Discerning the Life You Were Made For: Ignatian Discernment of Spirits and Vocation as a Gentle, Time-Tested Path Out of Purposelessness

This report offers a practical and theologically grounded account of how the Ignatian tradition helps a person who feels lost, aimless, or uncertain of their purpose to discover the direction for which God has been drawing them all along. Rather than treating the search for purpose as an anxious problem to be solved by relentless self-analysis, the tradition founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century proposes something quieter and far more hopeful: that God is already at work in the ordinary movements of a human heart, and that there exists a gentle, teachable method for noticing where the Spirit of God is drawing a person toward the fullness of life. The analysis proceeds through the central architecture of the Spiritual Exercises, examining the First Principle and Foundation, the definitions of consolation and desolation, the Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, the practice of Ignatian freedom or holy indifference, the Election and its three times of sound choosing, the daily Examen, the delicate art of telling true consolation from its counterfeits, and the wisdom of seeking a companion when discernment stalls. Throughout, the aim is not scholarly display for its own sake but a warm, accessible, and Christ-centered map for a reader who suspects they have wandered off the path and does not yet know that the path has been quietly seeking them.

The Ache for Purpose and the Ignatian Promise

There is a particular kind of suffering that does not announce itself loudly. It is not the sharp grief of loss or the hot pain of a wound, but a slow gray ache: the sense that one's life is drifting, that the years are passing without a shape one can recognize, that everyone else seems to have received a map that was somehow never handed to you. People describe it in different ways. Some call it feeling lost, some call it being stuck, some say they have no idea what they are supposed to do with their life, and some simply say, quietly and with a kind of shame, that they do not know who they are or what they are for. This ache is not a modern invention, though the modern world has given it new intensities, presenting each person with a bewildering surplus of possible lives and then whispering that they alone are responsible for choosing rightly among them, and that a wrong choice will be irrecoverable. Under that pressure the search for purpose can curdle into a low-grade anxiety that never quite resolves, a habit of restless self-monitoring that examines every feeling and every option and grows only more paralyzed the harder it looks[10].

The Ignatian tradition begins with a different and gentler premise, and it is worth stating at the outset because everything that follows rests upon it. The premise is that you are not adrift on an empty sea, left to invent a purpose out of nothing by sheer force of will. You are, rather, a person addressed. Before you began to search for God, God was already searching for you, already at work within the very desires and disquiets that make you feel lost, already drawing you, patiently and without coercion, toward the particular life for which you were made[9]. Purpose, in this understanding, is less a thing to be manufactured than a call to be heard, less a destination to be seized by anxious effort than a direction to be discovered by learning to notice a pull that has been present all along. Saint Ignatius did not teach that God's will is a single hidden point that a person must locate on pain of failure, a needle concealed in a haystack that a merciful God nonetheless dares you to find. He taught something both humbler and more generous: that God communicates through the movements of the human heart, that these movements can be read, and that a person can learn, over time and with help, to distinguish the drawing of God's Spirit from the many other voices that pull at a life[4].

This is the Ignatian promise, and it is a promise made specifically to the lost. The method that Ignatius bequeathed to the church was forged in his own experience of being profoundly at sea. He was, by his own later account, a vain and ambitious soldier with no interior life to speak of until a cannonball at the siege of Pamplona shattered his leg and confined him for months to a sickbed, where the only reading available to him was a life of Christ and a book of the lives of the saints[3]. Everything he came to teach about discernment grew from what he noticed during that long convalescence, and what he noticed was, at first, almost embarrassingly ordinary. It was not a vision or a voice from heaven. It was a pattern in the aftertaste of his own daydreams. That homely beginning matters for anyone who feels that spiritual direction and divine purpose are meant for special souls and not for them. The whole edifice of Ignatian discernment rests on the conviction that God speaks in the reachable, everyday interior life of an ordinary person, and that the first requirement is not extraordinary holiness but simple, honest attention[13].

Before turning to the method itself, it helps to name clearly what the Ignatian path is not, because misunderstanding here is the source of much needless anxiety. It is not a technique for extracting decisions from God as one might extract coins from a machine, and it does not promise certainty of the kind that removes the need for faith and courage. It is not a substitute for ordinary wisdom, for counsel, for study of one's circumstances, or for the responsible use of reason; it integrates all of these rather than replacing them. And it is emphatically not a program of morbid self-scrutiny that turns the soul inward upon itself in an endless audit of motives. Ignatian discernment, rightly practiced, tends outward and upward. It quiets the anxious self precisely by teaching the self to look away from its own churning and toward the gentle, consistent movements of the God who is drawing it home[8]. The reader who takes up this path is not being asked to become their own relentless investigator. They are being invited to become a person who listens.

The First Principle and Foundation: What We Are For

At the very threshold of the Spiritual Exercises, before any of the meditations begin, Ignatius places a short and startling paragraph he calls the Principle and Foundation, and it functions as the bedrock beneath the entire search for purpose[1]. Its opening is deceptively simple: the human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. Everything else that exists upon the face of the earth is created for the human person, to help in the pursuit of the end for which one is made[1]. In a handful of sentences Ignatius answers the question that the lost soul is aching to have answered, the question of what a human life is fundamentally for. The answer is not a career, a role, a relationship, or an achievement, however good any of these may be. The answer is a relationship of love and reverence with the God who made us, a communion that is itself the meaning and destiny of a human life. This is the deepest foundation of Ignatian purpose, and it is profoundly freeing for a person crushed under the weight of choosing, because it relocates the center of gravity of a life away from the frantic accumulation of the right accomplishments and toward the one thing that no external circumstance can take away.

The Principle and Foundation reframes the entire problem of purpose. If the ultimate end of a human life is loving communion with God, then the many particular questions that torment the lost person, questions about what job to take, where to live, whom to marry, what to do with the one wild and precious life they have been given, are not the ultimate questions at all. They are penultimate questions, real and important, but secondary to and in service of the one end for which the person exists[9]. This does not make them trivial. It orders them. A house built on a foundation is not a house without walls; the walls matter enormously, but they matter as walls of a house whose foundation holds them in place. In the same way, the particular shape of a person's vocation matters intensely, but it matters as the particular way that this particular person is called to praise, reverence, and serve God, and to love their neighbor as themselves. When a person grasps this ordering, the paralyzing pressure begins to lift, because they see that no single choice among good options carries the whole weight of their salvation. God can be found, loved, and served in many valleys and along many roads[9].

