One Year On: What is SpEx all about?
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything
One year since SpEx launched. Here is the first post for new subscribers and those who might have missed it.
Abbreviation: SpEx
Meaning: The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises
Encountering Jesus
Nothing is more practical than finding God,
than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
Joseph Whelan, SJ, From Finding God in All Things: A Marquette Prayer Book © 2009 Marquette University. Used with permission.
This site and my writing are about falling in love with Christ in deeply integrated ways that attend to the identity crises in modern culture.
Having experienced The Spiritual Exercises (19th annotation) and a life-changing encounter with Jesus, I am training as an Ignatian Spiritual Director to lead others in The Spiritual Exercises.
Sharing what I am learning helps me in my learning. I am aware I do so at a time when many others are exploring Ignatian Spirituality.
I have found a home within broader Ignatian Spirituality for my charismatic, Anglo-Catholic, evangelical, and missional faith. My faith journey from Evangelical Baptist to Charismatic Evangelical is integrating my Emerging and Missional experiences and Anglo-Catholic theological studies.
Things that I treasure and that are part of me have found a place to live together and grow within Ignatian Spirituality. I will be unpacking how that might be so on this site.
A Larger Coherence: How we become who we are
A great convergence is taking place - a consilient understanding of how we become who we are, how we choose and shape who we are, i.e. how habits, practices, desires, and passions overlap within us and map against the world around us in our social relationships, communities, ways of belonging and participation of life with others.
These overlapping understandings come from Behavioural and Social Science (thought processes and behaviour in interactions with our environment), Neuro Science (physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modelling), Social Theory (analytical frameworks, or paradigms, used to study and interpret social phenomena).
And like others, I am considering how Theology is not only consilient with all of this but is vital to understanding identity formation. Without theology, we cannot understand how all these elements combine in our createdness and life.
Without theology, we will never fully comprehend who we are, why we are, and how we were meant to be. Ignatian Spirituality provides a fertile place to explore all this in theory and practice for encounters with God.
What’s next?
Each month, I will share what I am learning and the resources from my learning around The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatian Spirituality, and the intersections with science and theology for identity formation within the vision and mission of Waverley Abbey.
And as I do so, my greatest hope is that it will foster and facilitate heart-to-heart encounters with God for others, of the kind George Aschenbrenner describes:
Congratulations on a year! I just celebrated a year as well. You started your Substack one month before I did. I heard your wonderful podcast on Journal of a New Generation and looked to see if you had any other content. Gained a new subscriber! God bless you and your work.