Life, Unveiled

“Jesus said to the Twelve: ‘Fear no one.
Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.’” (Mt 10:26)

Today’s gospel passage refers to Jesus’ sending forth his disciples “like sheep into the midst of wolves” to preach the good news of the Kingdom of God (Mt 10:16).
But hearing these words always makes me think of standing before God, with all that is in me unveiled.  The idea of being completely known, of no longer having secrets, is deeply attractive, a source of great longing.

I have been reading a classic text on the Ignatian Examen by George Aschenbrenner, SJ.  I was familiar in general terms with this daily practice of revision of life from my graduate school days, but I must admit my understanding was rather vague.  Here in the monastery, we practice a twice daily examen, the so-called “particular examen” after the office of Sext, where we spend ten minutes before dinner looking at our predominant fault and how it affects our life, and the general examen, where we spend about the same amount of time before Compline “examining our conscience” in the presence of God.  I don’t know about you, but this has never been a particularly important observance for me.  I have found it hard to concentrate at these times, probably because my understanding of it was rather negative and superficial.  In a word, I found it to be a chore.

We know that St Ignatius was influenced by early monastic sources on inner vigilance, including Cassian and probably Benedict.  Benedict’s chapter on humility is a lengthy commentary on what it means to live under the gaze of God, in a purifying movement from fear to perfect love.  Cassian gives us details about how to recognize and deal with the various “thoughts” that disturb our hearts.  So, we already know all about this, right?  Why do we need a daily examen if our whole life is about attentiveness to our inner world?  I believe St Ignatius is worth listening to on this point, because he took the monastic tradition of watchfulness of thoughts and applied it to his own experience in his own time, writing in a way that many have found practically helpful and spiritually enriching.

According to Aschenbrenner, the Ignatian examen is not meant to be an irredeemably negative, burdensome, and more-or-less meaningless routine, but rather “a daily, intensive exercise of discernment in a person’s life,” an opportunity to sit before God and look with him at what he is doing in my life.  He makes a distinction between the examination of conscience (which asks: what is the moral quality of my actions?), and the much broader consciousness examen (which asks: how is God moving and affecting me?).  Rather than a moralistic and even semi-pelagian “self-reflection for self-perfection,” we are offered a practice aimed at “developing a heart with a discerning vision,” which calls for a particular time and way “to sift through these various spontaneous urges and give full existential ratification to what is of God.”  Examen is inseparable from discernment.

There are five traditional steps to the Ignatian Examen, which may seem artificial and clunky, but they are meant over time to become integrated into our personal consciousness as an organic development of continual watchfulness.

First step: a prayer for enlightenment, for help to look at my day with God’s eyes, not merely my own.  “What we are seeking here is that gradually growing insight into the mystery that I am,” or as Fr Luke once put, getting to know myself a little more each day.  As St Benedict urges us: “First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to him most earnestly to bring it to perfection” (RB Prol.4).  We never act alone, but always under the gaze of God.

Second step: a prayer of thanksgiving for the gift of this day, the prayer of a poor person who has nothing and receives all.  “Our gratitude should center on the concrete, uniquely personal gifts that each of us is blessed with, whether large and obviously important or tiny and apparently insignificant.”  On a bad day, this challenges us to look beyond our surface reactions and preoccupations.  Over time, this offers us increased sensitivity to gifts in our life.  With St Benedict, we “Place [our] hope in God alone” (RB 4.41).  God gives us everything we need.

Third step: a review of the day, noticing especially what has been happening inside us in our affect, how God has been at work and how we feel called to respond by our actions.  We refrain from jumping immediately to the judgment of our actions as good or bad but focus on “the quality of responsiveness of the activity, more than the activity itself.”
“This part of the examen presumes that we have become sensitive to our interior feelings, moods, and slightest urgings and that we are not frightened by them but have learned to take them very seriously. It is here in the depths of our affectivity, at times so spontaneous and strong, and at other times so shadowy, that God moves us and deals with us most intimately. These interior moods, feelings, urges, and movements are the “spirits” that must be sifted through, discerned, so we can recognize God’s call to us at this intimate core of our being.”
We are invited to broaden and deepen what St Benedict calls us to: “Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware than God’s gaze us upon you, wherever you may be” (RB 4.48-49).
We become alert to patterns that emerge over time in our relationship with God, so that “the particular examen is very personal, honest, and at times a very subtle experience of the Spirit calling in our hearts for deeper conversion … God’s uniquely personal invitation to greater intimacy in faith.”

Fourth step: a facing up to my shortcomings with contrition and sorrow.  With St Benedict: “Every day with tears and sighs confess your past sins to God in prayer and change from these evil ways in future” (RB 4.57).  Seeing our “lack of honesty and courage in responding to God’s call … to God’s awesome desire that we love with every ounce of our being,” we desire to be changed.  The faith vision of sinfulness is not guilt-laden but grateful, the “wonderful sorrow” of those who are “constantly aware of being prey to our sinful tendencies and yet being converted into the newness.”  Our misery welcomes God’s mercy.

Fifth step: a hopeful look toward the day to come, with an honest appraisal of my feelings, and a prayer for God to help me be more sensitive and courageously responsive to his voice.  This hope is founded not on ourselves but on “God whose glorious victory in Jesus Christ we share through the life of the Spirit in our hearts.”  St Benedict retains the final word: “And finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy” (RB 4.74).

It is not hard to rationalize giving up a daily exercise because its goal has been achieved, we are in constant communication with God, and yet, we can be fooling ourselves.  The reason we maintain a specific time for silent prayer, for lectio and several specific times for the divine office is to root our intention of a life of continual prayer in the concrete.  As Mother Agnes was wont to say, our life need “jacking up” regularly.  So, the examen is not just a twice daily exercise, but a necessary means toward living under the gaze of God continually, as was St Benedict’s goal for his monks, and of finding God in all things, as St Ignatius expressed the goal in his own terms.

“The mature Ignatius near the end of his life was always examining every movement and inclination of his heart, which means he was discerning the congruence of everything with his true Christ-centered self. This was the overflow of those regular intensive prayer exercises of examen every day. … Being able to find God whenever he wanted, Ignatius was now able to find that God of love in all things through a test for congruence of any interior impulse, mood or feeling with his true self. Whenever he found interior consonance within himself (which registers as peace, joy, contentment again) from the immediate interior movement and felt himself being his true congruent self, then he knew he had heard God’s word to him at that instant. And he responded with that fullness of humble courage so typical of Ignatius. If he discovered interior dissonance, agitation, and disturbance “at the bottom of the heart” (to be carefully distinguished from repugnance “at the top of the head”) and could not find his true congruent self in Christ, then he recognized the interior impulse as an ‘evil spirit’ and he experienced God by ‘going against’ the desolate impulse. In this way he was able to find God in all things by carefully discerning all his interior experiences. Thus discernment of spirits became a daily very practical living of the art of loving God with his whole heart, whole body, and whole strength. Every moment of life was loving (finding) God in the existential situation in a deep quiet, peace, and joy.”

And so, in the light of St Ignatius’ re-reading of the monastic practice of inner vigilance, I invite us to re-examine how we live this aspect of our daily life, so that we can live without fear before God and, in due course, before others, for:
“Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.” (Mt 10:26)

Source: George Aschenbrenner, SJ, Consciousness Examen