by James Martin
The second step in the examen is asking for the grace to “know my sins,” to see where you have turned away from the deepest part of yourself, the part that calls you to God. Where did you act contrary to your better judgment or to God’s voice inside you, to the divine spark within? Perhaps during a mean-spirited conversation about a coworker you contributed your own snotty remark. Perhaps you treated someone in your family or at work without the respect everyone deserves. Perhaps you ignored someone who was truly in need.
Reflecting on your sinfulness sounds like an unhealthy outgrowth of the stereotypical Catholic emphasis on guilt. But today guilt may be undervalued. The voice of our conscience, which tells us we did something wrong and moves us to make amends, is a voice that can lead us to become more loving and, ultimately, happier. In his diaries, Peter Favre, one of the early Jesuits, when speaking about his sins, calls it a “certain good spirit” that moves him to remorse.
When thinking about your sins, you might consider a helpful idea from my moral theology professor, James F. Keenan, S.J.
Father Keenan observed that, in the New Testament, when Jesus condemns people for sinful behavior, he typically does not condemn weak people who are trying to do better, that is, public sinners struggling to make amends. Time and again Jesus reaches out to people who are ready to change and invites them to conversion.
More often, Jesus condemns the “strong” who could help if they wanted, but don’t bother to do so. In the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, those who pass by the poor man along the road are fully able to help him, but simply don’t bother. Sin, in Father Keenan’s words, is often a “failure to bother.”
St. Francis Xavier on the Examen
Twice a day, or at least once, make your particular examens. Be careful never to omit them. So live as to make more account of your own good conscience than you do of those of others; for he who is not good in regard to himself, how can he be good in regard to others?
This insight can help you see where you failed to respond to God’s invitation in your day. Where did you fail to bother? Where could you have been more loving? Perhaps you neglected to help a friend who needed just a few minutes of your time, or a sick relative hoping for a friendly phone call. You could have, but you didn’t—you failed to bother. This is a new way of meditating on what theologians call “sins of omission.”
Does reviewing your sins still seem a manifestation of the worst stereotypes of Christianity? Well, an admission of our own sinfulness, or our inability to do what is right, helps not only to move us closer to God, but also to become more loving people. We are also able to see more clearly our need for God, who invites us to grow in love, no matter how many times we take a step backward. This second step of the examen reminds us of our humility. We become more aware of the way that we hurt others and can move away from those parts of ourselves that prevent others from loving us back.
That is, as long as you don’t get mired in guilt. An awareness of your sins can be an invitation to growth but also a trap. Sometimes guilt mistakenly leads a person to believe either that he cannot be forgiven by God or that sinfulness makes him worthless. This leads to despair, a sure sign of moving away from God. All of us struggle with sin, all of us must seek forgiveness from God and others, yet all of us are still loved by God—more than we can ever imagine. Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32), where the father not only forgives the wayward son but lavishes him with love, captures some of this insight, expressed in Ignatian spirituality as the “loved sinner.” Guilt is a means to an end, not the end of the story.
Awareness of one’s sinfulness is important for spiritual growth. This is why Anthony de Mello wrote, “Be grateful for your sins. They are carriers of grace.”
The traditional third part of the examen is the heart of the prayer, a review of your day. Basically you ask, “What happened today?” Think of it as a movie playing in your head. Push the Play button and run through your day, from start to finish, from your rising in the morning to preparing to go to bed at night. Notice what made you happy, what made you stressed, what confused you, what helped you be more loving. Recall everything: sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, textures, conversations. Thoughts, words, and deeds, as Ignatius says. Each moment offers a window into where God has been in your day.
Now you may say, “I already know what happened today!” But without the discipline of the examen you could miss it. That’s something I learned, in a very surprising way, during my philosophy studies in Chicago.
When my Jesuit brothers and I were in the midst of our philosophy studies, after our time as novices, we were also expected to do ministry. Though our superiors instructed us that our primary work was studying philosophy, we were not to lose touch with the outside world or to forget that our studies had a practical end, the end to which Ignatius geared his studies: to help souls.
During my first year of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago I worked in an outreach program for members of street gangs in the inner city. During my second year, I was assigned to a community center in a lower-middle-class neighborhood near our Jesuit residence. Using my business experience, I helped unemployed men and women with the ins and outs of finding a job: writing résumés, learning how to track down job openings, and preparing for interviews.
From the Spiritual Exercises
Here’s the examen in the words of St. Ignatius Loyola, straight from The Spiritual Exercises:
The First Point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits I have received.
The Second is to ask grace to know my sins and rid myself of them.
The Third is to ask an account of my soul from the hour of rising to the present examen, hour by hour or period by period; first as to thoughts, then words, then deeds, in the same order as was given for the particular examination.
The Fourth is to ask pardon of God our Lord for my faults.
