One morning several years ago, I came downstairs to discover a disconcertingly large puddle in the middle of our kitchen. The errant water sat still and far apart from any of the usual suspects: the dishwasher, the fridge, and the sink. No appliance or forgotten faucet seemed to be at fault, and so I quit looking around and instead looked up.
My eyes fell upon a huge bubble of paint, soggy and sinking. The water had come from the ceiling. But the mystery only deepened. There was no plumbing on that side of the house, and there was a second floor. The night before had been stormy, true, but a hole in the roof should’ve caused a water issue in the guest bedroom, the room directly above the bulging bubble of waterlogged paint.
We popped the bubble and cleaned the floor and repaired the wall as best we could. Days passed as we tried to decipher the issue, and finally a contractor visited our home to provide an estimate on repairs.
“You know your siding is gone,” he said, bustling in from the cold outdoors. He pulled his coat tighter, straightened his hat, and tapped a pencil to his clipboard. “A whole strip of wood is exposed.”
We went out to see exactly what and where he was talking about and discovered that along a totally different part of the property, abutting a different room, the siding had indeed blown away and exposed the tender underbelly of our home.
“But that couldn’t be the source of the water in the kitchen,” I stammered. “The issue is half a house away!”
The contractor shrugged. “Water moves,” he said. “It very well could be.”
This experience has changed how I approach problems I encounter around my house. For one, whenever I stumble upon a drop of water out of place, my eyes immediately shoot to the ceiling. That stormy night and resulting puddle have changed how I care for my home.
But as I return to this story—and I do with some frequency, always on the prowl for water damage after storms—I wonder if I would do better to allow its lessons to speak to my inner life.
In outbursts of anger, do I look only to the preceding moment, assuming whatever has triggered me then and there is the sole source of my mood? Or do I examine my morning, too, the day before, and the past several weeks and months? It’s quite likely that an outburst of anger, like the soggy, sinking bubble of paint, is just the immediate manifestation of a larger, structural issue.
Whether feeling anger, desolation, stress, or pain, I bet we can all review the fullness of our days and find both obvious and immediate emotional triggers, as well as hidden and deep wells from which our feelings bubble over. We are fully embodied creatures; we have to check in with the fullness of ourselves to heal all our seemingly disparate parts.
The Examen, of course, is our most practical tool. We review our days in the company of God’s Spirit, looking for patterns and unearthing insights and uncertainties that would otherwise go unnoticed. Tiny, seemingly insignificant details surface and deepen our understanding of who we are and why we do what we do.
In our reviewing, we are invited to cultivate a disposition of cura personalis; we care for our full selves. We avoid siloing any part of who we are and instead recognize that how we feel physically can impact how we feel mentally, how we treat others socially, and how we encounter God spiritually. Mix and match the causes and effects, and the point holds. We are interconnected beings, so we check in with each part of who we are.
The next time you find the proverbial puddle in your soul—the anger, the sorrow, or the anxiety—spend time examining the infrastructure of your very being. You might be surprised to discover where the leak really is.
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay.
