Discernment and the Examen – Part 2 of 3

Paul writes – the Examen, above all other practices of discernment, enables us to acquire the important habit of reflecting on our lives; reflecting on our contexts in the company of God and learning how to read the maps of self and place. This is to grow in discernment – to grow in our ability to see and experience God in our consciousness and unconsciousness. It is to grow in our ability to recognise and hear the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). Finally we could say, with Ignatius, that doing the Examen is a response of love and a willingness “to strive to move my heart toward what [is] pleasing to God.” 

So, ultimately, the Examen is about nourishing the courage to love and enabling me to surrender ever more fully and transformatively to love (1 John 4:16). The Examen helps liberate us from what Ignatius calls “false attachments.” It helps us, over a lifetime, to increasingly “let go” of all that inhibits or limits a developing and deepening relationship with Jesus.

Joseph Cardinal Bernadin writing not long before his death reminds us that this:

“…Letting go” is “never easy. I have prayed and struggled constantly to be able to let go of things more willingly, to be free of everything that keeps the Lord from finding greater hospitality in my soul or interferes with my surrender to what God asks of me… My daily prayer is that I can open wide the doors of my heart to Jesus and his expectations of me…” 

Here’s Fr. Herbert McCabe on liberation and love:

“Jesus came to redeem us, to give us faith in his Father’s love so that we do not need to assert ourselves and our innocence and our rightness, so that we can relax and confess the truth about ourselves, so that we can stop judging ourselves and others, because we know that it doesn’t matter: God loves us anyway, so that we are liberated enough to risk being vulnerable to others – liberated enough to risk loving and being loved by others...”

Andrew Walker (author or editor of a number of very good books, including Remembering our Future: Explorations in Deep Church, and the earlier Spirituality in the City writes an excellent article on the subject of the Examen. I’m pretty sure too that Walker is one of Jason Clark’s PhD supervisors).

The article is titled Daydreaming Revisited: A Psychology for the Examen Explored and is well worth reading. It was published in the very useful journal of the British Jesuits, The Way and is available online as a PDF, here.

Tomorrow, I’ll post some questions I find useful in an Examen of Consciousness. Essentially the Examen I try and use. They are excerpted and in same cases adapted from a helpful Grove booklet (#98) by Anne Long. It’s a “follow up” to her earlier one on Spiritual Direction (“Approaches to Spiritual Direction”), and is titled: Reflective Practice for Spiritual Directors. For a more comprehensive understanding of St. Ignatius’s Examen of Consciousness I’d recommend the excellent book by Timothy Gallagher, The Examen Prayer: Ignatian Wisdom for Our Lives Today…