During my college days, a retreat leader introduced me and my friends to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. It was a very emotional experience for me because I found myself literally feeling pain. I was hyperventilating and shaking and gasped as I opened my eyes and broke out of the meditation. The Spiritual Exercises are not for the faint of heart and it still baffles me that Our Holy Father did these Exercises\u00a0twice.\u00a0<\/em>(And mind you, he has only one lung!) Usually, the exercises are done as part of a 30-day retreat and the meditations that focus on the Passion of Christ are particularly intense (if what I experienced was any indication).<\/p>\n From what I learned from the retreat leader, the idea of the Spiritual Exercises is to put yourself in the moment you\u2019re meditating on. For the purposes of this blog post, I will take you through the Stations of the Cross. I\u2019ll do two a day, leading up to Good Friday.<\/p>\n Without further ado, let\u2019s begin with the first station of the Cross: Jesus is condemned to death.<\/strong><\/p>\n The scene that immediately comes to mind in this station is the scene from the divisive film\u00a0Passion of the Christ, <\/em>directed\u00a0by Mel Gibson. In this scene, Jesus speaks in Latin, even though throughout most of the film, he spoke in Aramaic. Pilate knows that a man of Jesus\u2019s background shouldn\u2019t be able to speak Latin like a Roman citizen.<\/p>\n