The Center for Ignatian Spirituality is offering a ten-week directed prayer experience entitled "Encountering the Living God".
The ten-week Ignatian experience is an adaptation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which allows the participant to encounter the Living God in one’s day-to-day life. Offered in September and January, the program is free and open to the public.
Ignatian Spirituality centers on the belief that God can be found in all things and focuses upon a growing awareness of one’s affect, imagination, and intellect.
St. Ignatius emphasized the importance of one’s personal experience as the vehicle to form a closer relationship with God. Insights about how God is present in one’s experience emerge through processes of attention, contemplation, and discernment.
The 10-week directed Ignatian prayer experience for students, faculty, staff, and the local community involves:
- An immediate experience of God
- Being a contemplative in action
- Finding God in all things
- The meaning of the Magis
- An experience of discernment
"The 10 week directed prayer experience offered through Fairfield’s Center for Ignatian Spirituality is intended for those willing to venture into the unexplored, unfamiliar world of your own heart, your own life and experience. There, in silence, with the support of a wise and caring spiritual director, you discover underlying questions, desires, tensions, possibilities," explained Fr. Gerry Blaszczak, S.J., director of the Center for Ignatian Spirituality. "There you come to taste the richness of the gifts you have received and the pain of loves rejected, opportunities for living squandered. There you discover or recover God’s persistent call to life fully, deeply, truly. There, sometimes discreetly, sometimes dramatically you encounter that God in whom you live and move and have your being. All at your own pace, all with respect to your own unique history, all in response to a God who is relentlessly seeking you out and drawing you into fullness of life."
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are for those who desire integrity and authenticity; a renewed sense of purpose, direction, and meaning; a clearer sense of God’s presence and activity in one’s life; a deeper knowledge of and relationship with God; and to explore whether or not one would like to participate in the complete Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
The experience includes 30 to 60 minutes of daily prayer and reflection and 45 minutes each week to meet with a spiritual director/companion.
“I find myself looking forward to my weekly sharing with my spiritual director and can honestly say that I have received much more than I expected,” said participant Caroline Fain.
If you have any additional questions and/or would like to participate, please contact Colleen Gilbertson at cgilbertson@fairfield.edu or 203-254-4000, ext. 3468 or visit fairfield.edu/cis .