The second movement of the Principle and Foundation is where Ignatius introduces what has become one of the most misunderstood and most liberating concepts in all of Christian spirituality, the principle of holy indifference, which the Spanish text captures in the phrase tantum quantum, meaning only in so far as[1]. Because the created things of the world exist to help us toward our end, Ignatius reasons, we ought to make use of them precisely in so far as they help us toward that end, and let them go in so far as they hinder us[1]. From this follows the famous and bracing counsel that we should make ourselves indifferent to all created things, so that, as far as it depends on us, we do not fix our desire on health rather than sickness, on wealth rather than poverty, on honor rather than dishonor, on a long life rather than a short one, desiring and choosing only what leads more surely to the end for which we are made[1]. It is essential to understand that this indifference is not coldness, apathy, or the suppression of desire. It is the opposite of the numb detachment that the depressed and purposeless person already knows too well. Ignatian indifference is a hard-won interior freedom, a state in which the heart is no longer enslaved by its cravings and aversions, so that it becomes free to choose the good rather than being dragged toward it or away from it by disordered attachment[7]. We will return to this freedom at length, because it is the hinge on which all sound discernment turns, but here at the foundation its purpose is to establish that the search for purpose begins not with grasping but with a certain holy openness of hands.

For a person who feels they have no purpose, the Principle and Foundation delivers a message of quiet dignity. It says that their life already has an end and a meaning that does not depend on their having figured out their career or repaired their reputation or reached any of the milestones by which the world measures a successful life. They were made, deliberately and lovingly, for communion with God, and that end is available to them today, in whatever confusion or emptiness they currently inhabit[9]. The scriptural resonance is deep and steadying. The psalmist confesses that God formed his inmost being and knit him together in his mother's womb, that God's eyes saw his unformed body and that all the days ordained for him were written in God's book before one of them came to be[18]. The apostle Paul tells the Ephesians that we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do[18]. Purpose, in this light, is not a burden the lost person must invent under threat of meaninglessness. It is an inheritance already prepared, a good work already made ready, a life already written into the book of a God who does not lose track of a single one of his children. The task is not to create that purpose from nothing but to discover and consent to it, and the Ignatian method exists precisely to teach a person how.

Consolation and Desolation: Naming the Interior Weather

If God draws a person toward their purpose through the movements of the heart, then learning to read those movements is the first practical skill of discernment, and Ignatius gives us a precise vocabulary for the two fundamental kinds of interior movement. He calls them consolation and desolation, and it is crucial from the beginning to strip these words of the misunderstandings they invite. In ordinary speech, consolation sounds like comfort and desolation like misery, and so a person might assume that consolation simply means feeling good and desolation simply means feeling bad. This is not what Ignatius means, and the whole enterprise of discernment collapses into mere mood-tracking if the distinction is missed[4]. Consolation and desolation, in the Ignatian sense, are not primarily about pleasant or unpleasant feelings. They are about the direction in which the deep current of a person's spirit is moving, whether toward God and the fullness of life or away from God and into the closing-in of the self[4].

Consolation Defined

Ignatius defines consolation with unusual care in the third of his Rules for the Discernment of Spirits[1]. He says that he calls it consolation when an interior movement is aroused in the soul by which it comes to be inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord, and consequently when it can love no created thing on the face of the earth for its own sake, but only in the Creator of them all[1]. He continues that it is likewise consolation when the soul sheds tears that move it to the love of its Lord, whether tears of sorrow for its sins or tears at the Passion of Christ or tears over other things directly ordered to God's service and praise[1]. And, most broadly, he calls consolation every increase of faith, hope, and love, and all interior joy that calls and attracts the soul toward heavenly things and toward the salvation of the soul, quieting it and giving it peace in its Creator and Lord[1]. What is striking in this definition is that consolation is not identified with a particular pleasant sensation. It is identified with a movement of the whole person toward God, toward faith, toward hope, toward love, toward the peace that comes from being rightly oriented. A person can be in genuine spiritual consolation while weeping, while grieving over sin, while contemplating the suffering of Christ. The mark of consolation is not the absence of pain but the presence of a movement that draws the heart upward and outward, toward God and toward the love of others in God[6].

This distinction is a lifeline for the purposeless person, who often assumes that if they do not feel happy and clear and energized, then God must be absent and they must be on the wrong track. Ignatian consolation teaches otherwise. The quiet strengthening of faith in the middle of a hard season, the small increase of hope that lets a person get out of bed and try again, the unexpected softening of the heart toward someone they had resented, the tears that come during prayer and leave the soul more tender rather than more bitter, all of these are consolation, all of them are the fingerprints of the good Spirit, even when the surface of life remains difficult and gray[4]. Consolation is the sign that God is drawing near, and it is also, as we shall see, one of the primary ways God indicates the direction of a person's true calling. Where a person finds deep, lasting, faith-increasing, hope-giving, love-enlarging consolation, there they are very likely near the shape of the life for which they were made[5].

Desolation Defined

Ignatius defines desolation in the fourth rule as the contrary of everything he has just described, and again the definition is precise and pastoral[1]. Desolation, he says, is darkness of soul, disturbance in it, movement toward low and earthly things, restlessness arising from many agitations and temptations, all of which move the soul toward lack of faith, lack of hope, and lack of love[1]. He adds that in desolation the soul finds itself altogether slothful, tepid, sad, and, as it were, separated from its Creator and Lord[1]. The desolate soul feels distant from God, doubts whether God cares, sinks into sadness and lethargy, and turns inward upon its own troubles in a way that walls it off from grace. It is important to hold this definition together with a crucial pastoral qualification that the Ignatian tradition insists upon: spiritual desolation is not the same thing as the ordinary sadness of grief, the fatigue of a body that is ill or exhausted, or the heaviness that belongs to certain forms of psychological and mental suffering[4]. Ignatius is describing a specifically spiritual movement, a pull away from faith, hope, and love. Some of what a distressed person experiences may indeed be spiritual desolation to be met with the spiritual remedies he prescribes, and some of it may be the very human burden of a tired body or a wounded mind that calls for rest, care, and sometimes the help of a doctor or counselor. Learning gently to tell these apart, without harsh self-judgment, is part of the wisdom of the path, and it is one reason the tradition so values the company of a wise guide[4].

