Ignatius of Loyola was not a natural mystic. He was a soldier from the Basque country, ambitious, proud, skilled in the things soldiers are skilled in. In 1521, a French cannonball shattered his right leg at the siege of Pamplona. While he recovered, there were no books in the castle except a life of Christ and a collection of saints' lives. He read them. He noticed something. When he thought about returning to military glory, he felt a brief excitement that faded and left him flat. When he thought about imitating the saints, he felt something different: a joy that did not fade. This was the beginning of what he would eventually call discernment of spirits. And it began not with a mystical vision but with paying attention to his own interior experience.

Out of years of that kind of attention, Ignatius built the Spiritual Exercises: a structured retreat in four Weeks, designed to bring a person through self-knowledge, conversion, election, and union with God. The Exercises begin with a single paragraph he called the Principle and Foundation. It is one of the most concentrated pieces of theological writing in the Catholic tradition. Everything in the Exercises follows from it.

The Principle and Foundation makes a simple claim: you were made for God. Not for success, not for comfort, not for the approval of others, not even for happiness in the ordinary sense. You were made to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by this means to save your soul. Everything else — health, wealth, long life, good reputation — is a means to that end. Not bad in itself. But a means. When you treat the means as the end, you are disordered. When you treat the end as a means, you have lost yourself entirely.

Ignatius called the correct attitude toward everything-that-is-not-God indifference. This is not coldness or apathy. It is freedom. The indifferent person is not attached to health over sickness, wealth over poverty, long life over short, if God is equally served in either. This sounds austere. In practice it is the most liberating thing Ignatius ever taught. Most human suffering comes from treating contingent things as if they were necessary — as if the loss of this job, this relationship, this reputation, would be the end. Ignatian indifference says: none of these things are you. You are the one who was made for God.

You are not beginning this pathway because you have already achieved that freedom. You are beginning it because you want to. That is enough. The Exercises are not for the perfect. They are for people who are willing to look honestly at what they are actually oriented toward, and to ask God for the grace to reorient.

This first week is not about doing very much. It is about holding one question. Not anxiously, not with self-accusation. Simply: what am I actually for? Let that question sit with you this week. You will return to it in different forms throughout all six stages.