Examen

I'm working on preparing for our first Lenten program tomorrow. I'm reading up on the history of Lent, which is really interesting. We will cover some of the highlights briefly tomorrow, but the focus of our series is going to be on what Lent can be for us this year, an opportunity to try some very ancient forms of prayer and spiritual growth that may be new to a lot of folks.

One of the things we'll start out with this week is the Ignatian Examen, a deceptively simple approach to spiritual self-examination that was an integral part of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (bka Jesuits). This approach has, I think, been integral to the lives of Jesuit institutions ever since, and Protestants have been fortunate to rediscover it (along with some other forms of Christian spirituality) in recent years. A lot of the folks that I have heard talk about it in Protestant circles are doing youth ministry.

Let me explain. The idea is that God is always speaking to you through your life. So, to do the examen, you look back over your life for the last day, or week, or several hours. for the "consolations" and "desolations," and, especially over time, learn from these high and low points about the ways God is working in your daily life. It was fun for me to realize in retrospect that this is why my friend who had been an RA at a Jesuit university always had her girls share "highs and lows" when they had hall meetings. And I'm pretty sure it's why a friend's youth group shared "blessings and bummers" every time they met. The third step, after recalling the high and the low, is to try to identify how God has been speaking in this day. I think sometimes this really only emerges over time, and it may or may not be directly related to the high and the low.

My bummer/ low/ desolation of the day has definitely been the sort of panic that crops up all too often for me on a Saturday. It's often true that I say "yes" to too many things, and have more to do for work in a week than I can get done in the time I have, and that's a problem. But what compounds that problem is something I really struggle with -- spending as much time and energy worrying about all the stuff I have to do as it would take to just do it.

The blessing/ high/ consolation was dinner with family at a new restaurant in our neighborhood. It's exciting on several levels, because not only is it the third restaurant in the neighborhood (and the other two are in an intense competition to see who can provide the worst possible service), but it also has really quite a nice vegetarian selection, which can't be taken for granted at a place with "bar and grill" in the title.

God has definitely been speaking to me today, as S/he often does, through the words of Roberta Bondi. I'm reading her book A Place to Pray: Reflections on the Lord's Prayer, and I expect I'll be blogging about excerpts more specifically in the coming days. But I was touched today by her account of experiencing God's holiness in her life, long before she ever had the theological language to call it that. It, along with the prep for this Lenten program, comes as yet another reminder to wake up to God's presence in my own life.