No worries, yes, that’s spelled correctly. The Daily Examen process is one that I heard of from one of my professors, and he uses it as a spiritual practice. I hadn’t had a chance to try it, but figured that this Lent would be a good time to ease into the practice, as it is done weekly here. While I’m keeping the “Lent Madness” portion of Lent activities for the church on its blog, this is more of an individual exercise, and I figured I’d keep my thoughts here.
The Daily Examen process is generally a series of five steps created by St. Ignatius of Loyola:
1. Become aware of God’s presence.
2. Review the day with gratitude.
3. Pay attention to your emotions.
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
5. Look toward tomorrow.
During Lent, there is The Word (in this instance through Monday, it is to reflect on Matthew 6:5-8), reflect, give thanks, pray for light, find God, anything wrong, and what now?
Giving thanks is something I do daily, many times a day, as I realize that not only does God gift me with many blessings, but the blessings that may not be so obvious – leading to new things to learn, values to practice, alternative viewpoints to consider, etc.
Pray for light – now this is a new concept, but I think fits in with the latter part of thanking God for blessings. “I ask the Father to let me see my day as the Holy Spirit sees it, and to show me what I need to see.” Bit of a different twist, but hopefully I’ll be able to identify further blessings in that way.
Find God. God is in all, in everything. But the questions here ask, what have I done? Did I do as I planned? What happened that I didn’t plan and how have I responded? What did my heart tell me. I’m a horrible list-maker, so I actually do plan for things to accomplish. I’ve had getting blog posts done for a while, which I finally got to today. However, it wasn’t actually on today’s list. So, since today is Thursday, and work schedules are a bit odd on Thursdays in any case, I’ll get to some of the things on my list, and have some left for tomorrow.
Anything wrong? Oh, today is a day for family difficulties, and trying to figure out logistics of shipping something that was a gift, but isn’t registered to me.
What now? What do I need from God today? What do I need to do today and tomorrow? Pray. Not going to pray for patience, as I already have a situation that requires it, and don’t want anymore at the moment. Tomorrow will be a better day, and I’ll have better answers for these same questions. 🙂
Passage of Hours 