Living in the Spirit

GUIDES

Publication date:

February 2022

The text we have before us is an adaptation of the thirty-day course of Spiritual Exercises that Jesuit theologian Fernando Manresa gave years ago in Bolivia, by way of personalized spiritual accompaniment. As homage to his former teacher and friend, Carles Marcet has adapted the immense amount of material so that it fits into the reduced space of a booklet, thus converting it into an eight-day course of Spiritual Exercises. Our hope is that it will help both exercitants and directors to enter into a personal encounter with the God who is “always greater.”

Ignatian Spirituality

Author

Ferran

Manresa

A Jesuit with a doctorate in theology, Fernando taught for many years in the Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya [o: Theology Faculty of Catalonia]. He was very involved in spiritual formation and accompaniment both in Catalonia and in Bolivia, where he lived for long stretches. Despite all his teaching and pastoral activity, he published little; he used to tear up his writings once he had used them for his classes because he considered God and theology to be living realities that could not be captured in any manual. In 1986 he wrote D. Bonhoeffer a los 40 años de su ejecución [D. Bonhoeffer at the 40^th Anniversary of His Execution] for the booklet collection of Cristianisme i Justícia (Cuadernos no 14). In 1989 the publisher Sal Terrae released his work, Una larga marcha. Aprendizaje de la vida religiosa [A Long Hike: Learning about Religious Life] (Colección Servidores y Testigos no. 41). Finally, the EIDES collection published his spiritual reflection, La oración. «Con el sentimiento de una presencia» [Prayer: “With the Sense of a Presence”] (EIDES no. 18, 1996). Fernando left us in April 2020.