The deepest danger of desolation, and the reason Ignatius devotes so much of his teaching to it, is that it lies. Desolation does not merely feel bad; it distorts a person's perception of God, of themselves, and of their whole life, and it does so with a plausibility that can be overwhelming in the moment[4]. In desolation a person becomes convinced that God has abandoned them, that their past choices were all mistakes, that their future holds nothing, that prayer is pointless and faith is a self-deception. These convictions arrive with the force of revelation, feeling like sober truth finally seen clearly, when in fact they are the characteristic voice of the movement away from God. This is precisely why the person searching for purpose must learn to recognize desolation, because the lost feeling itself, the conviction that one's life is meaningless and that no good direction exists, is very often not an accurate read of reality but the coloring that desolation lays over everything. The first gift of naming desolation is the gift of not believing it. A person who can say, this darkness that tells me God is absent and my life is worthless is desolation, and desolation is a liar, has already begun to be free of its worst power[4].

The Rules for the Discernment of Spirits: How the Spirits Move

Having named the two fundamental movements, Ignatius provides a set of rules, twenty-two in all, for understanding and responding to them. He divides them into two sets, one suited to those in the earlier stages of the spiritual life who are turning from sin toward God, which he calls the rules for the First Week, and a more subtle set for those who are already moving forward in the life of the Spirit, which he calls the rules for the Second Week[1]. These rules are not abstract theology. They are field-tested, practical counsel of astonishing psychological acuity, distilled from Ignatius's own experience and from his direction of many souls, and they remain among the most useful guidance ever written for a person trying to find their way through interior confusion[6].

How the Good Spirit and the Enemy Move Differently

The first two rules establish a principle of orientation that governs everything else, and it is subtle enough to require careful attention. Ignatius observes that the two spirits, the good and the one he calls the enemy of our human nature, act in opposite ways depending on the fundamental direction in which a person's life is moving[1]. In the case of a person who is going from mortal sin to mortal sin, whose life is set against God, the enemy ordinarily proposes apparent pleasures, filling the imagination with sensual delights in order to hold the person fast in their vices, while the good spirit uses the opposite method, stinging the conscience and stirring remorse to prod the person toward change[1]. But in the case of a person who is earnestly striving to rise out of sin and to grow in the service of God, the two spirits reverse their tactics[1]. Now it is the enemy who harasses with sadness, false reasoning, anxiety, and obstacles, seeking to discourage the person and turn them back, while the good spirit gives courage and strength, consolations, tears, inspirations, and peace, making the way forward easier and removing obstacles so that the person may go on advancing in doing good[1].

This principle is enormously important for the person seeking their purpose, because it tells them how to interpret the discouragement they so often feel. If a person is sincerely trying to turn toward God and to find the good life God intends for them, then the sadness, the anxiety, the swarm of reasons why it is all hopeless, the sense that they might as well give up, are precisely what the movement away from God feels like when it is trying to stop someone who is moving in the right direction[4]. The discouragement is not evidence that they are on the wrong road. It is very often evidence that they are on the right one and are being resisted. Conversely, the courage, the quiet peace, the sense of the way opening before them, the strength to take the next step, are the marks of the good Spirit confirming and assisting their movement toward God[4]. Ignatius thus hands the struggling person a kind of interpretive key: for a soul turned toward God, the good Spirit encourages and the enemy discourages, and this single insight can reframe an entire experience of feeling stuck and defeated[6].

The Rule Against Deciding in Desolation

Of all the counsels Ignatius gives, none is more practically urgent or more frequently neglected than the fifth rule, and it deserves to be engraved on the heart of anyone facing a decision while feeling low. In time of desolation, Ignatius says, we should never make a change, but remain firm and constant in the resolutions and in the decision by which we were guided the day before the desolation, or in the decision we held in the preceding consolation[1]. The reasoning is straightforward once the nature of desolation is understood. In desolation the enemy is guiding us, and we cannot find the way to a good decision by following the counsel of the one who is actively trying to lead us astray[1]. Desolation distorts perception; it makes the good look impossible and the harmful look reasonable; it whispers that the relationship should be abandoned, the commitment broken, the vocation given up, the faith itself set aside, and it makes all of this feel like clear-eyed realism. To make a life-altering decision under that influence is to let the liar hold the pen[4].

The pastoral force of this rule for the purposeless person is difficult to overstate. So many of the most damaging decisions of a human life, the sudden abandonment of a calling, the rash quitting, the walking away from love, the giving up on faith, are made in the grip of desolation, when everything feels hopeless and the mind constructs an airtight case for despair. Ignatius counsels, with the authority of hard experience, that this is exactly the moment to make no irreversible move. Hold the position you took when you were clearer. Postpone the decision until the storm passes, as it always eventually does. If a change genuinely needs to be made, it will still need to be made when consolation returns and the mind can weigh it freely, and then it can be made soundly[5]. This does not mean a person should do nothing in desolation; it means they should not decide the direction of their life in it. There is a world of difference between enduring a hard season steadily and tearing up the map because the season is hard.

Acting Against Desolation

Ignatius does not counsel mere passive waiting in desolation. In the sixth rule he insists that although we ought not to change our resolutions, it is very profitable to make vigorous changes against the desolation itself, insisting more on prayer, on meditation, on much examination of ourselves, and on extending our efforts in some suitable act of penance or self-discipline[1]. The principle here is that desolation tempts us to do less, to withdraw, to abandon the practices that ordinarily sustain us, and precisely for that reason the healthy response is to lean in rather than pull back, to hold the ground of prayer even when prayer feels empty[4]. In the seventh rule he offers a tender word of encouragement, urging the person in desolation to remember that the Lord has not truly abandoned them but has, for their good, withdrawn the felt sense of his presence while leaving them ample grace to resist, so that although they may not perceive it, the help of God always remains and they can indeed stand firm[1]. In the eighth rule he counsels patience, reminding the desolate soul that the trial will pass and consolation will return, and that patience is the virtue that carries a person through the interval[1]. And in the ninth rule he explains, with remarkable gentleness, the three reasons God may permit a season of desolation: sometimes because we have grown careless or lukewarm in our spiritual life and the dryness calls us back to earnestness; sometimes to test us and to let us discover how far we will go in serving God even without the reward of felt consolation; and sometimes to teach us, in a way we could learn no other way, that consolation is a pure gift of God and not something we can produce or possess by our own effort, so that we neither take excessive credit for it nor build our house upon it[1]. None of these reasons is punitive in the harsh sense; each is ordered toward the person's deeper freedom and maturity, and this is characteristic of the whole Ignatian understanding of the difficult seasons of the soul[6].

