As we transition into the new year, let’s try an Examen prayer of our previous year. It’s really pretty simple: the Examen helps us reflect on a past period of time—usually we reflect prayerfully over the previous day or the previous few hours. But I believe we can apply these principles to the past calendar year as well.
Step One: Become aware of God’s presence.
One way of doing this is to ask the Holy Spirit to help you review the year with a holy perspective—with wisdom, grace, and faith. Ask for the grace to tear yourself away from your own patterns of thinking and seeing so that you can see your life more as God sees it. Of course you will see your failings—but God sees you as a beloved daughter or son who has a future and a hope. Of course you will see your accomplishments—but God sees your deeper self, the person behind all the activity, a person made in God’s image.
Step Two: Review the year with gratitude.
As you use this holy perspective to review the year, pay attention to the good gifts from the year ending. Name specifically those that come to memory now, and thank God for them.
Step Three: Pay attention to your emotions.
Think over the year again, and notice your emotional reactions. What memories speak most loudly to you? What events, conversations, relationships, or activities bring up the most emotion now, as you remember them? Ask God to help you linger with these emotions, whether they are pleasant or disturbing. Ask for help in understanding why you feel as you do. What can you learn about yourself or about your situation as you dwell in your emotional responses?
Step Four: Choose one feature of the year and pray from it.
While you are lingering with your memories and emotions, settle on one feature. Perhaps it is a single event, or maybe it’s a pattern of your own behavior that has come to mind as you reviewed the year. Whatever it is that has emerged, allow it to fuel your prayer. Don’t worry about the many other aspects of the year that you could think about right now; stay with the one thing that has come to you with the most power and pray from those thoughts and emotions.
Step Five: Look toward the new year.
Imagine what challenges and blessings might await you in the coming year. Think of important relationships, major (and minor) decisions to be made, skills to learn, habits to build, healing to seek, good work to accomplish. Make a simple list of highlights—matters that you expect to take prominence in your life in the new year. Bring them to God now, and ask for the graces you will need.
End your prayer, thanking God for love and life and holy possibilities.
Thank you for the Examen for the year. I am so glad I found it. It helped me look at not only events, but my emotions and it showed me that I need to move toward being more emotionally healthy. This is one Examen I will keep. Again, thank you.
I think I do this without thinking about what I’m actually doing. I’ll explain. Every year when I sit down to write letters in all of my Christmas cards, I think about what we’ve been through the past year. All of us, as a family, because what one does impacts us all – we are a communal faith after all. As I think of things to share with family and friends, I feel the gratitude for the blessings and re-live the pain, hurt, and embarrassment of those times we are not so proud to share. Thank you for putting a name to what I’ve been doing…God Bless.
I love doing the Examen for the year. Thanks for sharing. I find using my pictures stored on my phone from the past year helps bring to mind many of the things that have transpired through the course of the year. Seeing these photos increases my gratitude for the many ways that God has blessed me. Even the ordinary days (pictures from a walk or a funny picture of the grandkids) reminds me how God is present all the time. Looking back on the past year increases my ability to trust in God and all that He waits to share with me in the new year ahead.
Every thing one does is a gift of yourself to someone, how when you do an examination, you should see every act in your life as a shared action with The Creator as a gift of The Creators being and Spirit and yourself to others, you are a instrument of The Creators, even when you act wrongfully it can be a gift in another way. Seeing your existence as pure Creators Love then do an examination of your actions as just that, remaking an action as a gift changes the very way you see your life as a true shared being of The Creators LOVE.
This has given me insight into why I do some of the things I do and given me much to pray about, confident that God’s grace is sufficient. I embrace the new year with gratitude.
Thanks so much for this…..It helps with a focus I wish to have on New Year’s Eve! Thanks again!
@Vinita Hampton Wright-many thanks for this, as this is most appropriate and timely, given that New Year’s Eve is a couple of days away, and hence the New Year. It is so easy to get caught up in family/work at this time of year, and to forget to thank God for love and life and holy possibilities. The life and holy possibilities spring most to my mind in that they lead me to God and love.