The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola
In the Spirit of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
Tuesdays from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time Zone
September 22, 2026
Contemplation: Learning to Love the Way God Loves
God expresses God's self by creating a universe that reflects God's love. This self-expression created a universe that could delight in it as it grew and evolved over billions of years. God delighted in the humid race that emerged from the evolving earth so that they could become conscious of how much God loves them.
Imagine yourself surrounded by an omnipresent God holding the human race and loving existence and wanting to be lovingly involved with them, giving countless gifts to people, individually and collectively.
Ask for the grace to discover the thousands of ways that God loves you and all of creation. Ask for the grace to experience in your body and soul what it feels like to be so loved uniquely and unconditionally by God. Ask for the grace to feel tangibly connected to God. Ask for the grace to be immersed in God and God's creation and to feel deep gratitude and wonder at the boundless love God shows in every moment.
The third stage of loving: Cooperative Interaction
Ignatius (236) asks for a personal and active interaction:
I will consider how God laborers and works for me and all the creatures on the face of the earth; that is, God acts in the manner of one who is laboring. For example, God is working in the heavens, elements, plants, fruits, cattle, and all the rest – giving them existence, conserving, conserving them, concurring with the vegetative and sensitive activities, and so forth.
God keeps acting in and through each of those seven areas of gifts mentioned in the first point. God does not just act once and then stop. God continues to act and interact at every moment with, in, and through the gifts God gives in creation. By this continuous action, creation grows and develops. It becomes more complex and continues to evolve in consciousness.
For us to learn to love in the same way, we continue to act and interact with the gifts we have and the gifts continually being given to us to help us grow and evolve in complexity and consciousness.
We are invited to a new level of prayer, one that responds in wonder and gratitude to God's interactive commitment. Make some response like this:
Ever-creating God in whose love I live, in reflecting on your almost 14 billion years of divine revelation, I recognize the law of attraction-connection-complexity- consciousness that you have placed in me. This law is designed to culminate in the spiritual transformation of all matter. I stand in wonder and awe. My heart is filled with gratitude that I am one of those enjoying the privilege of recognizing, understanding, and feeling your love.
The fourth stage of loving: Mutual Indwelling
God shares God’s Self with the beloved, including the divine qualities of justice, goodness, piety, mercy, beauty, and so forth. God does not only give gives that are external to God, but reveals. God’s very Self to us an active, involved, interactive personal presence. Ignatius says “just as the sun’s rays give us the sun itself, and through its rays it is an active and interactive presence.
During the Incarnation, God shared God’s Self. Christ’s mystical incardination in the Eucharist is another expression. In the Universal Christ, we reciprocate in this self-giving love, “I no longer live, but I am alive in Christ.” I live and act in God and God lives and acts in me. Each of us lives out our day within and alongside God.
Finding God is all things is about finding God’s presence and quietly resting in it during prayer time. It also means being with God all day long in daily routines and activities, doing each thing with and in God. We are building the Christ together – God in me and I in God. We learn to become “contemplatives in action.”
We might conclude our prayer saying something like this:
O Great God in whom I live and act, I no longer wish to live and simply work for you. My deepest desire and the grace I ask is that I may live consciously in you and with you as a part of your Christ, that I may realize that my primary privilege and honor is to be a cell in the cosmic Body of Christ. I wish to live and work no longer just as me, but consciously as part of Christ who holds all of us together on our way to you. For this privilege I offer my deepest Thanksgiving.
Teilhardian Principle 7: The principle of self-convergence is now operating.
Self-convergence is an evolutionary ability to make yourself more whole and integral. It is a way of putting your life together. It is a process of inward evolution. You possess the ability to find ways to reconfigure, simplify, and integrate the growing complexity that is you. We are invited to do it with consciousness.
Teilhardian Principle 8: At present, evolution is focused in the “noosphere.”
Evolution also accelerates in the growth of human knowledge and consciousness. Worldwide, we are enveloped in ideas, information, knowledge, wisdom, goals, purposes, and powerful feelings. This envelope of information, thought, and emotions are the noosphere. This is the collective mind and heart of the planet. Whatever is in the noosphere remains a source of knowledge and love accessible to any individual. We keep enriching it.
We have a growing capacity for cooperative and caring interpersonal connections even though we may not choose to use this capacity. This development shows the real possibility of humankind coming to an ever-higher consciousness through higher and more complex social unions.
It is leading us towards a common outlook add a common hope. Eventually, the new or sphere will constitute a single thinking loving system. This is the natural and necessary underlying structure for the supernatural Body of Christ. It will help create a personal and personalizing world in which the individual is preserved and enhanced. The Body of Christ is meant to become an organized super aggregation of loving souls. The aim of God's plan of creation is the Christ project.
Teilhardian Principle 9: The success of God’s plan for creation depends on your conscious and creative activity to keep that divine plan evolving and developing in the direction God wants for creation.
Past theology taught us that the earth served merely as the classroom for Christians where they prepared for their final exams and hoped to graduate to heaven. Their daily activity and professional work did not build the Kingdom of God but generated a scorecard of good and bad behavior. They believed they would be judged worthy of a place in heaven based on this test of good and bad deeds.
