BTW, I should have added this before, but i wanted to give readers unfamiliar with the Ignatian exercizes a sense of what they seek to do. Ignatius himself explains, in the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, the retreatant seeks to receive the gift of indifference, detachment, and total surrender to God. This spiritual disposition—marked by a letting go of all self-fashioned life plans—prepares the individual to enter into the imitation of Christ, which is the focus of the Second, Third, and Fourth Weeks. A closer look at the structure of the Exercises shows that the Second Week centers on following Christ in obedience; the Third Week extends this obedience to its fullest expression in meditating on Christ’s passion and death; and the Fourth Week leads the retreatant into a profound awareness of the Risen Christ, active and present throughout all creation.

You can thus see that this progression illustrates how the spiritual life, conceived as both a readiness for and a response to one’s divine mission, mirrors the dynamic movement of Christ’s own life.