The Tactics of the Enemy

In the final rules of the First Week, Ignatius offers three images for the way the enemy of our human nature operates, and though the sixteenth-century imagery reflects its age, the psychological insight beneath it is timeless and can be presented in a way that respects a modern reader[1]. The first image portrays the enemy as fundamentally a coward who grows strong when we grow weak and grows weak the moment we stand firm. When a person, facing temptation or discouragement, shows a bold and steady face and refuses to be intimidated, the pressure characteristically loses its force, whereas when a person becomes fearful and begins to give ground, the pressure grows bolder[1]. The lesson is that firmness in the face of interior harassment is not futile but genuinely effective; the discouraging voice bluffs, and calling its bluff diminishes it.

The second image is the one most directly useful to a person carrying a secret burden, and it deserves special emphasis because it undergirds the entire Ignatian practice of spiritual companionship. Ignatius says the enemy behaves like a false lover who wants above all to remain hidden, who whispers his suggestions in secret and is greatly displeased when they are brought into the open, because he knows that once his deceits are revealed to a wise and trusted person, his whole enterprise is exposed and defeated[1]. The practical counsel that follows is one of the most important in the entire tradition: bring the tempting or discouraging thoughts, the shameful ones, the ones the mind insists must be kept private, into the light by speaking them to a good confessor, a spiritual director, or another spiritually wise person, and their power dissolves in the telling[1]. So much of what keeps a person trapped in a private hell of self-doubt and shame is precisely its secrecy, and Ignatius understood centuries ago what many have had to relearn since, that darkness spoken aloud to a trusted and grace-filled listener loses its grip[8]. The third image portrays the enemy as a shrewd commander who studies the defenses of a fortress and attacks at the weakest point, which counsels a person to know their own particular vulnerabilities, the specific places where discouragement and temptation most easily gain entrance, and to reinforce exactly there[1]. For the person seeking purpose, these images translate into a compact practical wisdom: stand firm rather than flinch, refuse secrecy and seek an honest listener, and know your own weak points well enough to guard them.

Ignatian Freedom: The Ordering of Desire

We return now to the concept introduced at the foundation, the holy indifference or spiritual freedom that Ignatius regards as the indispensable condition for finding one's true purpose, because it is here that the difference between anxious self-analysis and genuine discernment becomes clearest. The lost person often approaches the question of purpose in a state of interior bondage they do not even recognize, driven by fears they have not examined and cravings they have not questioned, terrified of certain outcomes and desperate for others, so that when they try to discern God's call they are really only listening to the loudest of their own compulsions[7]. Ignatian freedom is the patient work of loosening these grips, not by killing desire, but by ordering it, so that the deepest desire, the desire for God and for the good God intends, is set free to lead, and the lesser desires and fears fall into their proper and subordinate place[10].

The essential insight is that a person cannot discern well what they are not free to choose. If a man is so afraid of poverty that the possibility of a less lucrative but more life-giving calling cannot even be entertained, then his discernment is rigged before it begins; he is not choosing, he is being driven[7]. If a woman craves the approval of her family so intensely that she cannot honestly weigh a path they would not applaud, then the approval, not the Spirit, is making her decision. Ignatian indifference is the interior work of coming to a place where a person can hold all the options in genuinely open hands, where they could accept wealth or accept modest means, accept a longer road or a shorter one, accept recognition or obscurity, insofar as any of these serves the end for which they were made[1]. Only from that place of freedom can a person hear which way God is actually drawing them, because only then are they no longer drowning out the quiet voice of the Spirit with the roar of their own attachments[6].

It is vital to insist, against a common misreading, that this freedom is warm rather than cold. Ignatius was not a Stoic teaching the extinction of feeling, and the Contemplation to Attain Love with which he ends the Exercises reveals a man whose whole spirituality was drenched in gratitude and affection[14]. Indifference does not mean not caring; it means caring most about the right thing, so that lesser cares no longer tyrannize. In fact, Ignatian freedom actually intensifies and purifies desire rather than suppressing it, because as the disordered fears and cravings loosen their grip, the person discovers underneath them the great authentic desires that God has planted in the very structure of their being, the deep longings that are themselves a language in which God speaks a person's vocation[9]. This is one of the most hopeful features of the whole tradition. Ignatius trusted holy desire. He believed that when a person is genuinely free and genuinely turned toward God, their deepest desires are not obstacles to God's will but a primary means by which God reveals it, because God works within a person to shape the very wanting that then draws them toward their calling[5]. The apostle Paul says as much when he tells the Philippians that it is God who works in them to will and to act according to his good pleasure[18]. Purpose, then, is often found not by overriding one's deepest desires but by digging beneath the surface clamor to find them.

The culminating expression of this freedom in the Exercises is the prayer known by its first Latin word as the Suscipe, which Ignatius offers as the fruit of the entire journey[15]. In it the person prays, Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess; you have given it all to me, and to you, Lord, I return it; all is yours, dispose of it wholly according to your will; give me only your love and your grace, for that is enough for me[15]. This is the summit of Ignatian freedom, and it is worth noticing that it is not a grim resignation but a lover's self-gift, a joyful placing of the whole self back into the hands of the One who gave it, asking in return only for the love and grace that are the true wealth of a human life[14]. A person who can pray the Suscipe honestly, even haltingly, even through tears, has found the ground from which every good decision grows, because they have found the freedom to want what God wants, which is always their own deepest good.

The Election and the Three Times of Choosing

At the structural heart of the Spiritual Exercises stands what Ignatius calls the Election, which is his term for the making of a sound and holy choice about the direction of one's life[1]. Everything before it prepares a person to choose well, and everything after it helps them live out and confirm the choice. Ignatius is careful to specify what kinds of things are fit matter for an Election. The object of a good choice must be something good in itself or at least morally neutral, something that fits within the life of the church and the moral order rather than against it, so that discernment is never a matter of choosing between good and evil, which requires not discernment but simple obedience, but always a matter of choosing among genuine goods, or discerning the better among good options[1]. This is liberating for the anxious chooser, because it clarifies that the question is not usually whether one option is sinful and another righteous, but which of several good possible lives God is drawing this particular person toward, and that is a question the whole apparatus of discernment exists to help answer[5].

