Editor’s note: We continue our series exploring each of the steps of the Examen. We’re using the Examen version from Jim Manney’s book, A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer. We’ll look at a different step each week.
4. Face your shortcomings.
The Examen is a prayer of attentiveness. Prayer, like any action that we limited, finite, fallible human beings undertake, is something we can do well or badly, and in the case of the Examen, one of the ways we can do it badly is to make it more about ourselves than about God. How can we ensure that in praying it, we are not simply doing an exercise in solipsism or navel-gazing?
Step 4 of the Examen is about calibrating our attentiveness. We are not merely looking at ourselves through whatever lens occupies our thoughts at given moments of our lives. For adolescents, the lens may be the desire for social standing. For young adults, the lens may be the desire for right relationships. For somewhat older adults, the lens may be the desire to make an impact in the world. For people in middle age, the lens may be the desire for security, and for people in the autumn and winter of their lives, the lens may be the desire to leave a legacy. All of us carry lenses through which we see the arc of our lives and through which we interpret the presence and actions of God in our lives and the lives of those we love.
The prayer of Examen—whether done as individuals or prayerfully in conversation with a spouse or loved one about the past day—is a reminder that at no point of our lives is God absent from us. In returning to our life’s conversation with God, we call to mind that God is, in the words of St. Augustine, “more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.” Praying the Examen well, therefore, begins with the sober reminder that only God is God, and that we, by contrast, are creatures. Hear, O people, that the Lord is God, the Lord alone!—this, a paraphrase of the great Shema prayer of Deuteronomy 6:4. The Examen is fundamentally a prayer, not merely a meditative exercise.
Against this backdrop we can think of step 4, facing our shortcomings, as an opportunity to ask God what sense to make of the experiences of the day we’ve just reviewed in step 3. We can engage God in conversation—a “colloquy,” as St. Ignatius calls it, a “speaking together” (colloquium in Latin). “Here I am, Lord, the person you have created, having used my freedom and my gifts and talents in the ways I’ve just reviewed with you. What are you seeing here?” That’s one way to consider this movement in the prayer. And like any prayer, we can attend to the movement of the Holy Spirit within us, the Spirit that “groans inwardly” (see Romans 8:26–27) when we are not exactly sure how we should be praying.
The Spirit holds before us the example of Jesus, whose self-consciousness aligned perfectly with the will of the Father. We who fall short of that perfect self-consciousness may nevertheless express our desire, in prayer, to move toward that perfection. Facing our shortcomings, therefore, is not simply an experience of feeling bad about ourselves. It is an act of hope—that theological virtue which, according to theologians, is a gift of God that moves us in the direction of that perfection which God seeks to restore within us. It is the hinge which opens us to step 5, looking toward the day to come, the day which offers the opportunity to move, however subtly, in the direction toward which God leads us.
