3D Listening to God: with the Examen Prayer

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

bible study and notesOne of the reasons we seek to pray through the day is so that we can hear God’s daily invitations to us. How can we cultivate this attitude of listening to God in our daily life? The examen prayer is one of the best tools to help us listen to God’s invitations to us in our daily life. It is recommended by the saints—St. Francis de Sales, St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, and most notably St. Ignatius of Loyola, who developed this prayer in the way we discuss it below.

Foundationally, the examen is a way to recognize God’s presence in our life today. As a tool to help us to listen to God in my daily life, it’s best used as a daily practice. St. Ignatius recommends making the examen “formally” twice a day: around noon and in the evening; in his Examen App, Fr. Michael Denk provides an easy option to schedule it into your day. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I totally recommend Father Denk’s Examen App, which will guide you through the whole process—either through words on the screen, or through his videos.

The Jesuits have developed many wonderful resources to help someone learn and use this powerful practice of prayer, and many are available online. You can find videos, audio files, articles, and printed materials here.

For those who are hesitant about making the exam, not interested in the app, or already pray the examen and would like to explore it further, let’s take a deeper look.

To get started, you may wish to look over the five steps for the examen I posted earlier, or read through this attractive printable PDF card provided by www.ignatianspirituality.com:

 

examenprayerignatianspirituality

The five steps may be described differently, but the basic “movements” of the examen are:

  • Remember that we are in the presence of God
  • Note and thank God for God’s gifts to us
  • Ask for divine light to discern God’s presence in our day and in our life, and to gain insight into our own choices and hearts
  • Review the events of our day, paying attention to how we responded to God’s gifts and invitations, and especially noting our thoughts and the stirrings of our heart. We ask forgiveness for the times that we have turned away from God’s gifts and invitations.
  • Renew my love for God, my trust that God is with me, and my resolve to act in accord with God’s invitations as I look forward to tomorrow (or the rest of my day)

Blessed James Alberione (Founder of the Daughters of Saint Paul) told us that praying the examen is crucial  for growing in the spiritual life. He advocated praying it preventively in the morning during meditation, making the examen during our daily Hour of Adoration, again at noon, and again at evening prayer. For him, the practice of the examen is one of the best ways to grow in self-knowledge and in humility.

To make the examen well, Blessed James Alberione recommends writing down the main points: the gifts that God has given us, the events of our day and how we have responded, and our renewal of our resolve. The Examen App actually gives you a place to journal on your phone or tablet, but non-digital folks can use a small notebook.

Above all, Blessed James saw the examen as a path towards what he called “the habitual examen.” In other words, praying the examen through the day is meant to bring us to living mindfully, aware of our thoughts and desires, our words and choices, as we are living them. For Alberione, the goal of the examen is to bring us to a place where “my heart is with Jesus,” where the desires of Jesus become our desires. In other words, to live continuously in a spirit of discernment.

“The important thing is that the strings of my heart are tuned for the melody we want to play, that is the hymn: ‘Glory to God and peace to humanity.’ The essential purpose of the exam is to see whether or not these strings play this melody well. The strings of my heart are my interior dispositions. Therefore, they need to be played in order to know what they sound like. Do they sing of the glory of God? Or do they sing my self-love?” – Bl. James Alberione

As a follow-up to this post, try to make the examen prayer today or this week. Please feel free to contact me in the comments or via email with any questions you have about this beautiful and helpful form of praying that can draw us deeper into a spirit of discernment. In my next post, I’ll share a personal example of how I pray with the examen prayer during my Hour of Adoration.

3D Listening: Connecting with God Every Day

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

Various spiritualities offer support in living in greater awareness of God’s presence in our day to day life. You can get really creative with this, depending on your schedule and what helps you! I hope that you share in the comments below what you are already doing, or what you might try to increase your awareness of God’s love for you daily. Here are a few practices that I have found useful.

* Begin the day with meditation on a Scripture passage that concludes with a preview of how I want to live what I meditated on through this day. As I look forward to my day and the responsibilities I will face, I resolve how to  respond with love in the various situations that might arise

* Use everyday events to remind myself to pray a one-line pray (or aspiration) frequently. For example, I  set my watch to beep on the hour. When my watch is silenced, I try to remember to pray every time I stand up from my desk. I’ve also used other reminders, such as beginning or switching to a new project/file, as a reminder to pray

* Use part (or all) of my lunch break for prayer: go to Mass, pray the Angelus, make a spiritual communion or visit Jesus in the Eucharist in a nearby church, or take a prayer-walk (during which you can simply rejoice in God’s love for you, or pray the Rosary, etc.). I know people whose work is flexible enough that they can stop at 3 PM to pray the Divine Mercy chaplet

* Use times when I have to make a decision or am not sure what to do to pray for guidance from the Holy Spirit

* Close my day by putting on my “Sherlock Holmes” hat to look for one way that God revealed himself to me today. It might not be obvious or expected. For example, God often “speaks” to me through nature, such as a chickadee that chirps a greeting. A friend’s support at just the right moment, a film or song that deeply moves us, or a sudden insight—any of these can reveal God’s love.

