A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer: Discovering the Power of St. Ignatius Loyola's Examen - Softcover

Preface

The examen changed everything for me, but that almost didn’t happen. For years I had occasionally heard people talk about the examen as a good way to pray. I went to a Jesuit college; I remember one of my teachers saying that St. Ignatius of Loyola himself thought that the examen was the indispensible prayer. But I wasn’t interested because I thought they were talking about the Examination of Conscience.
The Examination of Conscience was the methodical inventory of sins that I was taught to do as a boy in Catholic schools of the 1960s. I would work my way through lists of faults, toting up my offenses in preparation for the sacrament of confession. This was a grim exercise, also a confusing one. I understood lying, and eventually I knew what lust was. But what was “acedia?” (It means spiritual laziness.) At any rate, the charm of the Examination of Conscience wore off as I grew older. I set it aside and moved on to other things, not all of them improvements. When people talked about the examen, this is what I thought they meant, and I wasn’t interested. I thought it was just the thing for people who like that kind of thing, but I wasn’t one of them.
Then I learned that the Ignatian examen was not the old, depressing Examination of Conscience. Quite the opposite. This was a prayer that focused on God’s presence in the real world. It looked to a God who was near to me, present in my world, and active in my life. It told me to approach prayer with gratitude, not guilt. It helped me find God in my life as I lived it, not in some heavenly realm beyond space and time. The examen had me take myself seriously, as I was, not as I wished I was or thought I could be someday if I worked hard enough.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the examen changed everything. It might change things for you too.

 

 

 

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention.
—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

The examen is a method of reviewing your day in the presence of God. It’s actually an attitude more than a method, a time set aside for thankful reflection on where God is in your everyday life. It has five steps, which most people take more or less in order, and it usually takes 15 to 20 minutes per day. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. Ask God for light.
I want to look at my day with God’s eyes, not merely my own.
2. Give thanks.
The day I have just lived is a gift from God. Be grateful for it.
3. Review the day.
I carefully look back on the day just completed, being guided by the Holy Spirit.
4. Face your shortcomings.
I face up to what is wrong—in my life and in me.
5. Look toward the day to come.
I ask where I need God in the day to come.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Not really. Sometimes praying the examen is smooth and joyful; sometimes it’s arduous. If the examen prayer is doing its job, it will bring up painful moments and cause you to look at behavior that’s embarrassing. Sometimes you squirm praying the examen, but why would you have it otherwise? Real prayer is about change, and change is never easy.
But there’s nothing complicated or mysterious about making the examen part of your life. The subject matter of the examen is your life—specifically the day you have just lived through. The examen looks for signs of God’s presence in the events of the day: lunch with a friend, a walk in the park, a kind word from a colleague, a challenge met, a duty discharged. The examen likes the humdrum. God is present in transcendent “spiritual” moments, but he’s also there when you cook dinner, write a memo, answer email, and run errands. The examen looks at your conscious experience. The ebb and flow of your moods and feelings are full of spiritual meaning. Nothing is so trivial that it’s meaningless. What do you think about while sitting in traffic or waiting in a long line at the grocery store? What’s your frame of mind while doing boring and repetitive chores? You’ll be surprised at how significant such moments can be when you really look at them.
The examen surprised me because it was so unlike prayer as I had previously understood it. Prayer for me was a time set apart. With the examen the boundaries between prayer and life became blurred. People usually pray the daily examen at a set time (for me usually in the morning), but there’s no reason why we can’t pray the examen while standing in that long line at the grocery store. After all, God is there too.
But in another way the examen didn’t surprise me at all. God is certainly there while you’re standing in line. All you need to pray the examen is a little quiet time. This made intuitive sense. I am God’s creature living in God’s world; of course God would be present in my everyday experience. If prayer is making a connection with God, it makes perfect sense to spend some time finding God in my conscious experience of daily life.
In fact, the examen is a very old practice. The word examen comes from a Latin word that means both an examination and the act of weighing or judging something. It’s as old as Socrates’s instruction to “know thyself.” A practice of regular self-scrutiny is found in most religions of the world, and this is certainly the case with Christianity. To follow the path of Jesus, we must regularly scrutinize our behavior and ask how closely our actions conform to Christ’s.
Five hundred years ago, St. Ignatius of Loyola made an innovative twist on this ancient tradition of prayerful reflection. He made it a way to experience God as well as to assess our behavior. Ignatius’s famous book The Spiritual Exercises is a guide to an intense experience of conversion to the cause of Christ. He designed the daily examen to sustain and extend this experience. Ignatius wanted to help people develop a reflective habit of mind that is constantly attuned to God’s presence and responsive to God’s leading. The examen became the foundation for this graced awareness. Ignatius wanted Jesuits to practice the examen twice a day—at noon and before sleep. He considered it so important that he insisted that Jesuits pray the examen even when they were too busy to pray in other ways.
Over the centuries, the practice of the Ignatian examen has taken on different forms. For a long time it closely resembled the Examination of Conscience that troubled the prayer of my youth. In recent decades Jesuits have been restoring the examen to something more closely resembling Ignatius’s original vision for a prayer practice that would help us find God in our everyday lives and respond more generously to his gifts and blessings. That’s the form of the examen that’s presented in this book.
I’ve read everything about the examen that I could find. Interestingly, there’s not a lot written about it. Except for a couple of small books and a few learned essays, most of what I found has been pamphlets, flyers, and web pages that give a brief overview. That’s not really a surprise because most people learn about prayer by talking to other people. News of the examen spreads by word of mouth. But at some point a book might be helpful, at least for some people. I hope this is that book.
The examen isn’t the only way to pray, but it’s a way that everyone can pray. It banishes the abstract and relishes the concrete. It is inexhaustible. It treats every moment of every day as a blessed time when God can appear. It’s a way...