What is SpEx all about?
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything
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. There is a coming together of my faith journey from Evangelical Baptist to Charismatic Evangelical into my Emerging and Missional experiences and Anglo-Catholic theological studies.
Things that I treasure and are part of me have found a place to live together and grow within Ignatian Spirituality. How that might be so is something I will be unpacking on this site.
Waverley Abbey: A Vocational Home
In late summer last year, 2022, having heard the vision for Waverley Abbey and 24/7 prayer, I went down to pray in the abbey grounds. As I contemplated and meditated on the vision for the abbey, something emerged from deep within my soul and onto my lips.
“Lord, this is worth giving a life for”.
He replied, “Well, will you?”
My yes to Jesus means I now have a new vocational home as the Principal and Head of Waverley College, which shapes my writing here.
Waverley Abbey is over 900 years old and a site of prayer, learning, enterprise and mission. In our new partnership with 24/7 Prayer, we want to be a renewed abbey for a new generation, with a vision to revive the church and rewire the culture every day with Jesus.
The college is leading the way in responding to the identity crisis of our modern world, with an understanding and integration of psychology and theology for spiritual formation, counselling, chaplaincy and leadership.
I’ll share about and resources from our centres for spiritual formation, counselling and leadership. We will have training at Waverley for Ignatian Spirituality starting in August 2023.
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.
And without theology, we will never fully comprehend who we are, why we are, and become who 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?
So 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:
I love where this is headed and look forward to resources to continue myself.
Excited to see this develop.