Ignatius then describes three distinct times or occasions in which a sound Election can be made, and this typology of the three times is one of his most original and practically useful contributions, because it dignifies several different ways that God leads a person and reassures the reader that they need not wait for the rarest kind of certainty in order to choose well[1]. The first time is when God so moves and draws the will that a devout soul, without doubting or being able to doubt, simply follows what is shown to it, as Ignatius says happened to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus and to Saint Matthew rising from the tax booth to follow Christ[1]. This is the dramatic and unmistakable call, the moment of clarity so overwhelming that deliberation is unnecessary because the certainty is total. Such moments are real, and some people receive them, but Ignatius wisely does not build his method upon them, because they are rare and cannot be summoned. If a person waits only for a Damascus road, they may wait forever, and Ignatius does not want the ordinary seeker to imagine that the absence of a thunderbolt means the absence of a call[7].

The second time is the one most characteristic of Ignatian discernment and the one most relevant to the reader of this report, because it is the time of discernment through the movements of consolation and desolation[1]. In this second occasion, Ignatius says, much clarity and understanding are gained through the experience of consolations and desolations and through the discernment of the different spirits, over a period of prayerful attention[1]. Here a person who faces a genuine choice among goods brings each option before God in prayer and then attends carefully to the interior movements that follow, noticing which direction consistently brings the deep, faith-increasing, hope-giving, love-enlarging consolation that marks the drawing of the good Spirit, and which brings the closing-in, the anxiety, the subtle turning away from God that marks desolation[5]. This is not a matter of a single feeling on a single day, which could be mere mood, but of a sustained pattern noticed over time, tested and weighed, the accumulated evidence of where God's peace consistently rests[6]. This is the ordinary road of Ignatian vocational discernment, and it is precisely the path that offers hope to the person who feels they lack the dramatic certainty of the first time. They do not need a thunderbolt. They need only to bring their real options faithfully to God and to learn, patiently, to read the weather of their own heart[4].

The third time is a time of tranquility, when the soul is not being strongly moved by various spirits in one direction or another and is able to use its natural powers of reason freely and calmly[1]. Ignatius, far from disdaining reason, offers two thorough methods for this third time. The first method invites a person to lay out clearly the advantages and disadvantages of each option, to weigh the reasons for and against, considering always which choice more serves the glory of God and the good of the soul, and then to decide according to the weightier reasons rather than according to sensual inclination[1]. The second method offers three imaginative aids of remarkable psychological wisdom that help cut through self-deception[1]. In the first, a person imagines someone they have never met who has come to them for advice in exactly this decision, and asks what they would counsel that person to do for the greater glory of God, thereby gaining the clarity that distance and disinterest provide[1]. In the second, a person imagines themselves at the moment of death and asks what choice they would then wish they had made[1]. In the third, they imagine themselves standing before the judgment seat of God at the end of all things and ask what decision they would then wish to have taken[1]. These are not morbid exercises but liberating ones, because each strips away the short-term pressures and vanities that cloud a decision and lets a person see it from the vantage of what truly and lastingly matters[7]. Together the three times assure the seeker that God leads in more than one way, through sudden clarity, through the patient reading of interior movements, and through the calm use of sanctified reason, and that a person can choose soundly by any of these roads, or by them in combination, provided they choose in freedom and with their heart turned toward God[5].

A final and deeply reassuring feature of the Ignatian Election is what happens after the choice is made, for Ignatius counsels the person who has come to a decision to bring it back to God in prayer and to ask for confirmation[5]. If the choice is truly of God, it will tend to be met over the following days with the quiet, deepening peace of consolation, a settled sense of rightness, a growing freedom and joy in the direction taken. If instead the decision is consistently followed by agitation, a closing-off, a persistent lack of peace that is not merely the natural fear of a big change, this may be an invitation to reconsider[6]. This practice of seeking confirmation relieves an enormous burden from the anxious chooser, because it means that the moment of decision is not a solitary leap into an abyss from which there is no feedback, but the beginning of a continuing conversation with a God who accompanies the choice and gently confirms or redirects it. A person does not have to get it perfectly right in a single instant of dread. They make the best discernment they can in freedom and faith, and then they walk forward attentively, trusting that the God who led them to the choice will not fall silent afterward[5].

The Examen as Daily Discernment

All the discernment described so far might seem to belong to great turning points, the major elections of a life, but Ignatius knew that the capacity to discern at the crossroads is built slowly through a small daily practice, and this practice, the Examen, is arguably his most portable and most treasured gift to ordinary Christians[13]. The Examen is a brief, structured prayer, traditionally taking ten or fifteen minutes, in which a person reviews the day just lived in the presence of God, attending especially to the movements of consolation and desolation that ran through it, in order to notice where God was present and how they responded[13]. Ignatius regarded it as so important that he told his companions it was the one spiritual exercise they should never omit even when circumstances forced them to drop everything else, because it is the daily gymnasium in which the muscles of discernment are trained[13].

The classic shape of the Examen unfolds in several gentle movements, and while different teachers arrange them slightly differently, the core is consistent[13]. It begins with gratitude, as the person calls to mind the gifts of the day, the concrete graces large and small, letting thankfulness rather than anxiety set the tone, because gratitude opens the heart and orients it toward the Giver[9]. It moves next to a prayer for the light of the Holy Spirit, asking God for the grace to see the day as God sees it rather than through the distorting lenses of ego and fear, since the whole point of the Examen is not self-analysis by one's own power but seeing by God's light[13]. Then comes the heart of the practice, the prayerful review of the day, in which the person walks back through the hours and notices the interior movements, asking where they felt consolation, that drawing toward faith, hope, and love, and where they felt desolation, that pull toward anxiety, resentment, and closing-in, and asking gently what these movements were about and how they responded to them[13]. This review naturally gives rise to a movement of sorrow and reconciliation, as the person notices the moments they turned away from love and asks God's forgiveness, receiving it with the tenderness that the God of the Examen always shows[13]. And it concludes with a hopeful look toward the day to come, asking God's grace for the challenges and opportunities ahead and resolving, with God's help, to respond more freely to the promptings of the Spirit[13].

For a person lost and searching for purpose, the Examen is quietly transformative, and it is transformative precisely because it is small and daily rather than grand and occasional. Purpose, the Ignatian tradition suggests, is rarely revealed in a single blinding disclosure. It is discerned gradually, through the accumulation of noticed patterns, and the Examen is the instrument of that noticing[5]. A person who prays the Examen faithfully over weeks and months begins to detect the shape of their own consolation, to see which activities and relationships and directions consistently draw them toward life and God, and which consistently drain and diminish them. Over time these patterns become a kind of map, drawn not from anxious speculation about the future but from the honest evidence of lived experience, showing where the current of grace tends to run in this particular life[6]. The person who has felt utterly without direction often discovers, through months of Examen, that the direction was being written in small letters all along, in the places where they came alive and the places where they closed down, and that they simply had not been reading it. The Examen teaches them to read. And it does so gently, without the corrosive self-scrutiny that the anxious soul fears, because it is prayed in the light of a God who reviews the day with mercy, looking not to condemn but to draw the beloved further into life[13].

