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

A while back, I felt deflated when I discovered that the wonderful Prayer of St. Francis (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”) wasn’t written by Francis at all.  It was written in 1912 by a writer for a small French Catholic magazine.  My disappointment wasn’t on the level of discovering the truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but it stung a bit.  I wish Francis had written it in the 13th century.

So imagine how I felt when I found out that something similar is likely true of St. Ignatius’s wonderful prayer for generosity.  You know it, I’m sure:

Lord, teach me to be generous,
to serve you as you deserve,
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to look for any reward,
save that of knowing that I do your holy will.

Turns out that no one can find any reference to this prayer before 1897.  The oldest publication of it dates from 1910, where it appeared as “The Scout’s Prayer” in a French Boy Scout manual.  The author is unknown, but no one who has looked into the matter thinks that it was Ignatius.  British Jesuit Jack Mahoney has all the details on the website ThinkingFaith.org.

I’ve prayed the Prayer for Generosity many times, thinking that Ignatius wrote it.  Does it matter that he didn’t?

I don’t think so.  It’s a great prayer. It expresses wholehearted commitment, a desire to imitate Christ, a generous spirit, and a readiness to work hard–all sentiments associated with Ignatian spirituality and the Spiritual Exercises.  They fit Ignatius perfectly.  You feel like he could have written that prayer, just as St. Francis could have written the prayer attributed to him.

Maybe Ignatius didn’t write the Prayer for Generosity in the sixteenth century.  But the spiritual movement he started was healthy enough in the twentieth century to produce a prayer that sounds just like him.  That’s impressive.

Image by elyse under Creative Commons license.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

–Thomas Merton

Our sixth and last Lunchtime Examen goes online today. This week’s question is “What shall I do?” It’s about the final step of the traditional Ignatian examen–the action we take to love God and other people in the day ahead.  Click on the button above. (Click here if you can’t see it.)

These Lunchtime Examens have been introduced every Wednesday in Lent, but they’ll be permanently available here at IgnatianSpirituality.com.

Our fifth Lunchtime Examen goes online today. This week’s question is “What does the Examen have to do with being honest with God?” Click on the button above. (Click here if you can’t see it.)

These Lunchtime Examens will still be available on IgnatianSpirituality.com after Lent is over. We’re working out the details now.

Our fourth Lunchtime Examen goes online today.  This week’s question is “What do our feelings have to do with prayer?” Click on the button above.

Our third Lunchtime Examen is online today.  This week, in addition to the guided prayer, I talk about how the examen answers the question, “what do I pray about?”  Click on the button above.

Today is the first day of the  Novena of Grace, an annual time of prayer directed to the intercession of St. Francis Xavier.  This special novena has been celebrated for hundreds of years.  It ends on March 12, the day that St. Francis and St. Ignatius Loyola were canonized.  A Jesuit who was miraculously healed through Francis’s intercession said that the saint promised  that “all who ask his intercession with God for nine days, in honor of his canonization, would infallibly experience the effects of his great power in heaven and would receive whatever they asked that would contribute to their salvation.”

Prayers for the novena have been posted by the Maryland province of the Jesuits.  If you pray them, you’ll learn much about the dramatic life of one of the church’s great saints.

During December 2010, I visited Loyola Press to talk with the marketing and sales team about why, when and how to use social media. As part of my preparation, I hunkered down to take a more rigorous look at the Virtual Abbey, an online community offering the Daily Office via Twitter.  This virtual monastery seems to engage new and active participants on a weekly basis.

People are hungry for prayer as well as engagement in community.  Yearning to seek and find, they’re knocking on virtual doors that open into real experiences of faith lived out in the secular world.  The Virtual Abbey uses online technologies and tools to provide prayer, as well as community, for people of faith–and those who yearn to be.

My experience with the Virtual Abbey plus participating in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be “church” these days, inspired me to create this contemporary take on Saint Teresa of Avila’s well-known prayer, Christ Has No Body. For your consideration and contemplation:

The feast of Epiphany today brings the Christmas season to an end.  To mark the day, here’s a litany called “Now the Work of Christmas Begins” composed by Howard Thurman, an African-American theologian, educator, and civil rights leader.

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.