Looking at The Particular Examen of Saint Ignatius with Fresh Eyes

 "This May be Heresy, but I don't care." 

A reformulation of the “Particular Examen” in Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises

I intend to explore the possibility that Saint Ignatius's Examination of Conscience, the Examen, might be useful as a rigorous way to focus our inner search. It’s an Open Source for anyone who wants to lead a full life in their communities and the universe. It’s probably not for individuals who confine themselves to a predetermined set of rules or conventions about behavior, love or faith, and don’t welcome questions. Leave that to the True Believer. 

I hesitate to edit Ignatius. He was not an atheist or a non-theistic hidden Zen master. His Exercises, however, spring from inner experience, prayer and meditation, and I want to test the hypothesis that they hold up outside Catholic theology. I have removed references to a deity, or to any external guidance not because I denigrate a particular belief, but I trust most believers can quickly fill in the blanks. Leaving them open might also allow space for new understanding or insight. In places I have left the words “faith,” “love,” “grace,” “presence,” “guidance,” and “goodness,” not as absolutes but rather focus points. Look for faith and presence in our lived experience instead of returning to old sermons about how to behave and be good. Examine our inner landscape. Include emotions, memories, and dreams. Think with every part of ourselves, right down to the bones,

Ignatius recommends undertaking the Examen for a relatively short period of time, 10-15 minutes, at three distinct times every day: upon rising, before the mid-day meal, and upon retiring. In the morning, as your day is not yet filled with conscious and unconscious actions, you resolve to reflect and remember what you are going to look for if you have identified a ‘chief characteristic.’ Usually you will hone in on what you’ve determined is your greatest obstacle to living in freedom and love--some trait, a repeating negative pattern, a persistent inner dialogue, resentment or prejudice. This becomes a tool that helps focus your review of the day’s events. It is almost always a moving target. You might work with a spiritual director to figure out a useful self-interrogation.

Here are the steps of the Examen*

• Quiet yourself. Become aware of the simple goodness of the universe. We see the gifts of life, the blessings of this human world through faith, the eye of love. Be thankful.

• Look within to see clearly, understand accurately, and respond generously to what is occurring in our lives.

• Review the history of the day (hour, week, or month) in order to see concrete, specific instances of the influence and activity of what we have identified as our chief characteristic. These can be detected by paying attention to strong feelings that may have arisen in situations and encounters. Over time more subtle feelings will become apparent. 

•  Examine these instances, our actions, reactions, words and feelings to see whether you have collaborated with deep inner guidance or yielded to the influence of evil in some way. Express gratitude and regret.

• Plan how to use our own inner guidance skillfully to avoid or overcome the negative influence of the chief characteristic in the future.

November 16th, 2006

The Examen was a breakthrough in the pedagogy of prayer. Human beings are certainly capable of self-examination, and Christians can find inner peace and clarity without Ignatius’s guidance. But he did recommend a method of prayer radically different from the ritual of confession and penance (although he certainly didn’t exclude them). He crafted a way to examine our inner landscape, the particular set of inner motivations and proclivities that govern our lives, and then refocus with an intention that we set for ourselves. 

Many people believe that prayer is like “talking with God,” and that it is the most natural of any communication. I don’t believe this is even close to the truth. For Christians it would mean that the results of Original Sin magically disappear with baptism or conversion. This is not supported by most of what we can gather from the records left by mystics and saints, and it certainly flies in the face of most Eastern teachings regarding humankind’s sleeping, inattentive, deluded state.

If God actually speaks to us, how do we know that our own channels are not jammed with well-intentioned instruction and misinformation at best or unexamined prejudice and obfuscation at worst? I recently saw some clips from a TV documentary called “Camp Jesus” about a fundamentalist summer camp for children. After the adult woman leading a prayer group made the rather startling accusation that Harry Potter should be in Hell, there was an interview with a young 12 or 13 year old boy who was a preacher. The boy said with absolute conviction that he regularly talked with God about his future, but when the camera switched to his father, also a preacher, and I began to listen for the subtext of what the father said, I felt that a strong, irrefutable case could be made that his son's “godly” conversations were nothing more than interiorization of subtle and overt parental messages and prejudices. I am certain the kid believed that Harry Potter was hell bound, and sadly he was destined to be just like his dad.

Prayer has to be taught and learned. How it is taught changes. We learn about love as we live out our lives; we share, and try to teach our children, from our experience. This learning cannot happen in a vacuum: my friend Daniel Shurman refers back to this phrase from Episcopalian liturgy: what is the Spirit saying to the Church? We are always listening and learning, both from the Source of All That Is and from one another.