There is a further and precious quality to the Examen worth naming for the reader in distress, which is that it reframes the search for purpose from an isolating burden into a shared conversation. The person praying the Examen is never merely analyzing themselves; they are reviewing their day with God, in the felt company of the One who was present through every hour of it[9]. This changes the entire emotional texture of the search. The lost person's characteristic experience is of being alone with an impossible question, but the Examen returns them each evening to the truth that they are not alone with it, that God was in the day and is in the review of it, and that the finding of purpose is a collaboration rather than a solitary interrogation[13]. Even on a day that felt empty of meaning, the Examen invites the person to look again and to find, often to their surprise, the small consolations they had overlooked, the quiet evidences that they are still being drawn, still being loved, still being led. This daily rediscovery of God's nearness is itself a healing, apart from any conclusions it yields about vocation, and for many people the steadying rhythm of the Examen becomes a lifeline through the very seasons when purpose seems most obscure[9].

Discerning True Consolation from Its Counterfeits

As a person grows in the spiritual life and becomes more sincerely turned toward God, the work of discernment does not become simpler but subtler, and Ignatius addresses this deepening in his Rules for the Second Week, which take up one of the most delicate and important questions in all of Christian spirituality: how to tell true consolation, which comes from God, from false consolation, which the enemy dresses up to look like the real thing[1]. This is precisely the danger that faces the person who is making progress, because the enemy of a soul that has already rejected obvious evil cannot tempt it with obvious evil, and so resorts to a craftier strategy, offering something that looks good and holy but is subtly ordered toward the person's harm[6]. Ignatius states the principle with a striking image drawn from Scripture: it is characteristic of the evil one to transform himself into an angel of light[1]. He begins by proposing thoughts that are genuinely good and pious, thoughts entirely in keeping with the direction of a devout soul, and only gradually, once the soul has been drawn along by these good beginnings, does he bend the train of thought toward his own hidden and destructive purpose[1].

The practical test that Ignatius provides for unmasking this deception is one of the most valuable tools in the entire tradition, and it turns on paying attention to the whole course of a movement rather than only its beginning[1]. In the fifth rule of the Second Week, he counsels the person to examine carefully the entire sequence of their thoughts, the beginning, the middle, and the end[1]. If the whole course of the thoughts is good from start to finish, tending consistently toward what is wholly good, this is a sign of the good angel[1]. But if the course of the thoughts, however holy its beginning appeared, leads finally to something evil, or to something distracting, or to something less good than what the soul had previously been resolved upon, or if it ends by weakening the soul, disquieting it, disturbing its peace and robbing it of the tranquility it had before, then this is a clear sign that the movement proceeds from the evil spirit, the enemy of our peace and salvation[1]. The decisive evidence, in other words, is found in the ending, in where the movement actually deposits the soul[6].

This is the wisdom captured in the traditional image of the serpent's tail, the recognition that a temptation aimed at a good person often begins beautifully and reveals its true nature only in its final sting[6]. A thought may present itself clothed in zeal, in generosity, in apparent love of God, and may draw a person forward with genuine spiritual sweetness, and yet if a person traces where it is actually leading them, they may find that its terminus is pride, or the neglect of a real duty, or the abandonment of a genuine commitment, or an agitation and loss of peace that betrays its source[6]. The person who feels a sudden surge of consoling certainty that they should abandon their marriage for a supposedly holier freedom, or should drop their ordinary responsibilities for some grand spiritual project, or should follow an inspiration that would leave others whom they are bound to care for stranded, is wise to examine that consolation's tail. Ignatius teaches such a person not to trust the sweetness of a movement's beginning but to test it by its whole trajectory and especially by its end, asking always whether it leaves the soul in the deep and quiet peace of God or in a subtle disturbance that only masqueraded as peace along the way[6].

Ignatius adds a further refinement of great subtlety in his teaching on consolation without preceding cause, which is a specific and precious kind of consolation that arrives with no prior thought or act of the person to occasion it, welling up purely as a gift[1]. Such consolation, he says, when it is genuinely without any preceding cause, can come from God alone, for God alone can enter and move the soul in this immediate way, and this pure consolation carries no danger of deception in itself[1]. But Ignatius, with characteristic care, warns of a subtle risk in the period that follows such consolation, the afterglow, as it were, in which the soul, still warm from the divine visit, begins to form its own resolutions and plans[1]. He counsels that a person must carefully distinguish the actual time of the God-given consolation, which is trustworthy, from the subsequent period in which the soul's own reasoning takes over, because in that following time the person's conclusions, though colored by the recent grace, may arise from their own habits of mind or even from the suggestion of the enemy, and must therefore be examined and tested before being acted upon[6]. The pastoral upshot is a counsel of humble patience: even after a genuine and beautiful experience of God, a person should not rush to act on the grand plans that experience seems to authorize, but should let them settle, test them, and bring them to discernment, lest they mistake their own subsequent enthusiasm for the voice of God[6]. This is the mature wisdom of the tradition, and it protects the earnest soul from the peculiar danger of being deceived precisely through good things, a danger to which the sincere and generous person is far more vulnerable than to any obvious sin[10].

When Discernment Stalls: The Gift of a Companion on the Way

For all the clarity of Ignatius's rules, anyone who has actually tried to discern a hard question knows that there are seasons when the interior movements seem hopelessly tangled, when consolation and desolation cannot be told apart, when a person becomes so entangled in their own perspective that they can no longer see their situation truly, and when the search for purpose grinds to a halt in confusion and exhaustion. Ignatius neither denied nor romanticized these seasons, and his response to them is one of the most humane features of his entire spirituality: he insisted that discernment is not meant to be done alone[8]. The whole tradition of Ignatian spirituality is built around the relationship of spiritual direction or spiritual accompaniment, in which a person shares the movements of their interior life with a wise and trusted guide who helps them notice and interpret what God is doing, and this companionship is not a luxury for the advanced but a normal and healthy part of the search for every ordinary seeker[8].

