Among the legacies left to us by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises is spiritual rereading. What is spiritual rereading? It is a way of discovering the movements of the Lord in our daily life through an examination of conscience. It is a simple prayer that helps us to review and discover how attentive and available we have been to the presence of the Holy Spirit each day.

Our day passes between numerous events that produce in us inner movements. Some make us sad, others cause us joy, others fill us with enthusiasm, others not so much. These feelings move us to act, in different ways, sometimes they open us to answers of life, of help, of commitment, of freedom. Others, on the other hand, enclose us in our fears and doubts. When we cultivate the habit of rereading and examination, that is, of going back through the heart and looking again at what we have experienced, we learn to discover these inner movements and where they lead us. 

This practice helps us to discover the Lord’s passage through our lives and to make ourselves more and more available to his actions and movements. That is why it is so important to make a spiritual examination or rereading and to realize if we have experienced movements open to life, to surrender, to joy, to service or if on the contrary we have had experiences of sadness, enclosure or doubts. With Jesus in the evening in Click to Pray is the time to do this rereading and examination.

The first Jesuits who lived with St. Ignatius say that in the last years of his life, Father Ignatius never spent an hour without pausing to discover how he had lived it. He deeply desired to love and serve the Lord in every circumstance and to discover him in the events he had to live, so he sought him in everything he lived, pausing and discovering how the Lord made himself present. 

Happy St. Ignatius Feast Day to all the Jesuits of the world and to the laity, religious and priests who live the spirituality of the Spiritual Exercises that this saint bequeathed to us!

Bettina Raed

International Coordinator of The Way of the Heart