After filling the page with distillation of Ignatius and reflections, I remember the caution of a very astute Jesuit spiritual guide: “Our capacity to deceive ourselves is infinite!” This leads to another set of cautions: don’t be duped and fall for an easy answer, but on the other hand, don’t let this caveat become an excuse to give up your quest when you become discouraged because you certainly will. Stick with it.

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Notes

It was very difficult to find the exact text of Ignatius for the Particular Examen online. The internet is flooded with many people using the header “The Examen of Saint Ignatius,” and then freely adapting them. I have lots of company; whether or not it is good company, the jury is out. While my adaptation is admittedly one of the most theologically extreme, I have explained at some length my reasoning, and include an English translation of the original text from The Spiritual Exercises. 

*The text:

The first point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the gifts received.

The second point is to ask for the grace to know my sins and to root them out.

The third point is to demand an account of my soul from the moment of rising to that of the present examination, hour by hour or period by period. The thoughts should be examined first, then the words, and finally the actions.

The fourth point is to ask pardon of God our Lord for my faults.

The fifth point is to resolve to amend with the help of God’s grace. Close with the Lord’s Prayer.

My conversation deals with the Particular Examen, and the text from the Exercises is specifically for what is known as the General Examen. The steps are the same for both. The general examination surveys all the morally significant actions of the day, so far as we can recall them, while in the particular examination we focus our attention on one particular fault against which we are struggling and the corresponding virtue we are trying to cultivate. 

From The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Edited by Fr. Martin Royackers, S.J.

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The woman who inspired this essay, Annemarie Marino, died on May 20, 2006. I will always remember her bright mind and generous heart. We had wonderful conversations. Please add your prayers to mine that she has found peace and her heart's desire.

And my deep gratitude to Bonnie Johnson who inspired so many by the way she lived her life. She continues to be a source of my inspiration.

I invite anyone who reads this and wants to comment or share something about their experience using the Ignatian Examen to leave a comment or contact me. If you are interested you can also check out the wide selection of books, articles, and websites that Morgan Zo-Callahan and I put together, An Ignatian Bibliography.

Music, Genius & Surprise

December 2nd, 2007

I wanted to show the Garapons that we have some culture in San Francisco with a trip to Davies Hall and a concert by the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. MTT never disappoints. When we bought the tickets, I found out that MTT was not on the podium. Disappointment.

Let’s go anyway. Wednesday was the only night Jean and Marie-Christine had for un spectacle musical!

As we sat down, I began to read the program; by the time the musicians had taken their places, I knew that we had really lucked out.



There are some moments in life that astonish, that knock your socks off. This was one. With music, somehow, it seems that your body can respond if properly tuned, even if words fail. You just sit, stirrings arise from deep inside, and then sometimes are followed by a completely different set of feelings. It is like a journey. Then the last cords sound, and there is applause. The culture tells the body to respond. The emotions choose the decibel level.




I have often wondered what it must have been like to hear young Mozart play. Despite the fact that he was promoted by his father as a kind of musical sideshow to make lots of money, not much different from the parents of any child actors today in Hollywood, or some very famous personalities from the more recent past, such Judy Garland whose experience was not entirely happy, I still have the impression that Mozart loved music. A person could not compose Don Giovanni or the Magic Flute under duress or carrying mental scares.

No question that he was a genius born into the world with such extraordinary gifts that you might think that they come from the angels. And still he had to have some kind of training.

Listening to the remarkable Lise de la Salle play Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, questions like these flooded my mind, that is after the last astonishing bars had faded. She was born in 1988, began playing at 4, was at the Paris Conservatory by age eleven, and to my ear, at age 19 has the grace and command of an Arthur Rubinstein at the end of his career. Clearly she is a musical genius of the highest order, and it is also clear that she loves the piano. Here is a link to the program notes about Lise.

And what a performance it was. To give a hint of her command of the powerful Russian feeling, the emotions of those opening lines, I found a short video of Mme de la Salle playing the amazing Toccata in D minor Op.11 of Prokofiev.

A spectacular evening. Applause please!

The Indian Tomb of Jesus

In 1983, the German writer on esoteric subjects Holger Kersten published Jesus Lived in India, which popularized the legend that Jesus' final resting place was Srinagar in Kashmir. The claim that the tomb of Jesus is the Roza Bal shrine was first asserted in 1899 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. 

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a religious leader and apologist. He argued that Jesus survived the crucifixion, traveled to India, married, had children, and died a natural death at the age of 120, eventually being buried in the Roza Bal shrine under the name Yuz Asaf (or Youza Asouph). 

In 1976, the Spanish philosopher and scholar of comparative religion Andreas Faber-Kaiser published Jesus Died in Kashmir, presenting what he considered historical and physical evidence to support this claim. Somewhere in this amalgam of legends, we learn that Jesus was returning to the place where he’d spent the hidden years of early childhood until he became a prophet in Galilee, learning the wisdom of pre-Islamic sufis. The storytellers must account for the six-century gap between the execution of Jesus and the founding of Islam. But I quibble. The first wave of newly minted Western seekers had just discovered India and seemed swayed by the notion that Jesus had also been influenced by Indian magic. A shrine with an inscription and a name was, of course, conclusive evidence.

