The Spiritual Exercises in Prison: a Preparatory Course in Nuoro
The idea originated from the prison chaplain, parish priest of the Sardinian parish where the Spiritual Exercises in Ordinary Life are offered in the city.
The dream: to offer them also in places where life is particularly difficult and painful, such as prisons. “We began with a program of preparatory meetings to bring people closer to the Ignatian prayer on Sacred Scripture,” Fr. Carlo Manunza explains. “A very small group of people from different backgrounds, in a part of the prison that is particularly reluctant to receive initiatives from outside, accepted this initiative”.
The Style
Necessarily long times, prolonged also by the unexpected and sudden postponements and overlaps of other initiatives, unusual to this environment.
“The purpose of the meetings was not to pray together, but to pray outside the meetings, in normal life. This was something completely new for them, which required all the time of those months and a difficult perseverance, which for some remained an achievement as yet to be fulfilled. However, the discovery of the dialogical contact with God who speaks through Scripture, which is characteristic of the Exercises, began to feature, albeit slowly and not without some timidity.
Observation
The peculiarities of prison life, with its dynamics and routines, began to teach us to review and re-read with new eyes and new programs the steps of the Lord who works in the hearts of our fellow travellers. We discovered that what seemed clear and accessible often had to be rejected and new methods introduced by revising programs, expectations, rhythms, orientations, graces to ask, readings of feedback and, above all, languages.
We have seen, in the lengthy process that this entails, the importance of the direct testimony of the guide, expressed before words, through gestures, silence, body language, expectations, the guide’s compassionate welcome towards the person being guided and the entry into a reality stretched between the normality of life “outside” prison, as remembered and sometimes imagined, and that of “inside” prison which is being lived. It is a school that promises to introduce us guides to orientations other than those with which we are familiar in different situations.
Reviewing Programs
We then noted the need to be instructed into being proactive on a broad scale. On the one hand, to review the programs, avoiding turning the Ignatian cornerstones into an illusion, exposed to the risk of becoming judgments and conflicts, if not walls and divisions. On the other hand, to learn each time to revise the criteria and orientations, the cornerstones, but without losing the heart and the articulation of the journey by distorting it or diluting it through adaptation, that is, without depriving our companions of its richness.
Personal prayer
It is also important, in the context of the vision just described, to gradually initiate and lead to the first steps of a personal prayer, different from the choral or group prayer that is so helpful in this context, through the dynamics of communal moments such as singing and its gestures. Along with these community events, true islands of light in a flow of life that is not easy, we have tried to place the celebration of the eremitical relationship with God, proper to the Spiritual Exercises, which makes personal and daily moments the main place for the transforming entry of the Gospel into one’s existence. The long times and the gradualness have opened the perception and perhaps the first steps of the spiritual dimension of the days we spend, and the growth of the awareness that we can approach the Lord and walk with Him, appreciating more and more the greatness of His gift. Often, they have rescued from oblivion a faith that was present but buried by so many events and have reopened its capacity to shine again even in difficulties.
A priceless gift in new perspectives
To us guides it has allowed us once again to appreciate the priceless treasure we have received in the gift of what Ignatius calls “our way of proceeding in the Lord”. It is a way that, even in this ministry, continues to demand from those who have received the call to live and spread it, a lot of energy, freedom from the journeys already taken, “conversion” and listening, along with the effort to try to build new programs, suitable for the new people who have responded to the call to discover it. Once again, it is the “way forward” that has proved capable of opening up new perspectives and ways of approaching Jesus, the Saviour of the world.
A beginning
It is still only a beginning, with the idea and desire to begin a journey of spiritual exercises in ordinary life, for which the journey was intended as a preparation. There is a risk of “backsliding”, but when a good day dawns in the morning, the luminous gifts given in this first “tilling of the soil”, invite us together with the praise and gratitude that was expressed at the time when we adjourned just before Easter, to remain steadfast in hoping, while we wait to begin to walk the true Ignatian Way.
The richness of a prayerful dimension
What seemed remarkable to us, however, was the richness of bringing to these days, locked in issues and thoughts limited only to the bureaucracy and tensions of internal prison life, the awareness of even the simple possibility of a prayerful spiritual dimension of ordinary existence, conveyed by a witness that avoids the abstract irrelevance of an exclusive and distant ecclesial language, whether theological or catechetical”.
