One day I was riding a subway in New York City engaging in my favorite New York pastime—people-watching. You can really study people in subways because they sit in the same place for a while and they almost always avoid eye contact. Across from me sat a Sikh man wearing an expensive suit and a turban. Near him was a Muslim woman also wearing a head covering. Down the car a bit were two Hasidic Jews wearing long black coats, flat-brimmed black hats, and sporting curls of hair on the sides of their heads. The religions of the world, all in one subway car—only in New York. Then I noticed that the man sitting next to the Sikh appeared to be reading a Bible. It was hard to tell for sure. The Bible looked like an ordinary book, but as I peered at it, it looked like the type was small and laid out in two columns on the page.  He looked like everyone else, an ordinary guy reading a book on a subway.

My friend Chris Lowney calls this “the Christian problem.” The problem is: how are Christians different? Our lives look pretty much the same as everyone’s. In everyday terms, what makes us different?

Other religions have answers to that question with visible differences, as my subway inspection showed.  Observant Jews follow the Law, which regulates food, dress, and other aspects of daily life. Faithful Muslims pray five times a day.  Hindus are differentiated into caste groups with distinct modes of dress and behavior. We Christians have few of these outer signs of religious identity because Jesus wasn’t much interested in external signs of piety.  He was much more interested in the condition of our hearts. We act as Christians when our hearts are set on loving God and other people.  We live as followers of Christ when we’re aligned with the work God is doing in the world. This is much more a matter of our inner orientation than outward characteristics.

The answer to the Christian problem is to find God in all things—to see God in what we think, do, and feel; in life with family, friends, colleagues, and casual acquaintances; in our busyness and our rest.  That’s what the Examen helps us do so well.

Adapted from A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer: Discovering the Power of St. Ignatius Loyola’s Examen

I’ve long maintained that anyone can pray the daily examen at any time–even at awkward, stressful times, like sitting in traffic jam or standing in a long checkout line at the grocery store.  Now comes Richard Kaufmann to prove my point.  He did the examen while doing his taxes:

Using the examen prayer as a template for thinking about taxes gave me a different perspective on that dreaded task and deadline. I had to think about where God was in my life last year–or, better still, where I was in relation to God. As with the examen prayer, I thought too about the rest of this year. I wondered what experiences will enter my reflections next year.

Read the whole thing.

Tuesday you saw me talk about the examen in a short video.  Today you can read blog posts about the examen by a Presbyterian pastor in Florida and an Episcopalian science teacher in Pennsylvania.   What can I say?  I love the examen.  It’s examen week.

In this second week of An Ignatian Prayer Adventure, we’re reflecting on finding God in all things and looking at how the Examen can help us do that. In today’s video, I talk about the Examen and why it’s one of my favorite prayers.

If you’re receiving this via e-mail, click through to watch the video The Examen.

A suggestion for Lent: learn to pray the examen.  Yesterday we read about a Jesuit nurse who finds God’s presence in an emergency room with the help of the examen.  Here are  good pieces about the examen from an Episcopal priest in Massachusetts, a spiritual director in Vancouver, and a Catholic columnist in Minnesota.

You might like the guided Lunchtime Examen.  And you can get a copy of my book, A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer.

Jason Brauninger, SJ, is a nurse who works in the Trauma Center at a Denver hospital.  It’s a place where you hear announcements like “Pediatric Code Blue.  Emergency Room.  Five minutes by ground” — “probably the worst words that can come across the overhead paging system,” he says.

The Trauma Center tests the Ignatian axiom that God can be found in all things.  Brauninger writes that praying the Examen is an especially helpful prayer for him at work:

It is sometimes very difficult for us to find the presence of God in our lives.  He will show up in places where we expect him to be, but he will also be “disguised.”  For me, I tend to find Christ the easiest in the sick and the injured; in the suffering Christ.  It is in the everyday things, like life in the community, completing my studies, or a visit with my family where I can be blind to the presence of Christ.

Read the whole thing.

Blogger Wayne Stratz found a book that helped his prayer life quite a bit.  It helped mine too.

And youth minister Daniel Haugh, who works at the American Church in Paris, has a suggestion for the starting the new year.

Jesuits in St. Louis have developed a special series of seven Examen prayers for the last week of Advent.  They are based on the seven messianic “O Antiphons” prayed during this week. The seven titles attributed to Jesus in the antiphons are Wisdom, Ruler of the House of Israel, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Rising Dawn, O King of all the nations, and Emmanuel. Today the O Antiphons are most familiar to us in the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” in which each verse of the hymn parallels one of the antiphons.

The Examen prayers begin on Saturday, December 17 and continue through Friday, December 23.

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.

Here’s a fine overview of the Examen by Canadian Jesuit Artur Suski.  (Click here to watch it on YouTube.)