There are sound reasons, rooted in Ignatius's own rules, why a companion is so valuable, and the first is the one already encountered in the teaching on the enemy as a false lover who thrives on secrecy[1]. So much of what keeps a person stuck is precisely what they are keeping to themselves, the shameful thought, the fear they cannot admit, the discouraging voice they assume everyone else would find contemptible, and the simple act of speaking these things aloud to a wise and grace-filled listener drains them of their disproportionate power[1]. A good spiritual director provides exactly the safe and holy space in which the hidden can be brought into the light, and again and again a person discovers that the burden that felt unbearable in the isolation of their own head becomes manageable, even small, once it is spoken and met with understanding rather than the condemnation they had feared[8]. The second reason is the sheer difficulty of seeing oneself clearly, for a person is too close to their own life to read it well, too enmeshed in their own fears and habits and self-images to perceive the patterns that another might notice at a glance. A companion offers the gift of a second set of eyes, not to make the decision for the person, for a good director never usurps the seeker's own discernment, but to help them see more truly, to ask the questions they have been avoiding, and to reflect back the movements of grace they have been overlooking[20].

It is worth affirming warmly and explicitly, especially for a reader who may be carrying not only a spiritual search but real emotional pain, that seeking human help of many kinds is a wise, faithful, and mature part of God's care for a person, and is in no way a failure of faith or a sign of spiritual weakness[4]. To seek out a spiritual director, a mentor, a trusted pastor, or a counselor when one is lost and struggling is precisely what a healthy soul does, and it accords with the whole grain of a tradition that never imagined the individual as a self-sufficient island[8]. God very often provides guidance, comfort, and healing not through private revelation but through the ministry of other people, through their wisdom and their listening and their love, and to receive help through them is to receive it from God, who works through the community of his people as one of his ordinary and beautiful ways of caring for his children[9]. If a person's struggle to find purpose is bound up with a heaviness that will not lift, with a persistent darkness that colors everything, or with a weight that feels beyond the reach of spiritual practice alone, it is not only permissible but genuinely wise and faithful to seek the help of a trusted counselor, a doctor, or another professional alongside their spiritual companions, for the care of the mind and the care of the soul are not enemies but partners, and God is the author of both[4]. This report offers no diagnosis and no clinical counsel, and it would be a disservice to pretend to; it offers only the pastoral assurance, given gently and meant sincerely, that reaching for human help is itself a movement toward life, a form of the very hope that the good Spirit is always working to kindle, and a thing to be blessed rather than second-guessed[4]. The person who cannot yet find their way alone is not thereby disqualified from being led; they are simply being invited to be led, as most of the saints were, in the company of others.

There is one more consolation to name for the moment when discernment stalls entirely, and it may be the most important of all. When a person has prayed, and reviewed, and sought counsel, and still cannot see the way forward, the Ignatian tradition does not leave them in anxious paralysis but returns them to the foundation, to the truth that their ultimate purpose does not hang on solving the immediate question[9]. If a person cannot yet discern which of two good roads to take, they can still, today, love God and love their neighbor on the road they are already on. They can still pray the Examen tonight. They can still make the next small, faithful step in front of them, trusting that a God who leads does not require the whole route to be visible before the first step is taken[5]. Ignatius himself did not receive his life's mission all at once; it unfolded step by faltering step over many years, through detours and mistakes and long stretches of not knowing, and God was in all of it[3]. The person whose discernment has stalled is not therefore outside of God's leading; they are within it, in the particular way that God leads those who must walk for a while in trust rather than in sight, and this too is a form of being led, perhaps the deepest form, for it is the one that most purifies and matures a love[10].

The Magis and Finding God in All Things

Two final threads must be woven in before the conclusion, because they express the animating spirit of the whole Ignatian search for purpose and guard it against distortion. The first is what the tradition calls the magis, a Latin word meaning the more or the greater, which runs through the Spiritual Exercises as a kind of holy restlessness ordered toward love[7]. In the meditations on the call of Christ the King and on the Two Standards, Ignatius invites the person not merely to avoid evil and do the acceptable minimum but to desire to give more, to love more generously, to serve more completely, for the greater glory of God, a phrase so central to his spirit that its Latin form, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, became the motto of the order he founded[7]. The magis is easily and dangerously misunderstood, and it is worth naming the misunderstanding clearly for the sake of the very reader most likely to fall into it. The magis is not a spirituality of anxious perfectionism, not a demand to do ever more until one collapses, not a fuel for the exhausting self-improvement that already torments so many. That would be a counterfeit, a serpent's tail, a good-seeming thing whose end is disquiet and the loss of peace, and by Ignatius's own test it would stand condemned[6]. The true magis is not driven by fear or by the compulsion to earn one's worth; it is drawn by love, and it seeks the greater good not to prove anything but because love by its nature always wants to give more to the beloved[10].

Understood rightly, the magis is a message of expansive hope for the purposeless person, because it insists that God's dream for a human life is not small, cramped, or merely safe, but generous and large, and that the deep dissatisfaction a person feels with a shrunken and aimless existence may itself be the stirring of the magis within them, the God-given refusal to settle for less than the fullness of life for which they were made[9]. The ache for purpose, in this light, is not a defect to be cured but a holy hunger to be honored, the very appetite that God will use to draw the person toward the greater life that awaits them. What the magis asks is not that a person do more frantically but that they love more freely, and this reframing can turn the whole exhausting project of finding purpose into something lighter and warmer, a matter not of anxiously optimizing a life but of asking, with open hands, how one might love more truly with the life one has been given[10].

The second thread is the phrase most often used to summarize the whole of Ignatian spirituality, the practice of finding God in all things[9]. Ignatius was not primarily a mystic of withdrawal but a contemplative in action, a man who found God not by fleeing the world but by discovering the divine presence laboring within it, and he closes the Spiritual Exercises with the Contemplation to Attain Love, in which he invites the person to see how God dwells in all creatures, giving them being, and how God labors and works on their behalf in all created things, and how every good gift descends from above as rays from the sun or streams from a fountain[14]. This vision has direct and liberating consequences for the search for purpose, because it means that God is not to be found only in some single perfect vocation hidden somewhere beyond the person's reach, but is present and findable in the actual texture of their present life, in their work and their relationships and their ordinary days, in the very place where they now stand feeling lost[9]. The person who is waiting to find God in the far-off ideal life they have not yet discovered may miss the God who is with them in the unglamorous, unresolved life they are living right now, and it is very often by learning to find God here, in the present that feels so purposeless, that a person is gradually led toward the future God intends[9]. The Contemplation to Attain Love ends by observing that love shows itself more in deeds than in words and consists in the mutual sharing of gifts, the lover giving to the beloved and the beloved to the lover, which situates the entire search for purpose within a relationship of mutual self-gift between the soul and God, rather than within a lonely quest for self-realization[14]. To find one's purpose, in the end, is to find one's particular way of joining that exchange of love, one's particular place in the great labor of a God who is working in all things for the good of those who love him[18].