The Fifth is to resolve, with his grace, to amend them. Close with an Our Father.
After the challenges of working with the street gangs, working at the community center seemed comparatively easy. And more physically comfortable: working with gang members meant standing outside of public housing projects and speaking with them during Chicago winters, when the bitterly cold Lake Michigan wind cut through however many layers of clothing I wore. At least the Howard Area Community Center had heat.
But where the gang ministry was exciting, this work seemed more prosaic. And it didn’t feel particularly Christian. Where was God? I enjoyed the friendly staff at the community center, and I enjoyed meeting the unemployed men and women, who seemed interested in what I was teaching them. But the work itself seemed dull. On top of that, the clients were having a hard time finding jobs. I felt bored and unsuccessful at the same time.
One woman, whom I’ll call Wanda, embodied this. Wanda was overweight and unkempt (neither surprising, given her limited finances) and had faced an unbroken string of bad breaks. Her education consisted mainly of high school and a desultory few months at a local community college.
Out of work for several months, Wanda was desperate for a job; this drew her to the community center. We met several times, and together we crafted a résumé that highlighted her skills, pored through the newspaper want ads, and ran through some practice interviews.
But no matter how hard we worked, Wanda never found a job, and I began to feel frustrated working with her.
One day, I confessed this to my Jesuit spiritual director, named Dick, a cheerful middle-aged priest with a great deal of experience in Ignatian spirituality. As with many spiritual directors, you felt that you could tell Dick anything. And he knew when you weren’t telling him everything.
“Is your ministry coming up in your examen much?” he asked.
It wasn’t. Since my primary work was studying, I said, I was more focused on that. In my examen, I would carefully review what experiences I had in my classes, during my study time, and over lunch and dinner with my Jesuit f
riends in community. The work with Wanda and the other clients was an afterthought. Or not even a thought at all.
“Maybe one reason that the work seems dull is because you’re not bringing it up before God in prayer,” said Dick.
“No,” I said, “it’s dull because it’s dull.”
Dick reminded me that when we feel resistance to something in prayer, it’s often because we’re resisting God’s invitation to growth. So the next day after I spent some time at the center with Wanda, I promised myself that I would remember her during the review part of the examen.
That night I settled down in the chapel of our Jesuit community and began my examen. After a long day, I recalled the events related to my studies and community life. Then, when I reached the part of the day spent at the community center, I reminded myself to pause. It was strange to feel resistance, but I forced myself to remember the faces of the people that I had seen that day: the unshaven homeless man who had struggled with being out of work for many years; the wheelchair-bound, middle-aged man who had been searching for a job for months; and, finally, Wanda.
Wanda and I had spent an hour that day preparing for an interview that might not come for months, or might never come. Suddenly in my prayer I saw her face and was filled with an intense sadness that nearly overwhelmed me. Things seemed so hopeless for her. It was as if I had tapped into an endlessly deep well of pity. Before I knew it, I was crying for someone I barely knew.
The next week I told Dick how surprised I had been. “Perhaps you were feeling God’s compassion for her,” he said. “How else would God communicate his hopes for Wanda other than to work through you?” It was not surprising, Dick suggested, that I had earlier felt resistance to thinking about those with whom I worked—perhaps out of fear of the strong emotions that lay just beneath the surface.
The next time I met Wanda, it was like meeting someone holy, someone God loved in a special way. Of course God loved all the people at the community center, but prayer reminded me that Wanda was the one for whom God had asked me to care, even if in a small way. That one step of the examen—the review—changed the way I related to my ministry, changed the way I related to the people with whom I worked, and, more important, changed the way I related to Wanda (whom I would never see again after my time in Chicago ended). It had helped me to see God not simply in retrospect, but in the moment.
As Margaret Silf writes in Inner Compass, “You will quickly find that you start to look out for God’s presence and his action in places you would not have thought to look before.”
The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds.
—Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (1675–1751),
The Sacrament of the Present Moment
The fourth step of the examen is asking for forgiveness from God for anything sinful that you’ve done during the day. Catholics may feel the need to follow this up with the sacrament of confession if there has been a grave sin. You may also recognize the desire to seek forgiveness from the person you offended.
Asking for forgiveness for our sins can be freeing, reminding us of God’s desire to welcome us back—like the father in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son—no matter what we’ve done, if we are truly sorry. In theology studies, one of our professors, Peter Fink, S.J., told our class that the emphasis in confession needs to be not on how bad I am, but on how good God is.
Finally, in the last step of the examen you ask for the grace of God’s help during the next day, and you can close with any prayer you like. Ignatius suggests the Our Father. Those who aren’t Christian might want to close with a prayer from their own tradition.
