The cannonball
In May 1521 a French cannonball struck Iñigo López de Loyola, a Basque nobleman of about thirty, during the defence of Pamplona. It shattered one leg and injured the other. He was carried back to the family castle at Loyola, where the bones were reset twice — the second time deliberately broken again because the first setting had left a disfigurement he considered unacceptable for a courtier.
The convalescence took months, and the castle had almost nothing to read: a life of Christ and a collection of saints' lives. He read them because there was nothing else, and alternated them with the daydreams he preferred — chivalric exploits, and a particular noble lady.
Then he noticed something that would matter more than anything else he ever observed. Both kinds of daydream were pleasant while they lasted. But the worldly ones left him dry and restless afterwards, while imagining the life of Francis or Dominic left him with a lasting quiet contentment. The difference was not in the feeling but in the wake.
That observation is the seed of everything Ignatian: it is the beginning of what he later set out as the rules for the discernment of spirits (Exx 313–336).
Manresa and the Exercises
After a vigil at Montserrat in 1522 he spent nearly a year at Manresa, in prayer, penance and considerable interior turmoil, including a period of scruples so severe that he thought of ending his life. He came out of it with the notes that grew into the Spiritual Exercises.
The Exercises are not a book to read. They are a manual for the person guiding somebody else through a four-week retreat — which is why the text is so dry when you read it straight through. The guide's instructions are the point: Ignatius tells the director when to speak, when to say nothing, and when to keep out of the way entirely so that "the Creator deal directly with the creature" (Exx 15).
He was in his thirties when he went back to school, learning Latin among schoolboys, and he studied in Alcalá, Salamanca and finally Paris, where the companions gathered who would form the Society of Jesus. It was approved in 1540. He spent his last sixteen years in Rome, largely writing the Constitutions and an extraordinary volume of letters, and died on 31 July 1556.
The Exercises in one page
- The First Week looks honestly at sin and mercy — not to crush the person but to establish that they are loved while being truthful.
- The Second Week contemplates the life of Christ, and holds the Election: the decision the retreatant has come to make (Exx 169–189).
- The Third Week accompanies the passion.
- The Fourth Week the resurrection, and ends with the Contemplation to Attain Love, whose point is that love shows itself in deeds rather than words (Exx 230–237).
Two structural pieces matter more for ordinary life than the four weeks themselves. The nineteenth annotation allows the Exercises to be made without withdrawing at all — spread over months, in daily life, with a guide. And the Presupposition (Exx 22) asks both parties to assume the other means well before assuming the worst, which is a discipline most arguments would survive better with.
Why the Examen is the part that stayed
The Exercises contain exactly one thing Ignatius set as a daily routine regardless of circumstances: the examination of conscience (Exx 43). He kept pressing it on Jesuits who had time for almost nothing else, and the Constitutions keep it when much shorter prayer is permitted.
The reason is visible in the cannonball story. Discernment needs data, and the data are the traces a day leaves. Whoever looks back each evening on where the day went wide and where it went right begins, after a few weeks, to recognise the wake of things — and that is the skill the whole method rests on.
The daily form is not a tribunal. It sees the good first — gratitude comes before review in every version Ignatius gives — and it ends by handing the day over rather than by grading it. His own instruction for the harder case is bracingly practical: in desolation, change nothing you decided in consolation (Exx 318), and never make a decision from inside the low.
Where to start
Read Exx 43 — one page — and try it for a week. If it holds, the daily Examen after Ignatius sets out the steps, and the rules for consolation and desolation are the natural next piece. For the Exercises themselves you want a guide rather than a book; how to find one is a separate question, and a real one.
Lumen carries the daily part: the seven steps each evening, the Particular Examen for the one point you are working on, the Election after Exx 169–189 — with everything encrypted on your own device, no account, and no AI reading along.