Fr. Thomas Green, S.J., draws on his vast background as a retreat master and spiritual writer to make available to a much wider audience the retreat experience based on the classic Spiritual Exercises by St. Ignatius of Loyola. While many scholarly and professional treatments have been done on the Spiritual Exercises, for the "grassroots Catholic", St. Ignatius' classic is often too mechanical and hard to grasp.

This book can be used in many ways. It can be used by retreat directors for one-to-one direction of retreatants; by retreatants making a retreat with a director; or by more experienced retreatants who wish to be "alone with the Lord". In addition, this work can be used for a closed retreat of eight days as broken down in the chapters. Or it could be used for a "retreat in daily life" where a person could devote 30 to 60 minutes a day to the themes of this book and prolong the retreat over several weeks or months.

In every case the goal of the Spiritual Exercises as presented here is that expressed by St. Ignatius: "Just as taking a walk, journeying on foot and running are bodily exercises, so we call spiritual exercises every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all inordinate attachments, and after their removal, of seeking and finding the will of God in the disposition of our life for the salvation of our souls." The means are many and various ("every way"), and Ignatius is the great apostle of flexibility, echoing St. Teresa of Avila's "Do whatever most moves you to love."