The Spiritual Exercises

Father Joseph Tetlow, S.J. was interviewed in 1997 for a series of videotapes entitled 'Shared Vision: Jesuit Spirit in Education' (available from The Institute of Jesuit Sources).  Below are excerpts from that interview that provide some basic points about the Spiritual Exercises. The interviewer is Lawrence Johnson, filmmaker and director of the Shared Vision series.

Let's talk about the Exercises. Would you explain what they are?

The Spiritual Exercises are a way to go through a prayer experience to discover through praying and Scripture and the Church's revelation what your own deepest and most authentic desiring is, and to find the courage to enact that.

Another way to explain them is to say that Spiritual Exercises organize what is revealed to us through Scripture and by tradition into a coherent way of possessing revelation and giving yourself to the purposes that it opens to us.