St. Ignatius said that you begin an Examen by coming into God’s presence. That’s not as easy for us as it was in Ignatius’s time, Fr. Joseph Tetlow, SJ, says:
Today a prior effort has to be made. I have to become present to myself in God. In my culture I am constantly dragged away from myself. The phone, lights, emails, noise—everything is going on to drag me away from myself. So the first thing I have to do is come present to myself as an individual whom Almighty God has chosen as his own. I belong to God and I have to become aware of that now and that means becoming aware of the gifts that God is giving to me and that’s the first point of the Examen actually.
Never, never start examining yourself until you have thanked God for the gifts that God is giving to you—not in general, not in the past, but right now, today. That’s how you start The Examen. I think people who can keep the Examen up often do that.
Read the rest of Fr. Tetlow’s introduction to the Examen here.
Sign up for dotMagis updates in an RSS reader
Sign up for dotMagis updates by e-mail