Weekly Community Examen

Campus Ministry and the Murphy Center for Ignatian Spirituality have teamed up to offer an examen for our community each week. This invitation is an opportunity to go deeper into a shared text and consider how our mission and Jesuit values guide our work together here at Fairfield and beyond. Each week, a different member of the Campus Ministry or Murphy Center staff will provide a text for us. Video of the reflection can be found on our Instagram and Facebook pages.

From Katie Byrnes, Campus Minister for Social Justice & Community Engagement

Advent is a time of preparation and waiting for us. Especially this year, we can focus our hearts on gratitude and the spirit of giving thanks for all we have been given.

Start with an examination of your conscience and give thanks for at least one thing from the past day. 

This first point gives our prayer a context of thanksgiving for the gifts we receive from God … and I don’t think this is just about being polite with God! Rather, we are deciding to look back on the day from a particular perspective, one of gratitude, of recognizing that God is active in our lives and that God is generous in giving gifts. One of the reasons this is a good place to start our looking back is that in sifting through our day it is often easier to recall the challenges, difficulties, failings and hurts, as these tend to be more noisy in our memory. The difficult experience of the day can demand our attention, holding us in its disquiet. When we consciously try to tune into the gifts of the day we let ourselves pay attention to the quieter, gentler, hopeful moments and experiences. This in itself is a beginning to ‘discern spirits’, to try consciously to recognize the action or touch of the Holy Spirit in our lives and also to identify what can stand in the way of receiving or recognizing that touch.

It is worth wondering what we might include as ‘gifts’ in our lives. Many of us are tired of "sheltering at home" and long for the chance to gather with loved ones like we have in the past. How we recognize gifts is in part about how something makes us feel or think. St Ignatius gave a clue as to how we identify what might be coming from God: anything that ‘increases faith, hope or love’. We can also consider all those things that we experience as truly life-giving or life-enhancing. For example, a person may be grateful for a beautiful sunset and the possibility of being able to appreciate it. We can also look more widely at things we generally take for granted: you are reading this article, perhaps at times it would be good to give thanks that you are able to read, or for those who taught you, or even for this online form of communication, which has so much potential for good – as well as bad! Then there are the more fundamental gifts, of life, creation, relationships, community, etc., for which even on the worst of days we might be able to give thanks. It is almost certainly the case that we will not always feel thankful for all of these at any given time, but it is likely that if we take a moment we will find something, particularly if we get into a habit of stopping and noticing. All of this serves as a reminder that God is with us, actively working in the world and laboring to draw all people into building the Kingdom.

This practice of noticing and giving thanks, moves us to gratitude that permeates Ignatian Spirituality and is most beautifully summed up in the beginning of the Contemplation on Love at the end of the Spiritual Exercises:

I ask for an interior knowledge of all the great gifts that I have received, in order that, moved to profound gratitude, I may become able to love and to serve God in all things.

Here, gratitude is seen as an experience that has the power not just to shift perspective, but also to move a person to action. In recognizing that they have received so much from God, all a person can do is respond in love and service. This is not to be considered as simply a reciprocal arrangement – ‘you did this for me so I will do something for you’; instead, in a profound way, the gratitude itself energizes the desire and the response. Placed at the end of the Exercises, it is perhaps easy to imagine that after 30 days of meditation and contemplation there will be many fruits from prayer for which to be grateful, and this is generally the case. But we do not need to make a 30-day retreat in order to develop a grateful heart, we can usually pause and find something to be grateful for at any moment. Practicing this in the Examen can help to tune us in to God’s life-giving activity in our lives and in the world around us, and so energize our lives towards greater love and service of God.

Giving thanks to God, then, is not simply about being polite, but rather acknowledging just how much we have been given. In expressing our gratitude, in hearing ourselves say ‘thank you’, we can gain both a new perspective and an impetus to respond in love and service. We are in a relationship with this God, the giver of gifts who is always more generous than we can imagine, so we might also consider what it is like for God to hear our ‘thank you’. We cannot get into the mind of God, but we do know what it is like for us to have a gift acknowledged – can we extend that somewhat and perhaps imagine that in some way God appreciates our ‘thank you’?