The Spiritual Exercises

Ignatius began taking notes about what he experienced during the year he spent at the small town of Manresa, near the shrine of Montserrat.  These careful notes were the earliest stages of what eventually became the handbook called the Spiritual Exercises.

This book has been printed about once a month for 450 years; no one knows how many millions of copies have appeared, nor in how many languages.  The text of the Spiritual Exercises constantly evolved from the time Ignatius lived in Manresa around 1522 until he printed them in 1548, although the main lines were almost surely in place by the time he got to Paris in 1528.

The Spiritual Exercises are not just Ignatius' experience; they encode the experience of many, many men and women who wanted to understand their experience of God and to respond to that experience.