Examen 1: "Conduct Your Booming in the Noise and Whip of the Whirlwind"

I didn’t realize that she was the first African American to earn a Pulitzer Prize – hers for literature in 1950. Clearly, she is a poet who knew about chaotic days. It’s a portion of her fuller quote: “It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud. Nevertheless, live. Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

In my prayer these days, I lean on Gwendolyn, as we each do our own heros and heroins. As we pray with our ordinary holy, we’re invited into the gratitude that we experience in our sacred, everyday experience. We revisit the moments we were grateful for, whatever it is, however large or small. Ignatius has us do this with our full beings, as whole persons, and to use our senses to do so. As I sense gratitude, where do I detect it and through which senses? Do I hear it as a voice in my head? Where do I feel it in my body? In my face or belly? Does it make me calm, rested, or energetic? It’s good to get familiar with our individual experience of gratitude, notice it and spend time with it, allowing it to grow in us as much as possible.

In a weekly series this month, I’m invited to come together in my community to pray the Examen prayer together. There is a lot to pray for: in our personal lives, the time for our country and our whole planet. I seem to need others, to lean on and draw strength from in these days.  To go deep, in and down to the hope in me, the joy, peace, and love that’s within me. To go into gratitude, and practice it, to dig down and find it or let it find me, deep within me, below the surface, to what sustains me, so I can pull back up and move out again with the good and loving way of mine.

The night time grows longer in autumn when we’re invited to move into the deep, dark, warm ground and seed again so that we can bloom, over and over, in the noise and whip of this whirlwind of ours. We invite God in to our holy, ordinary lives, to creep on into the hearts of us – our God who is always seeking us, loving us and wanting to be with each of us and share in and reflect on the meaning of our precious days.