The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [42]
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