EXAMEN(S)
Even though Ignatius told the Jesuits never to omit it from their day, the examen doesn’t need to be followed slavishly. For Ignatius the examen went like this: gratitude, awareness of sins, review, forgiveness, grace.
But Jesuits pray it in a variety of ways. For me, it’s hard to identify sinfulness without first reviewing the day. It’s also easier to ask for forgiveness after thinking about my sins. So my examen goes like this: gratitude, review, awareness of sins, forgiveness, grace.
Others find that the steps overlap. Some run through the review and, in the process, recall something sinful and immediately ask for forgiveness.
The examen was meant for everyone, not just Jesuits. Dorothy Day, the American-born founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, talks about the examen in her journals, published as The Duty of Delight. “St Ignatius says never omit 2 examens, 15 minutes each,” she writes on April 11, 1950. Then she gives her own way of doing it.
Thank God for favors.
Beg for light [that is, the grace to see clearly]
Survey
Repent
Resolve
Day found the examen not only reminded her of the simple joys of life, but goaded her to self-improvement. “We all do too much talking,” she wrote in 1973, at the age of seventy-five. She had been complaining and gossiping too much, she felt. “I must stop.” The examen led her to action.
“There is no ‘right’ way to pray,” as David told me. So pray it in whatever way draws you closer to God.
There is, however, one common pitfall: doing the examen as if it were simply a list to be completed. Many Jesuits (including me) fall prey to this temptation. For busy people it’s tempting to plop down at the end of the day and race through the day on their own: I did this, then I did that, then I did this, and so on.
To guard against this, you might remind yourself that you’re doing the examen with God. Recalling this makes it not only more prayerful but more like a dialogue and less like a task that needs to be completed. Sometimes just recalling that you’re in God’s presence is enough.
The Examen in Five Steps
Here is how I like to do the examen. It’s only slightly modified from what St. Ignatius suggests in the Exercises.
Before you begin, as in all prayer, remind yourself that you’re in God’s presence, and ask God to help you with your prayer.
Gratitude: Recall anything from the day for which you are especially grateful, and give thanks.
Review: Recall the events of the day, from start to finish, noticing where you felt God’s presence, and where you accepted or turned away from any invitations to grow in love.
Sorrow: Recall any actions for which you are sorry.
Forgiveness: Ask for God’s forgiveness. Decide whether you want to reconcile with anyone you have hurt.
Grace: Ask God for the grace you need for the next day and an ability to see God’s presence more clearly.
YOU SHALL SEE ME PASS
The examen builds on the insight that it’s easier to see God in retrospect rather than in the moment. To highlight that insight, let me tell you a story.
A few years ago, I edited a book called How Can I Find God? in which I asked the famous and not-so-famous to address that question. Somewhat boldly, I wrote to the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, and was delighted when he mailed back a concise essay. His approach accented the practice of “looking back” to find God.
Father Kolvenbach recounted the story of an abbot in the Middle Ages who would speak to his monks every day “on finding God, on searching for God, on encountering God.” One day a monk asked the abbot if he ever encountered God. Had he ever had a vision or seen God face-to-face?
After a long silence the abbot answered frankly: no, he hadn’t. But, said the abbot, there wasn’t anything surprising in this because even to Moses in the Book of Exodus (33:19–20) God said, “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” God says that Moses will see his back as he passed by him.
“Thus,” Father Kolvenbach wrote, “looking back over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God.”
The examen helps yo
u see God in retrospect. And what Father Kolvenbach said about the search for God could be applied to this daily prayer. “In this sense, it is less a matter of searching for God than of allowing oneself to be found by Him in all of life’s situations, where He does not cease to pass and where He allows Himself to be recognized once He has really passed.”
Likewise, while we frequently ask God for help in specific areas of life, we just as frequently fail to recognize God’s help when it comes. Sometimes the examen can help answer the question, “Why doesn’t God answer my prayer?”
Suppose you start a new job, enter a new school, or move to a new town and are feeling lonely. You ask God for help: Help me feel less lonely. Help me find friends.
Typically we expect a dramatic change: an instant new friend the next day. Normally, that doesn’t happen; real friendships don’t progress that quickly.
Instead you might start to grow friendly with a few people, very slowly. Perhaps the day after your prayer someone offers a friendly remark or asks if you need help. If you’re looking only for that “instant friend,” perhaps something as small as a kind remark will go unnoticed. The examen helps you notice that God often works gradually—which reminds me of one of my favorite images of God.
God, an elderly Jesuit once suggested to me, is something like an old carpenter in a small village in Vermont. If you ask the townspeople where to turn for carpentry work or repairs, they will say, “There’s only one person to call. He does excellent work. He’s careful, he’s precise, he’s conscientious, he’s creative, he makes sure that everything fits, and he tailors his work exactly to fit your needs. There’s just one problem: he takes forever!”