Do you examen?
December 15, 2008
Here is my question right off the bat: How do you close out your day? Do you have certain practices you engage in to bring an end to your day? What’s your routine?
A day can pack a lot of punches. Think of how many events can happen in a day. Lives can change quickly by an announcement of birth, of death, of the arrival of the kingdom of God into a person’s or a community’s life, or the onset of recession. Sin can lodge free at our expense in our thoughts, words, deeds, and bodies. Distancing ourselves from the loving Father only takes a careless moment of falling into temptation. We make the right or wrong decision, we take the right or wrong turn and by the end of the day life accumulates and many parts of life demand resolution. Stuff happens that needs debriefing with God. An experience cries out to us to be revisited and understood deeply in the presence of God. While this time taken at the end of the day may be a luxury to many (I think here of the mother who is exhausted after a day with a fussy baby, or parents whose children demand more energy than they have). If not daily, then, some form of reflection upon the day, the week, the month needs to take place in our lives.
Compline, saying our prayers just before we retire to bed, allows us a chance to reflect (even if ever so briefly) upon the day’s activities: what we did and did not do, how we felt, how we thought or how we loved, what we said and shouldn’t have said. The kind of prayer par excellence for doing some introspection is called examen. In examen, we address God as “revealer” of our hearts asking him the all-too scary yet necessary questions about our lives. Or perhaps we ask embarrassing questions that would shine the light of God, Scripture, and conscience upon our hearts. Celtic Daily Prayer (also here) offers us a liturgy of examen. By the way examen does not need to be sad and despairing. Far from it. Simply put, be yourself, and expect that hope is alive.
Examen is no easy feat. It can be real scary. What would God think and what do I think about myself, about my experience with God today? Here is that scary prayer: Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my thoughts. See if there be any wicked way in me, abide with me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
What’s so scary? …
Who wants to be exposed, knowing that there is no way of escaping from ourselves. Here’s the thing, when exposed, we are exposed by one who is loving and totally committed to will everything good for us. This is what makes examen a good activity at the end of the day for me. I get to face myself and God, my sinfulness and my righteousness, my joys and my sorrows in an attitude of neediness before a loving God.
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I know practicing the examen brings more life and awareness of God’s presence. But it is stinkin’ hard for me to do consistently. Thanks for the encouragement. I am inspired to try again.
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