I’d read at least an abbreviated account of the connection between Jesus and India. On my second trip to Srinagar, I asked my host, Gul Mohammed, the son of a Kashmiri merchant I’d met in MacLeod Ganj, if he could arrange for a local guide to take me to the tomb of Jesus. A few days before, there had been an incident in the ongoing tension between the majority Hindu government of India and the Muslim majority population of Kashmir, and I’d been told that a white face might not be welcomed in the Old City. Of course, Mo knew an older, well-connected, respected, and savvy Sunni driver who could get us in and out safely. 

But first, didn’t we want to visit the world's oldest wooden mosque? This is Khanqah Shah-i-Hamadan, 14th century. Made entirely of wood, it is unusual and stunning. We got out of the car, but we were not allowed to enter. The guards, however, were extremely courteous and friendly. They left their positions at the main gate, came up to us, introduced themselves, and showed us as much as they could through the windows. They had been the target of extremists, so their instructions were only to admit Muslims who were intending to pray.

Our next stop was Jama Masjid. Situated at Nowhatta in the Old City, the Mosque was commissioned by Sultan Sikandar in 1394 CE and completed in 1402 CE. As we drove in, just past the main gate, looking for a parking space, a few women began to gather around our car and pound on the bonnet. More women began to run over towards us. Our driver-guide apologized, backed up quickly, and told us we would have to skip it. He then told us that we’d been spotted; we could continue an abbreviated tour, driving slowly but not getting out of the car. 

Probably 15 minutes later, we drove up to a very ordinary building, about the size of a Western two-car garage. The roof was tin and needed a coat of paint. The sign said that the opening hours were restricted to Wednesdays between noon and 3 PM. It appeared to be the shrine of a minor saint, not a major figure like Jesus, who appears in the Quran. 

The belief that the tomb belongs to Jesus is a central belief for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community but is rejected by mainstream Christian and Muslim scholars, as well as the local Sunni Muslim caretakers of the shrine, who maintain it is the grave of a local Sufi saint. Modern scholarship generally dismisses the theory as legend or myth with no historical basis. 

Photo credit: Indrajit Das/Wikimedia Commons

According to local Kashmiri traditions, Yuz Asaf was a saint or prophet who came from a foreign land. A few historical interpretations link "Yuz Asaf" to an Arabic or Urdu variant of Josaphat, which is also associated with the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, an Islamized and Christianized version of the life of the Buddha.

Photo credit: Indrajit Das/Wikimedia Commons

Yes, this is the small shrine that we were taken to when I asked to see the tomb of Jesus. You can see there is more than a little dispute over whether this is his actual burial place. You know that the mullahs want to settle a dispute quickly and definitively when there’s a large sign with a long quote about Jesus from the Quran.

There it is, just as we saw it on our trip into the Old City. It was on a closed day, so we couldn’t get out of the car even under more favorable circumstances.  It is not common for white skinned Westerners to be wandering around this part of Srinagar unless you’re a scholar of esotericism trying to prove a point.

The grave of Yuz Asaph. Photo credit: Indrajit Das/Wikimedia Commons

Standing in the need of prayer. After our adventure in the Old City, we were welcomed inside at Hazratbal. It is a huge Mosque, not located in the old city, but on the eastern shore of Dal Lake. We took off our shoes, faced Mecca, and prayed.

Ty and I sing at a Latin high mass

My leaving the formal Catholic fold was a long, slow process, with hours of prayer, personal introspection, and my share of suffering. However, I can pinpoint the moment I knew I was done to an exact day and hour.

For most of the time I lived in San Francisco, I was a member of the Museum of Modern Art. On November 4, 2003, their special exhibition of Marc Chagall’s work was closing. It was a fabulous exhibition; I had already seen it twice, maybe even three times. On that last Sunday morning, the Museum was going to open to members from 6 AM, before the huge crowd expected at 9:30. I had a plus-one ticket. I asked Ty Cashman, a friend and former Jesuit. Ty and I worked with the same Zen teacher; we’d done several seven-day meditation retreats together; he was super-educated with a PhD in philosophy from Columbia; he’d been a student of Gregory Bateson; he taught a class on Spiritual Exercises at a small private university on the Presidio. 

