Love and Freedom: The First Principle and Foundation



One of the most challenging things in the world is to believe in and receive God’s unconditional love for us. The messages of our culture sometimes seem to encourage us to look to people and things other than God to find our worth, our identity, and our meaning. It can feel confusing! Not to mention, it can leave us feeling like our lives are out of order. We can feel restless and unfree, sometimes even searching endlessly for the purpose of our lives.  

Maybe you feel like that now? Perhaps, you are facing a longing to anchor your life in something that gives life meaning and purpose and helps you know who you are.   

The answer to our deepest human desires is not anchoring our lives in something, but building our lives on a solid foundation, a relationship with Someone-God-who deeply loves us and desires to set us free.   

“The purpose and goal of life is to praise, reverence, and serve God. Everything else helps us achieve that purpose.” ~Gerald M Fagin, SJ 

The goal of our life is clear. We are called to live with God forever. In doing so, we love, praise, and serve God, and find the purpose and meaning of our life.   

St. Ignatius, in the wisdom of his Spiritual Exercises, begins with something he calls the First Principle and Foundation. Even if we never make the Spiritual Exercises, the gifts of the First Principle and Foundation can help us discover the depth of God’s unconditional love for us, embrace the freedom God seeks to give us, and to discover the purpose of our lives. Knowing these things give us an unshakable foundation that will help us navigate all the areas of our lives. 

This six-week retreat offers you a path of prayer to embrace the unconditional love of God and receive the gift of freedom.  

Let's walk the Ignatian path together. 

This retreat is grounded in the wisdom of The First Principle and Foundation, the beginning movement of the Spiritual Exercises that St. Ignatius calls the preparation days. St. Ignatius reminds us that the starting point of our relationship with God is that we are already highly favored by God, unconditionally loved, and created as good.  

Praying with The First Principle and Foundation helps us believe that we are all worthy of God’s unconditional love and boundless mercy, that God seeks to help us intimately know God’s love, and that God wants to offer us the gift of freedom. In the same way that St Ignatius designed the preparation days to prepare the heart, Love & Freedom is a six-week community retreat providing a guided path of daily prayer to anchor you in the depth of God’s unconditional love for you so that you can go forth with greater freedom to follow where God calls.   

The Purpose of our Retreat:   

The purpose of this retreat is to help you to deeply understand and believe in God’s unconditional love for you and to embrace the gift of spiritual freedom that comes as you accept the invitation to place God as the center of your life and live with God in every aspect of your life.   

Each of the six weeks of the online retreat focus on a different grace: 

• Week 1: For the grace of interior knowledge of God’s love for me from the beginning. 
• Week 2: For the grace to recognize that everything is “gift” used to help me know God’s unconditional love for me. 
• Week 3: For the grace of interior knowledge of God’s faithfulness to me throughout my life. 
• Week 4: For the grace to choose to make God the center of my life. 
• Week 5: For the grace to choose spiritual freedom in and with God over the attachments of the world. 
• Week 6: For the grace to say yes to God and respond with complete trust and willingness to do whatever God asks for love. 

Together with our team of Ignatian prayer guides, we will help you more intentionally embrace God’s unconditional love for you and God’s gift of freedom.