Rummaging for God

Last updated on: October 22, 2012 at 3:08 pm by Lori Erickson

Rummaging for God 2012-10-22T15:08:28-06:00 Lori Erickson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Ignatius of Loyola

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve recently discovered Ignatius of Loyola. He’s been waiting for me for centuries, and I finally got around to making his acquaintance.

Ignatius was born in 1491 in Spain and in early adulthood lived the life of an adventurer and soldier. While recovering from a battle wound, he underwent a profound religious conversion that dramatically altered the course of his life. As he grew in his own spirituality, he became particularly adept at the art of helping others discern the movement of God in their lives. His most famous work is the Spiritual Exercises*, a blueprint for a 30-day retreat that can be adapted in many forms. Ignatius also founded the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits.*

If you’re interested in learning more about Ignatius, the website Ignatian Spirituality features many resources. I can personally recommend its on-line version of the Spiritual Exercises at An Ignatian Prayer Adventure, which I’m gradually making my way through.

Let me share with you another of its resources I’ve found helpful, a piece called Rummaging for God: Praying Backwards through Your Day. In it, Jesuit scholar Dennis Hamm gives a succinct overview of one of the central features of Ignatian prayer, the examen:

We are creatures who live one day at a time. If God wants to communicate with us, it has to happen in the course of a 24-hour day, for we live in no other time. And how do we go about this kind of listening? Long tradition has provided a helpful tool, which we call the “examination of consciousness” today. “Rummaging for God” is an expression that suggests going through a drawer full of stuff, feeling around, looking for something that you are sure must be in there somewhere. I think that image catches some of the feel of what is classically known in church language as the prayer of “examen.”

The examen, or examination, of conscience is an ancient practice in the church. In fact, even before Christianity, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics promoted a version of the practice. It is what most of us Catholics were taught to do to prepare for confession. In that form, the examen was a matter of examining one’s life in terms of the Ten Commandments to see how daily behavior stacked up against those divine criteria. St. Ignatius includes it as one of the exercises in his manual The Spiritual Exercises.

It is still a salutary thing to do but wears thin as a lifelong, daily practice. It is hard to motivate yourself to keep searching your experience for how you sinned. In recent decades, spiritual writers have worked with the implication that conscience in Romance languages like French (conscience) and Spanish (conciencia) means more than our English word conscience, in the sense of moral awareness and judgment; it also means “consciousness.”

Now prayer that deals with the full contents of your consciousness lets you cast your net much more broadly than prayer that limits itself to the contents of conscience, or moral awareness…What I am proposing here is a way of doing the examen that works for me. It puts a special emphasis on feelings, for reasons that I hope will become apparent…

Prayer, by László Mednyánszky (WIkimedia Commons image)

A Method: Five Steps

1. Pray for light. Since we are not simply daydreaming or reminiscing but rather looking for some sense of how the Spirit of God is leading us, it only makes sense to pray for some illumination. The goal is not simply memory but graced understanding. That’s a gift from God devoutly to be begged. “Lord, help me understand this blooming, buzzing confusion.”

2. Review the day in thanksgiving. Note how different this is from looking immediately for your sins. Nobody likes to poke around in the memory bank to uncover smallness, weakness, lack of generosity. But everybody likes beautiful gifts, and that is precisely what the past 24 hours contain–gifts of existence, work, relationships, food, challenges. Gratitude is the foundation of our whole relationship with God. So use whatever cues help you to walk through the day from the moment of awakening–even the dreams you recall upon awakening. Walk through the past 24 hours, from hour to hour, from place to place, task to task, person to person, thanking the Lord for every gift you encounter.

3. Review the feelings that surface in the replay of the day. Our feelings, positive and negative, the painful and the pleasing, are clear signals of where the action was during the day. Simply pay attention to any and all of those feelings as they surface, the whole range: delight, boredom, fear, anticipation, resentment, anger, peace, contentment, impatience, desire, hope, regret, shame, uncertainty, compassion, disgust, gratitude, pride, rage, doubt, confidence, admiration, shyness–whatever was there. Some of us may be hesitant to focus on feelings in this over-psychologized age, but I believe that these feelings are the liveliest index to what is happening in our lives. This leads us to the fourth moment:

4. Choose one of those feelings (positive or negative) and pray from it. That is, choose the remembered feeling that most caught your attention. The feeling is a sign that something important was going on. Now simply express spontaneously the prayer that surfaces as you attend to the source of the feeling–praise, petition, contrition, cry for help or healing, whatever.

5. Look toward tomorrow. Using your appointment calendar if that helps, face your immediate future. What feelings surface as you look at the tasks, meetings, and appointments that face you? Fear? Delighted anticipation? Self-doubt? Temptation to procrastinate? Zestful planning? Regret? Weakness? Whatever it is, turn it into prayer–for help, for healing, whatever comes spontaneously…

If we are to listen for the God who creates and sustains us, we need to take seriously and prayerfully the meeting between the creatures we are and all else that God holds lovingly in existence. That “interface” is the felt experience of my day. It deserves prayerful attention. It is a big part of how we know and respond to God.

Read the entire article for more of Hamm’s musings on this ancient method of prayer. I’m glad I’ve discovered it–perhaps it may be of benefit to you as well.

Prayers

Ignatius of Loyola

Previous Post

October 17, 2012

60 Things She's Learned the Hard Way

Next Post

November 1, 2012 Pray As You Can, Not As You Can't

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Aging & Spirituality Amish Anabaptists Animals Apocalypse Archeological sites Art and Spirituality Awards Belgian Holy Sites birds Blessings Books Buddhism Business & Spirituality Callings Cats Celtic Cemeteries Children Christianity church Colorado Creation Death Desert Spirituality Easter Economics Education & Spirituality Egypt Episcopal Church Faith Fear Films First Nations Food Forgiveness Germany God Good & Evil Good Friday Grace Gratitude Happiness Healing Hildegard of Bingen Hinduism History Holy Rover blog Holy Sites Holy Week Horses Iceland Illness Images of God Indigenous Spiritualilty Interfaith Interfaith Dialogue Iowa Islam Israel Japan Judaism LDS Church Lent Machu Picchu Martin Luther Media Meditation Monasteries Museums Music Music and Spirituality Musings Mysticism Native American Nature New Age New Zealand Norse History/Culture/Spirituality Orthodox Paradox Paranormal Peru Philosophy Pilgrimage Poetry Politics Pop Culture Pilgrimage Sites Prayers sermons Silence Social Media Spiritual writers Spirituality and Food Spirituality and Social Media Stone Circles Thomas Merton Turkey Uncategorized Unconventional Holy Sites Utopian communities Videos Virgin Mary Wicca Work World War I Writing Zen

Select a Month August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What happened to the first stone tablets of the Ten Commandments?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Pharaoh destroyed them They were placed in the Ark They were lost in battle Moses broke them