We met at 6 AM at Mission and 3rd Street and spent a full three and a half hours with the 153 paintings and other works by Chagall, carefully displayed over two floors of the wonderful building. We spent most of the morning just contemplating. It was not the first time we’d shared the early hours of the day in silent meditation. A few comments here and there, but mostly just deep appreciation for the astounding images of a poor Jew from the shtetl who’d transcended any sectarian feel in his work. Seamlessly incorporating the imagery, even iconography of his adopted country, he’d carved out a spiritual, almost magical world that had actually contributed to healing France after the brutality of Nazi occupation. I can describe it as a spiritual experience.

 

At 9:30, as we left, I thought that we’d go to breakfast and say goodbye, but Ty said, “We just have enough time to get to the 10 AM Mass at Saint Patrick’s. Let’s go.” I was surprised, but said sure, and we quickly crossed the Park to the high Latin Mass at the predominantly Filipino parish. Right from "Introibo ad altare Dei," Ty and I were leading the whole left side of a large congregation through familiar tunes. His seminary had been in the Midwest, mine in New England, but our Jesuit choir training was shared. The chubby Monsignor noticed us with a broad smile. The emotional participation at mass in a Filipino church is exuberant compared to their Irish co-religionists. Singing our hearts out, Ty and I shared that high. 

It came time to receive communion, and we approached the altar. It was something that I don’t usually do. I still believed in the sacrament of Penance, and I had not been to confession, but it felt appropriate. Standing before a rather stern-looking woman, the minister of Holy Communion, she said, “The body of Christ,” and I responded spontaneously, “Praise Lord Jesus Christ.”  She stopped, looked at me angrily, and said, “The proper response is 'Amen.’” She wasn’t going to allow any ecstatic response in her line. I followed instructions and said Amen, but in that instant, something changed. It felt irrevocable. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be years before I again set foot in a Roman Catholic Church to receive the Eucharist. 

Was that too extreme? Of course. I could always find a church that was less insistent on the correct formulation. The narrative of Jesus is carefully, thoughtfully, reverently transmitted through words and ritual practices that have been handed down to us over the centuries. I’d been a real part of that transmission; I’d even been to Saint Patrick’s before, when I stood as the ninong for the granddaughter of one of my workers. Over many years of study and prayer, I’d added my own personal, even mystical understanding of those teachings. Now standing humbly at the table of the Lord, I was met with a burst of anger and told that my response was not acceptable, or it felt that way. Of course, there are a thousand mitigating circumstances; there was no right and wrong, but in that moment, the spell had been broken. 

I allowed this experience of the Eucharist to devolve  into a series of sharp exchanges with many former Jesuit friends about whether one had to have his or her feet firmly in the neoplationist camp before one could talk about the “Real Presence.” And I wasn’t buying it.

And why? And what next? 

Do I even want to talk about this moment? I mentioned that both Ty and I had done the seemingly endless hours of Zazen retreats, just sitting from dawn to dusk in a completely still room, usually with a handful of others or, when the leader had a reputation for insight, integrity, or depth (there are a few of those left), crowds. The work in these Zen retreats was the koans. Detractors talk about impossible riddles designed to throw a wrench into the ordinary, expected inner works; proponents speak of craftily designed word games that might provide a startling insight. I’ve had both experiences and many others over the more than 30 years I’ve been working with a teacher on the koans. You are allowed to switch the subject and the predicate. There are few rules in a logical or discursive sense. 

The feature of the retreats I want to point to here, besides the concentration and silence, is the meetings with your teacher to discuss the koan and your meditation. 

These meetings give Zen its distinctive flavour. You might present an answer to the koan; with a bit of luck and hard work, the teacher will ask a few follow-up or checking questions. Or you might be sent back to the dojo with a hint about where to focus. The length of the meeting can be seconds or hours. I will not add any fiction or wish fulfilment to the pile of idiocy about koan work, other than to say that after many years, I have a clear feeling that I am part of a vibrant conversation about awakening that Buddhists have been having for hundreds of years. And that conversation has been carefully, thoughtfully, reverently transmitted through words and ritual practices that have been handed down to us. The content is different, but the mechanism of transmission shares a lot with the Jesus narratives. 

But what is different was more important for me. My koan responses that felt right, where the opening went deep; they were part of a meditation practice; they were spontaneous, without a lot of thinking about what I should say or what would be clever; they came from a place that I can only describe as intimate. A far cry from “The proper response is ‘Amen.’” 

I’m getting older, and maybe some of my rough edges are beginning to soften. Now and then I’ve thought about that rather stern woman. I have no idea why she responded the way she did, and it’s none of my business. But I owe her a debt of gratitude. I began to meditate on the Real Presence as a koan rather than rigid dogma from the Council of Trent 500 years ago, a mystery I could enter with a sense of wonder and intimacy. 

“Praise Lord Jesus Christ.”

Marc Chagall, The Good Samaritan (1963–64). Collection of the Rockefeller Archive Center. Photo: © Mick Hale.