“We desire only what is magis, more conducive for us toward the end for which we are created.”
-St. Ignatius of Loyola
The Magis Ignatian Spirituality Program, which has provided Ignatian spiritual direction and spiritual director training for the past seven years, is now an official program of Oblate School of Theology.
There is a growing interest in the full Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola among laypeople who cannot go away for a 30-day retreat but can do it in their daily lives. They commit to meeting with a spiritual director weekly for about a year and a half, and they pray an hour a day, five days a week. But the program doesn’t have enough trained spiritual directors.
Magis has only ten spiritual directors trained specifically to direct the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. It’s a big commitment, so when working as well as doing spiritual direction, a director in this program can direct a maximum of only three to four people.
Applicants can take the Magis training program at the certificate level, or for nine hours’ graduate credit, applicable for the Master of Arts (Spirituality) degree. It’s one year of theory and one year of supervised practice. The School has had more requests for spiritual direction than it has trained directors to handle it.
Applicants for the training program to accompany others in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius must already be experienced spiritual directors trained at recognized centers and must have completed the Spiritual Exercises in a personally directed setting such as a 30-day retreat or in daily life. The training course uses the original text of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and the syllabus complies with the master’s skill level. Those who take the course for graduate credit must fulfill the prerequisites for graduate studies at OST.
Once certified, spiritual directors will be equipped to accompany others without having to rely on pre-designed formats of the Spiritual Exercises and will be able to meet the contemporary needs of each retreatant. Each session will consist of a lecture and a practicum in the form of a role play or a case study. The first year of weekly study will be followed by a second year of supervised directing of the Exercises in daily life.
The Magis program also offers Ignatian Twilight Retreats, given over three workday evenings and designed for busy working people. Each includes dinner, a presentation, an opportunity for personal reflection and materials to reflect on at home. Magis also offers Abundant Life retreats, which are completely silent, three-day, directed retreats. Each retreatant is assigned a spiritual director, who meets with him or her four times during the weekend.
By J. Michael Parker