There are plenty of books to introduce you to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Society of Jesus, also known as the religious order of Jesuits). Such books typically include the original text of the sixteenth-century classic, and design a course using the imagination, prayer, and contemplation to discover God’s will for one’s life over the course of four weeks — preferably on a guided retreat.
This isn’t one of those books. This one presumes you already have familiarity with the Spiritual Exercises and what it does. So it’s not for beginners. But Ignatius’ classic of Catholic spirituality has become more popular in recent decades — even though to use it well, one is supposed to take a thirty-day retreat from work and domestics to focus on spirituality alone, which most people can’t do.
In The Soul Also Keeps the Score, author Robert McChesney — a Jesuit priest with decades of experience as a Spiritual Exercises guide — wants readers to see how ideally suited the original classic was, and is, for people suffering trauma of all kinds. He starts by revealing in the life of Ignatius himself (who he refers to by his Spanish name, Inigo) the personal trauma that gave birth to his way of teaching.
“Could it be said, five hundred years on, that Inigo himself was suffering from PTSD?” McChesney writes. And then: “Today’s traumatized survivors of violence, witnesses thereto, repentant perpetrators — indeed anyone whose conscience or values are notably unnerved by the trajectory of current events — can discover in the morally injured Inigo and his Spiritual Exercises tailored guidance for healing of their own beleaguered and bewildered soul.” Very well put, we thought.
And McChesney demonstrates throughout the book how looming problems such as gun violence and climate disaster leave most everyone, today, under a cloud of trauma-related bewilderment.
McChesney goes on to show through helpful counseling and exercises, historical anecdote and contemporary studies of human behavior, how this spiritual classic is designed to help the morally and spiritually injured — and how it consoles and informs the memories, understandings, and will of all manner of people who have been hurt by life. This is a book about “spirituality for an age of trauma,” as the author puts it.
The Soul Also Keeps the Score is highly recommended for spiritual companions, clergy, practical and pastoral theologians, counselors, and trauma therapists and psychiatrists who work from a Christian perspective or with Christian patients.