The Christ project is why God created the evolving universe until humans. No creature was capable of grasping the idea of this great project. The plan is not only that each person would be saved individually but that we would work together as one family. We would consciously cooperate in the creative work of this universal Christ. We are invited to be an essential part of the project.
Teilhardian Principle 10: Any true spirituality today must be a collective spirituality.
Most spiritual traditions offer Individualized forms of spirituality. It nurtures a relationship between you and God. They present a path that emphasizes personal sin and salvation in union with God. Most Christians have been focusing upon personal salvation and helping to save individual souls. This is not enough.
A collective spirituality is called for in which people individually and collectively create and contribute to its evolution. The purpose is to bring the Noah's sphere to its highest level of convergence, eventually operating as a single consciousness. The oneness of humanity and the planet will be a knowledge based and love inspired union and communion. This will provide an adequate infrastructure for the full emergence of Christ as the cosmic Christ.
This helps focus the vision of humanity as a whole and would put our minds, hearts, and energy into building the great body of Christ. Therefore, the major task of any true contemporary spirituality should be to help prepare the collective mind and heart of the planet for the cosmic Christ. This is the Christ project.
Teilhardian Principle 11: Today, even an individual spirituality, that is a private and exclusive redemptive relationship between God and me, must include all other human beings and the rest of creation.
We were all joined to each other for the success or failure of the divine project. Whatever happens to a fellow human somehow affects me. Spirituality K cannot be something just between me and God. Your personal spirituality has to include awareness of in cooperation with God's unfinished project. Each person has work to do and it is connected to the efforts of all other persons. You are not the center of your life purpose. The Christ project is.
The Ignatian Adventure
Read page 44, The Anima Christi.
Reap pages 45-46, The “Presupposition” and 59-60, “Images of God.”
Song: Is there a song you listen to that brings you to transcendence?
As we are entering the fall season, could it be one of the seasons by Vivaldi, an instrumental piano piece by George Winston, a religious hymn like “All Creatures of our God and King” or “All Things Now Living” or even a secular song like Three Dog Night’s “Out in the Country.” For me, certain classical pieces work to elevate and center me. What is it that you listen to that brings you to a higher level of consciousness?
WhatsApp
I invite you to sign onto this communal sharing app. It allows for group conversations and sharing of resources without having to share your email address. It allows you to share information among yourselves without making me your conduit. It is a closed group.
https://chat.whatsapp.com/JrTudgr3B0p8tWP3KW9JZY?mode=gi_t
Introductions on WhatsApp. It might be helpful to share generally where you are, what your experience with the Ignatian Exercises are, and your connection with the evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, SJ. Say anything you would like about your family, your church situation, and your prayer routines.
All Notes will be Accessible through this website: To the Frontiers
https://predmoresj.blogspot.com/
Creative Affirmations
- I am a channel for God’s creativity, and my work brings about something good.
- My dreams come from God; God has the power to accomplish them.
- As I create and listen to God, God will lead me.
- My creativity is the Creator’s will for me.
- My creativity heals myself and others.
- I am allowed to nurture my artist
- Through the use of a few simple tools, my creativity will flourish.
- As I use my creativity, I serve God.
- My creativity leads me to a trust and to a more loving place.
- My creativity brings me to an environment of forgiveness and self-forgiveness.
- However small, God has a plan of goodness for me.
- However small, God has a plan of goodness for my work.
- As I listen to the creator within, God will lead me.
- As I listen to my creativity, I am led to my Creator.
- I am willing to create.
- I am willing to learn to let myself create.
- I am willing to let God create through me.
- I am willing to be of service through my creativity.
- I am willing to experience my creative energy.
- I am willing to use my creative talents.
The Seven Areas that we can use for Contemplation
If you find your gratitude and wonder naturally flowing in response to one of the divine gifts, stay with that feeling. You may spend the entire time with this single movement. Do not feel as if you have to cover all of the seven areas listed below. The graces from this exercise can never be exhausted.
- Consider the gifts that astronomy has revealed to us. Ignatius may not have been aware of the extent of this revelation as he had no sense of the vast number of galaxies for the age of the universe.
- Observe the gifts God has been giving us that the life sciences had revealed. All of these gifts are active, interactive, and evolving. As life forms kept evolving in complexity over time - From sensation to perception to movement to social life - We observed that consciousness became the primary emergent property of life. Evolution keeps moving forward.
- Recognize evolution at work in all things. Saint Paul tells us that creation is still incomplete and still in process. Through discoveries in science and technology, we recognize the fundamental law driving creation onward and upward.
- God's gifts on the microscopic side reveal by science show the incredible complexity and activity of each living being - the human genome, the trillions of cells that live in our body, each cell itself a living being with the highly complex intra active life.
- Recognize the gifts of the earth itself. All the beauties of mountains, plains, and skies. All the power of tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, deserts.
- Reflect on God's gift that flow from human consciousness and society, such as civilization, music, art, literature, society, communication, transportation, recreation, science, mathematics, architecture, ecology, entertainment, film, radio, Internet.
- Consider all the gifts you have personally received - talent, skills, education, opportunities, friends, family. Remember your five sentences as well as memory, intelligent, willpower, imagination, choice, the ability to love and make commitments, the ability to accomplish things, to create things that never existed before, could build teams, to worship.
