Over five hundred years since Ignatius conceived them, the Spiritual Exercises still respond to the inmost religious longings of people in and outside the Christian tradition. Adaptations of them to the different contexts of contemporary faith, culture, and society have gathered pace worldwide, bearing abundant fruits. The essays in this fine volume provide an insight into the reason why and the way in which the Ignatian text has been, or can be, adapted. At the same time, they illustrate and remain faithful to the essential qualities and traditions of the Ignatian Christian life. The essays also reflect the atmosphere of communal prayer and meditation shared by experts of twenty-seven nationalities who took part in the symposium from which the volume originates. Held at Manresa in 2022 to celebrate the fifth centenary of Ignatius’s conversion, the forum explored the mystagogy of the Spiritual Exercises in the train of Ignatius’s personal spiritual experience in Manresa in 1522, when everything appeared to him in a new light, and he began recording his spiritual journey.

The volume is divided into four separate but coherently related sections. James Hanvey, S.J., sets the tone for the first section. His hermeneutical and theological discussion of what makes some texts, the Spiritual Exercises included, long-lasting and relevant through the centuries, centers around their characteristically “generative” nature. In the Exercises, this “generative” nature is brought about, in Hanvey’s view, by Ignatius’s trust in the “immediate communication of the Creator with the creature, and of the creature with its Creator,” as expressed in annotation 15, and also by the fact that the Exercises have been continually experienced, vivified, interpreted and transmitted within and by the Society of Jesus (28). Because Ignatius’s text is to be experienced and applied to life, it also opens up the possibility of multiple encounters: the exercitant’s encounter with God and with the director, as well as the director’s own encounter with God and with the exercitant. It can and does, therefore, work at different levels. Hanvey identifies “four texts,” as it were, in one: the performative, the dramatic, the transformational, and the unfinished texts (30). The essays that follow in this first section take into account the relational and “generative” nature of the Exercises and show the need for the spiritual director to adapt them so as to address issues that the original text may pose, for example, issues of gender when giving the exercises to women, theological issues when accompanying Protestant Christians and challenges in the practice of spiritual direction when guiding a large group of people along a communal spiritual journey. Here, the authors, all experienced spiritual directors, agree that the process of attentive listening and discerning is necessary when administering the spiritual exercises, which bring about an increased understanding of the text and a deepening of the faith in both exercitant and spiritual guides.

An inspiring essay by Dan Harnett, S.J., opens the second section of the volume. The standpoint is different. Leaving the theoretical perspective behind, Harnett reads and interprets the Ignatian text in the light of his own experience of giving the Exercises to people marginalized because of class, race, or gender. What changes, he asks, when we give the Exercises in the midst of social suffering? Two things. First, the Exercises help the marginalized endure their lives as people who have been excluded and forgotten. By existentially identifying with Christ and understanding the experience of the cross, they are able to feel somehow included and reconciled. Second, their spiritual directors are themselves moved and changed by the way in which those who suffer at the margins of society respond more easily to the importance of silence and freedom and the reality of sin, hell and joy. From this standpoint the reader is then led to consider case studies related to a group of Jesuits in Ruanda, migrants in South America, and refugees in Australia.

The third section focuses on the mystical element. In his excellent and insightful introductory essay, Javier Melloni, S.J., considers the Exercises as part of the initiatory journey that is common to all spiritual traditions. He concentrates on the mystagogy of the Ignatian journey, highlighting parallels and analogies with that of the theo-cosmic, Islamic sufi and the oriental or oceanic traditions. If the mystagogy of the Exercises is christagogic, an entry, that is, into the mystery of Christ, it is also true, however, that the mystery of Christ intimates, in Melloni’s words, “the union of the divine, the human and the cosmic” (191), itself the “Origin and source of Reality” (178). Here lies the reason, I believe, why the text of the Exercises endures. It culminates in a universal call, through the Contemplatio ad amorem, to full participation in Christ. “We are,” Melloni writes, “in the unitive stage of the Christian mystical tradition” (192). This perspective is shared by the authors of the essays of this section, who compare the mystical element of the Exercises with the initiatory journeys of African traditions and Mayan culture. In line with Melloni’s approach, this section ends with a study of Franz Jalics’s contemplative exercises, inviting us to enter a reality that exists beyond thoughts and action.

The unitive life begins for the exercitant with the Contemplatio ad amorem and the awareness that God lives in his creatures, intervenes in our life, and is the source of all good. The last section of the volume suggests that remaining in this contemplation of God’s love allows for creativity and courage in adapting the exercises to new cultural contexts, whether using the new languages of the internet, relying on ecological consciousness or the practice of pilgrimage. All provide occasions to help others delve deeper into the mystery of God.

The volume emphasises the responsibility of those who give the Exercises. They are the ones called to discern how to recreate them, trusting what is Christlike in them and in the people they are ministering to. At the same time it also presents possible adaptations within a theoretical, experiential or contemplative framework. The different voices that we hear are part of the great mystery “about which,” concludes Melloni, “we know hardly anything and which leaves us stammering: ‘Everything is yours: we return it to you, Lord; Give us your love and grace, this is enough for us (Ex 234)’” (298). Ignatius wrote that the Exercises were all that was best in what he was able to think, feel, and comprehend in this life (letter to Manuel Miona, November 11, 1536). They are indeed the fruit of his total surrender to God’s love. And after five hundred years, they are, as Harnett puts it, “a source of grace for us, for the Society of Jesus and for all the Ignatian family” (128).