Father Joseph Tetlow, SJ was interviewed in 1997 for a series of videotapes titled "Shared Vision: Jesuit Spirit in Education" (available from The Institute of Jesuit Sources). Below are excerpts from that interview that provide some basic points about the Spiritual Exercises. The interviewer is Lawrence Johnson, filmmaker and director of the Shared Vision series.

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An interview with Father Joseph Tetlow SJ

Johnson:

Let's talk about the Exercises. Would you explain what they are?

Tetlow:

The Spiritual Exercises are a way to go through a prayer experience to discover through praying and Scripture and the Church's revelation what your own deepest and most authentic desiring is, and to find the courage to enact that.

Another way to explain them is to say that Spiritual Exercises organize what is revealed to us through Scripture and by tradition into a coherent way of possessing revelation and giving yourself to the purposes that it opens to us.

Johnson:

Why is this little book still in use today all over the world after so many years?

Tetlow:

The book has been printed about once a month for 450 years; no one knows how many millions of copies. But it isn't the book that kept the Exercises alive. What kept the Exercises alive is that Inigo gave them to Pierre Favre, and then he told Favre, "Look, find others who can profit from this and help them with them." Favre did. One of the people he helped with them was a man named Dominic to whom he gave the Exercises, and Dominic gave them to another man who gave them to another man, or to a woman who gave them to another woman.

For all of these centuries, someone has been giving these Exercises in a live way to another person who handed them down. So they were given to me first by a man who was my novice master, Tony Mengerisina. He had gotten them from a man who was his novice master, who got him from his, and so forth, all the way back down the line.

Johnson:

Describe them to us. Maybe you can follow with some examples.

Tetlow:

Well, everyone thinks of the Exercises first of all as a 30-day retreat, but they do not have to be that long. Inigo gave one person the whole exercise in 16 days.

What do you do? Well, ordinarily you get to know someone who gives Exercises, and you ask to talk with them. A good director will try to get to know the exercitant well before going off somewhere.

You don't have to go out into the country, just be by yourself without people, phones, faxes and so forth. You try to put everything aside so you park all of your problems. Then you give yourself to an organized format of praying through the truths of revelation.

You pray ordinarily four or five separate hours in a day. You prepare for that hour, and then at the end of it you give 15 or 20 minutes to looking back at what you did and what happened, and you take notes on that. You meet with a guide or a director every day, and you tell the director what you want to tell him. Of course, the more you tell, the better the director can help. The director is aware that this is not confession and does not need to know your conscience, unless you want to tell it. Everything else is very helpful. Were you up, where you down? Was it easy to pray, was it hard to pray? Did you have some ideas? Is some glimmer of a desire beginning to take shape to do this or that, or to be that way or this way? Is some glimmer beginning to shape up? What did you go through in your prayer? Do you know Jesus better? Did you have some insight into Peter or Mary or Judas? What was going on in your spirit?

Day by day you pray these hours, noting what you've been through and sharing that with a director. Day by day the guide says, "Well, it sounds like it would be useful for you to move to ...," and then he tells you what to go to next.

Now, what to go to next is well outlined in the book, but Ignatius insists over and over again that it is not like a blueprint. This is a structure to help the director understand what the person is going through, and then to suggest what comes next. All 30 days are laid out very carefully with some material for each of these hours of prayer. By the end of the retreat, you have prayed through your personal relationship with God.