Simple Examen
ISC EXAMEN Series: Gratitude, Grief, Grace, Grit
Carla Orlando, Oct 6, 2020
Hello everybody! And Welcome back from our listening groups and hearing the Ordinary Holy in one another, maybe a gratitude in the everyday, sacred lives of friends gathering here tonight. And because it’s the gratitude night of the grief, grace and grit series, I invite you to recall your moment of gratitude now, to revisit it, whatever it was that you are grateful for tonight. Because Ignatius has us use our senses, I invite you to sense gratitude in you. How do you detect it? Where do you feel it in you? In your face? Belly? Does it make you calm, rested, 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.
Andrea has invited us to pray together this month and what a perfect time to come together and pray. I look forward to being part of our October Tuesdays when we gather, and honored to lead us in prayer tonight
There is a lot to pray for. It’s a tough time we’ve been in , an usual time for our country and our whole planet. We need one another, to lean on each other and draw strength from one other. Tonight, I invite you to not go high or go low, but go deep with me, that is go in and down to the hope there, the joy, peace, and love that’s within us. Tonight, we go into gratitude, and practice it, dig down, find it or let it find us tonight, deep within us, below the surface, to what sustains us, so we can pull back up and move out again with our good and loving way.
“Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind,” is what poet Gwendolyn Brooks said, a quote I’ve kept for a long time. I didn’t realize that she was the first African American to earn a Pulitzer Prize – hers for literature in 1950, clearly a poet who knew a bit about chaotic days. “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind,” So I draw on her tonight, we each lean on our heros and heroins as we ask God to be with us all.
In these night times that grow longer in autumn, we’re invited to move into the deep, the dark, the warm ground and seed again so we can bloom, over and over, in the noise and whip of this whirlwind of ours. Tonight, we invite God in to our holy, ordinary lives, to creep on in to the hearts of us – our God who is always seeking us, loving us and wanting to be with each of us.
Tonight, I’ll share a bit about
1. The prayer of the Examen
2. I will then lead us in the Examen
3. Andrea and I will send you home with a few versions of the Examen to choose from, compiled by our colleague Maria Ochoa: Maria created an Examen using creative materials, there is an Examen for families, managers, and environment …I’ve included a version that I use with students as well as an audio/guided version from Pray as you Go, another great resource for the Examen!
4. You could use one of these this week, use a different one each night this week, read through them and find what’s helpful for you, create your own practice of the Examen! EXPERIMENT! Make it yours.
5. And then Andrea asks that we bring our experience back and share something about it with our small groups.
6. We’ll close tonight with a sung vespers prayer written by Marty Haugen and led by Joe Orlando
So, why the Examen?
Ignatius said that if we were only going to pray one prayer, make it be the Examen. He called it a gift that came directly from God, that God wanted it to be shared as widely as possible. And it is popular, and practical, the wisdom of 500 years practiced all over the contemporary world.
There were very few rules for the Jesuits regarding prayer. Ignatius made the requirement for Jesuits to practice the Examen, not once- but- twice a day!
So, why the Examen?
I thought the gift to the world from Ignatius was the Spiritual Exercises. The Examen is what came at the very beginning of the Exercises, before anything else.
When did I notice what was tender, generous, good? What do I regret or want to do differently next time, what calls me to be more of myself, or to love like God loves? What in this world is truly beautiful, a gift to me, that I don’t want to miss?”
“We had the experience but missed the meaning.” Says TS Elliot, another great poet. The Examen, perhaps, is the gift- the way- to help us to not miss it, to not miss the meaning of our lives.
EVERYday,
The Examen
1. Roots us in gratitude
2. Invites us into God’s presence
3. Helps us to seek God, find meaning and the depth of our lives
4. Asks us for our humility, where we missed the mark and fell short
5. Helps us seek forgiveness, grace, and to move on
EVERYday
The Examen is the way for God to help us not miss the biggest gift we’ve been given, the beauty and meaning of the life we were made for.
Parker Palmer shares a tale of Rabbi Zusya who said, “In the coming world they will not ask me “Why were you not Moses? They will ask me “Why were you not Zusya?”
