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Time to Change: An Ignatian Retreat in Everyday Life

Reviewed by Luke Penkett.

These Spiritual Exercises were written, according to Ignatius of Loyola’s secretary, ‘For Catholics, Protestants and for pagans’. Being neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant, I presume, therefore, I must fall into the last category! That aside, I joined with retreatants who, down through the years, have used these exercises before making life-changing decisions, at times of spiritual dryness, or trauma, or whenever our time with God has been out of kilter or in need of finer tuning.

What Michael Campbell-Johnston, himself a Jesuit, the former Provincial of the British Jesuits and Head of the Jesuit Social Justice Secretariat in Rome, now a parish priest on Barbados, has done in his introductions and commentaries is to present the exercises in a day to day context, which enables the reader to come closer to God.

He has achieved this without any sense of dumbing down the original text and addresses his text to all who, however busy they are, desire to find a sense of joy and peace in their everyday lives.

The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Roman Catholic religious order known as the Jesuits, were originally composed in order for ordinary people to find God in the ordinary things of life and, despite the fact that Ignatius was loathe to distribute these during his lifetime, they have enabled countless folk to do so for four and a half centuries.

Aldous Huxley declared the original book ‘drab, trite and uninspiring’ (p.7) but then he didn’t have the privilege of having a spiritual director of the calibre of Michael. We do and should rejoice in the fact that, as readers, we have.