the examen in a nutshell 3
the examen while standing in that long line at the grocery store. After all, God is there too. But in another way the examen didn’t surprise me at all. God is certainly there while you’re standing in line. All you need to pray the examen is a little quiet time. This made intuitive sense. I am God’s creature living in God’s world; of course God would be present in my everyday experience. If prayer is making a connection with God, it makes perfect sense to spend some time finding God in my conscious experience of daily life. In fact, the examen is a very old practice. The word examen comes from a Latin word that means both an examination and the act of weighing or judging something. It’s as old as Socrates’s instruction to “know thyself.” A practice of regular self-scrutiny is found in most religions of the world, and this is certainly the case with Christianity. To follow the path of Jesus, we must regularly scrutinize our behavior and ask how closely our actions conform to Christ’s. Five hundred years ago, St. Ignatius of Loyola made an innovative twist on this ancient tradition of prayerful reflection. He made it a way to experience God as well as to assess our behavior. Ignatius’s famous book The Spiritual Exercises is a guide to an intense experience of conversion to the cause of Christ. He designed the daily examen to sustain and extend this experience. Ignatius wanted to help people develop a reflective habit of mind that is constantly attuned to God’s presence and responsive to God’s leading. The examen became the foundation for this graced