Camino is to set aside a period of, say, an hour a day for meditation with time for preparation for this and time for reflection and journaling. Another way is to prayerfully walk with the particular meditation throughout the day. The former, of course, leads naturally to the latter.
One thing that surprised me was how much walking, journeying, is found in the Biblical stories on which I was meditating. Ignatius stresses that in praying the scriptures we place ourselves imaginatively into the scene. The emphasis is not on getting the image historically clearly in our mind; the emphasis is more on using our imagination as a way for God to engage with us.
On the Camino, one can more than imagine many of the walking/journeying scenes, one is actually walking the scene.
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