Spirituality
We offer spiritual guidance, Ignatian excercises and retreats.
Our missions:
Many of our sisters offer spiritual accompaniment in the Ignatian tradition, giving the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola in various forms as well as guiding residential retreats, retreats in daily life in person and online.
In spiritual accompaniment, we offer people who want to shape their lives based on their relationship with God the opportunity to talk. Numerous sisters – and in some places also trained lay members of the Mary Ward Family – are available to you in different locations. With online retreats in different languages, there is also an offer that is not location-dependent.
Everything that happens, whether pleasant or unpleasant, triggers inner emotions in us: joy, hesitation, fear, trust, anger … These emotions are examined in a conversation with a sister who has experience in discernment and has completed training in spiritual guidance.
The person being accompanied and the accompanier listen together to what these stirrings mean, how God can be found in them, and what the appropriate response to them is.
Spiritual accompaniment is an integral part of Ignatian individual retreats and takes place on a daily basis during the retreat. In everyday life, many persons opt for a monthly conversation which is usually practised for about an hour.
Mary Ward was strongly influenced by the Jesuits in her spiritual life. In 1611, while praying, she realised that her community should do for women exactly what the Jesuits did for men. The fact that women were limited because the sacrament of ordination was reserved for men did not prevent her from thinking broadly about the vocation of women. She was convinced that women could do everything except priestly ministry. To describe the mission of her community, she uses two terms that have fallen out of fashion today: soul and bliss. The purpose of the community is to help souls attain bliss.
Soul means the whole person, not the mind, not achievement, not profession, not possessions, not relationships, but what lies behind all that, the inaccessible, the original, just as a person is created by God in his image.
When Mary Ward uses this phrase, to help souls attain bliss, she sees Jesus Christ himself before her, as he behaves towards people.
Jesus uplifted people, encouraged them, called them, corrected them, commissioned them, taught them, healed them, fed them… His goal was for people to be lifted up, to be able to stand on their own two feet, to know that they are loved, to grow into ever greater freedom, to feel that God wants to live in friendship with them. When people are so directly drawn to God, they grow beyond themselves, so that sometimes they can even ‘move mountains.’
For Mary Ward, the way Jesus encountered people was perfect, and she writes in a diary entry: ‘…I loved this way and longed to walk the same path – mainly because he had walked it.’ Here is the source of what she calls bliss.
The purpose of her community is therefore to carry on Jesus’ mission to people and through the ages, using all means and ways to bring people into relationship with Jesus and his healing and life-giving power.
