The phrase "stir my heart"--Hurley refers to the passage from a letter to Bridges in which Hopkins laments that Christ rarely "stirs [his] heart sensibly"--may be a direct allusion to the Ignatian Exercises and the "motions" that prompt the
retreatant's heart either to joy and service or to sadness and selfishness.
(96) The spiritual upshot is to put before a
retreatant a costly God-centeredness willing to stand up to interior blockages to God's individual guidance.
47) The goal of the composition of place according to Jeronomino Nadal, who was deputed by Ignatius to elucidate the Exercises, is not simply to produce a mental drama of a biblical scene that unfolds in a
retreatant's mind but to compose a place, a scene, in which a dialogue between the persons in the gospel passage and the
retreatant can take place.
There is also a series of questions upon which the
retreatant should reflect.
The director of a personalized retreat must combat within himself five major enemies of the other person's freedom: the director's own desire to have others dependent on him; his fear that he may lose control of the retreat if the
retreatant exercises freedom; the worry that he may not know what to do if the
retreatant takes a path that he himself is not accustomed to; his desire to achieve results in the retreat; inflexibility in his own spiritual life, with the tendency to feel his personal spirituality threatened when the
retreatant goes his own way.
One of the colloquies invites the
retreatant into conversation with the dying Jesus, speaking to him "in the way one friend speaks to another" and considering the questions: "What have I done for Christ?
And yet, for the short-term
retreatant, the Gethsemani experience pales next to Tassajara's challenge to make vows for oneself and live them out: for three months or six months one must take the measure of one's faith, for that is what resides in the making of a vow.
The weekend begins with the Ignatian Daily Examen, which asks the
retreatant to reflect on their day, identifying ways in which God was both present and not present.
Many times issues surface that the
retreatant had not intended to work with or might even have forgotten.
(31) Divided into Four Weeks that loosely correspond to the three "ways" of traditional mysticism, namely, the via purgativa, the via illuminativa, and the via unitiva, the text of the Exercises offers a retreat director instructions and scriptural references to aid the
retreatant in overcoming attachment to created things and thus to dispose him or her to the action of divine grace and to discern the will of God.