Conclusion: Led by the Spirit into the Life God Made You For

To the reader who has come this far carrying the quiet, gray ache with which this report began, the sense of being lost, stuck, purposeless, uncertain of who you are or what your life is for, the whole weight of the Ignatian tradition leans toward you now with a single steadying message: you are not adrift, and you never were. The feeling of being lost is real and it is painful, and it deserves to be met with tenderness rather than dismissal, but it is not the truth about your situation. The truth, as the saints who walked this path before you discovered, is that a God of infinite love has been drawing you toward the life for which you were made since before you were born, working within the very desires and disquiets that make you feel so untethered, and that this drawing does not depend on your having yet recognized it[9]. Your purpose is not a thing you must invent out of nothing under threat of failure. It is a gift already prepared, a good work already made ready, a life already written in the book of a God who has never once lost track of you[18].

The path that Ignatius left us is not a burden added to your confusion but a gentle way through it, and its steps are within your reach. You are invited to rest first upon the foundation, the knowledge that you exist, before any achievement or any decision, to be loved by God and to love God in return, and that this end is available to you today, exactly where you are, in whatever emptiness you now inhabit[1]. You are invited to learn the two great movements of the heart, the consolation that draws you toward faith, hope, and love and quietly whispers the direction of your calling, and the desolation that pulls you toward darkness and lies to you about God and about yourself, and to remember, when the darkness comes, its single most important rule, that you must never remake the shape of your life in the middle of the storm, but hold steady until the light returns[4]. You are invited to seek the freedom that lets you hold your options in open hands, not the cold freedom of not caring but the warm freedom of caring most about the God who is your deepest joy, so that your truest desires, no longer drowned out by fear, can rise up and lead you home[7]. You are invited to make your choices in that freedom, by whichever of the three ways God leads you, and then to walk forward trusting that the God who led you to the choice will confirm and accompany it[5]. And you are invited to the small daily prayer of the Examen, in which, evening by evening, in the company of a God who reviews your day with mercy, you will slowly learn to read the map of grace that has been quietly drawn across your ordinary hours all along[13].

If the way is tangled and you cannot yet see it clearly, you are not thereby outside of God's leading, and you do not have to find your way alone. To speak your struggle aloud to a wise and trusted companion, a spiritual director, a mentor, a pastor, a counselor, is not a defeat but one of the most faithful and courageous things a searching soul can do, and it accords with the whole grain of a tradition that never asked anyone to be an island[8]. If your search is bound up with a heaviness that will not lift, reaching for the help of a counselor or a doctor alongside your spiritual companions is a wise and blessed movement toward life, for the God who made your soul also made your mind, and cares for the whole of you through the many hands of those he sends[4]. And even in the seasons when discernment stalls entirely and the way forward simply cannot be seen, you can still take the next small, faithful step in front of you, still love the God who is with you and the neighbor beside you on the road you are already walking, trusting, as Ignatius himself had to trust through long years of not knowing, that a God who leads does not require the whole journey to be visible before the first step is taken[3].

For beneath all the rules and methods, the deepest thing the Ignatian tradition has to tell a lost and weary person is not a technique but a Person. It is Christ who calls, Christ who walks the road with you, Christ in whom the God who made you for himself has drawn near enough to be found, and it is his Spirit, the Consoler, who is even now at work in the movements of your heart, kindling the hope you feel and drawing you, patiently and without coercion, toward the fullness of the life he intends[14]. The same Lord who found a vain and wounded soldier lying with a shattered leg and no interior life, and who over long years made of him one of the great guides of souls, is not less able to find you where you now lie, and is no less patient with your faltering steps[3]. You were made for him, and the restlessness you feel is the pull of that making. You are not alone with an impossible question. You are a beloved child being drawn, gently and surely, into the life for which you were made, by a Father who has known your name and prepared your path since before the world began, and who will not fail to bring to completion the good work he has begun in you[18]. Take, then, the next step you can see, hold fast when the darkness lies to you, keep company with the God who reviews your days in mercy, and trust the One who is leading. He is nearer than the ache, and he is not finished with you yet.

---

References

[1] The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Louis J. Puhl, SJ (Loyola Press). Cited for the Principle and Foundation (23), the definitions of consolation and desolation (316, 317), the First Week Rules for Discernment (313 to 327), the Election and the three times of a sound choice (169 to 189), and the Second Week Rules for Discernment (328 to 336).

[2] The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. George E. Ganss, SJ (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992).

[3] St. Ignatius of Loyola, A Pilgrim's Journey: The Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Joseph N. Tylenda, SJ (Ignatius Press).

[4] Timothy M. Gallagher, OMV, The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living (Crossroad, 2005).

[5] Timothy M. Gallagher, OMV, Discerning the Will of God: An Ignatian Guide to Christian Decision Making (Crossroad, 2009).

[6] Jules J. Toner, SJ, A Commentary on Saint Ignatius' Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1982).

[7] Michael Ivens, SJ, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises: Text and Commentary (Gracewing, 1998).

[8] David Lonsdale, Eyes to See, Ears to Hear: An Introduction to Ignatian Spirituality (Orbis Books, 2000).

[9] William A. Barry, SJ, Finding God in All Things: A Companion to the Spiritual Exercises (Ave Maria Press, 1991).

[10] Dean Brackley, SJ, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola (Crossroad, 2004).

[13] George A. Aschenbrenner, SJ, "Consciousness Examen," Review for Religious 31 (1972). See also the Spiritual Exercises on the daily examen (24 to 43).

[14] The Contemplation to Attain Love (Contemplatio ad Amorem), Spiritual Exercises 230 to 237, in the Puhl and Ganss translations.

[15] The Suscipe prayer, Spiritual Exercises 234, in the Puhl and Ganss translations.

[18] Holy Bible: Psalm 139:13 to 16; Ephesians 2:10; Philippians 2:13; Jeremiah 29:11; Romans 8:28; Galatians 5:22 to 23; John 10:3 to 4.

[20] William A. Barry, SJ, and William J. Connolly, SJ, The Practice of Spiritual Direction (HarperOne, revised edition 2009).