Through the Examen, we are invited to be ourselves and lead our own loving life, everyday.
Ignatius introduces the Examen at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, in front of the 4 movements, or, 4 weeks:
WEEK 1) God’s mercy, forgiveness, unconditional love; we are loved/broken
WEEK 2) Life of Jesus, God entering the world, light enters our night time
WEEK 3) Standing with Jesus, we stand with the poor. Passion & compassion
WEEK 4) Resurrection, new life and more love which directs our next steps
The Spiritual Exercises is made in 4 weeks, or the 19th annotation, which I make with my SEEL friends each year for 9 months time.
But The Examen? It is the whole Spiritual Exercises in a 5-minute daily work-out routine! Here are 5 points about the Examen:
1) THE Essential Spiritual Exercise:
It’s the Cornerstone to Ignatian prayer
It’s foundation is love:
It Grounds us in gratitude,
It Offers God’s presence & mercy,
It Guides us to new life.
It is our Loving conversation with God which is Ignatian prayer.
2) Spirit-Led
-God goes first. We prepare to listen, making ourselves quiet and sensitive to the spirit and the movements in our lives. We know that we belong and are loved into a world that God loves and sustains. God is always wanting to be with us, constantly seeking us, caring for us before we care for ourselves. The Examen allows God a way in…
3) Deals in the REALS that is the observable, truth of our days. Detects it, doesn’t invent it. The Examen uses the rigors of science to look at our life with God. We don’t make it up, not the difficult challenges nor the unbelievable joys! The Examen requires our humility, keeps our feet on the ground, helps us find God in all the things – all the REAL things.
4) FOUNDATION for DISCERNMENT With the Examen, we develop a regular way to listen to our lives, and then, more and more, we move below our necks and busy brains, to notice our personal patterns and habits.
A Jesuit friend and Professor, David Leigh, outlined the prerequisites to discernment: knowing yourself, knowing the world, being sensitive to God’s spirit and having a freedom of heart. We become discerning people by praying the Examen.
5) Personal Transformation: The Examen opens our hearts, motivates us in our days, strengthens our desire to grow as people, moves us forward with our lives, helps us look ahead with promise to the next day.
By praying the Examen, we become the people that Ignatius prayed we would be: grateful, generous, and available to God.
I like Jesuit Dennis Hamm’s image for using the Examen. He says it’s like “rummaging for God through a drawer full of stuff, feeling around, looking for something that you are sure must be there.”
At our house, my husband calls this the “everything” drawer. The place we tuck scratch paper, rubber bands, tape, foil twisties from the grocery store, birthday candles, Get Out the Vote pins,– it’s all of that every day stuff that we don’t know what to do with. So, we dig a bit to find what we’re looking for, sometimes it’s on top, often in it’s in the bottom or in the back corners. Dennis Hamm says in the Examen, we search and know God is there.
…and we don’t search alone but with the dearest of friends, who helps us sort through our loveable junk. For God, ALL of it is treasure in our everything drawers. There is no trash. Whatever we discover and hold can lead us to become more loving AND join God in the work of loving the world – and everything in it’s drawers! Imagine all the junk that hides out in God’s drawers in this world! It’s kind of like take your pick and start loving it!
But first, let’s start by looking into our drawers, our everyday lives, sort through our memories in order to see the way God has been with us over time and in the present moment—in our relationships, actions, good things, challenges, frustrations, and feelings of today.
A great thing about the Examen is that we never run out of things to pray about. At times, our prayer can dry up. Sometimes we wonder what to say to God. Other times we wonder what to listen for. The Examen does away with all of this for us As long as we have twenty-four hours to look back on – let alone a whole week in October- we will have plenty of things to talk to God about—and to thank God for.
So, we’re going to practice now. As I lead you in the Examen, I’ll move through the day slowly, allowing you to follow my suggestions. I leave moments of silence so you can recall the day, inviting to you take your time to fill in your details. When we close, I’ll take another minute for you to quietly review it to yourself, what happened in your Examen?, what comes easily for you? and what challenges you? If there is time, we can share some questions…