Often, at the end of these mini prayer breaks, I will ask Jesus to guide me to respond to his call through the next hour/minute/project.

A favorite prayer practice that I use daily is the examen, and I hope to blog more in detail about that next.

A month of thanksgiving

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

The month of June was full of travels, and I thought I’d be able to keep up with the blog, but it proved impossible. (I will get back to posting as usual next week, on Monday.) Between beautiful centenary celebrations for our 100th anniversary of foundation (Boston and New York), and a visit with family, June for me has been a month of renewal and above all, gratitude to God. Over and over again, I have thanked God for the great gift of his faithful love as manifested to me in my congregation, the Daughters of Saint Paul. (Visit here for a glimpse of the most joyous occasion of Sr. Emi Magnificat’s perpetual profession last week!)

Finally, a last call for those young women who are interested in discernment: Our sisters are offering a very special week-end discernment retreat at our retreat house in Billerica, MA in just two weeks. We’re extending the registration deadline, so please share this with any young woman whom you know is discerning. Depending on how many participants we have, I might be called upon to help out at the retreat.

Have a blessed weekend.

3That Christ May Live in Me_Daughters of St. Paul_Discernemnt Poster_YCL_Consecrated Life_Discernment

I’m temporarily offline but praying for you

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

I’d hoped I’d be able to keep up posting during this week and next, but am not able to. I apologize for the lack of posts, and hope to be back by the end of next week. Know that you have been in my prayers in a special way.

For the young women discerning religious life, I am posting below a couple of retreat opportunities that our sisters are offering this summer. If you are interested (or you know someone who might be), please contact Sr. Michael at the phone number or email provided.

3That Christ May Live in Me_Daughters of St. Paul_Discernemnt Poster_YCL_Consecrated Life_Discernment

 

SaintPaulSummerProgram2015_Flyer_Square_Daughters-of-St-Paul_Discernment_Consecrated-Life

 

 

The Most Important Thing To Do When Discerning

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

The most important thing we can do during our discernment is to listen deeply. Listening is a skill that most of us can improve in, as we tend to talk more than listen. Even if we consider ourselves good listeners with our friends and family, we may still need to learn an attitude of listening in our every day life. In “3D listening,” we seek to listen to God who speaks to us and invites us through:

  • our lives and our whole being (our thoughts, feelings, gifts, limitations, desires, past and present)
  • the people in our lives (including their needs)
  • the “voice” and needs of the community
  • the Church
  • the guidance of a mentor or guide
  • our circumstances
  • the world around us (including the needs of the world)

A really helpful tool for 3D listening is the examen, which we’ll look at in the next post. But one of the keys to learning how to listen more deeply to our lives is to make time and space in our lives to listen.

We will find it very difficult—if not impossible—to listen deeply if we:

  • are constantly running from one thing to the next
  • don’t make time in our day or week for reflection or a meditative/contemplative prayer
  • don’t take time to genuinely relax regularly
  • don’t create quiet moments in our day or week (e.g. our lives are filled with constant “noise” — the radio is always on in the car, the TV is always on in the home, we can’t take a walk without headphones, we are always on the phone with friends, etc.)
  • neglect to put smart limits around our media use (e.g. we never “unplug,” we don’t take breaks from twitter, work email, news updates, etc., or we’re always listening to music or talk radio)
  • work excessively (e.g. workaholism, always being “on call,” or being so absorbed in our work that we only think of ourselves in terms of what we “do” and not who we are)

Many of these obstacles are easy to overcome, depending on our personality and our circumstances. Because of the culture we live in, many people don’t even think about creating quiet in their lives, and yet when they do, they find it can make a big difference in their awareness and appreciate of the beauty of their own lives.

Listening to God is possible only when we take time to pray and nurture our relationship with God. To do that, we need to create occasional (or regular) oases of serenity and quiet. Even the way we pray can prevent us from deeper listening, if we do all the talking and we don’t take time to listen.

Listening prayer can be as simple as starting or concluding our daily prayer with a few moments of quiet, doing lectio divina, or checking in with God and ourselves at the end of the day using the examen.

Follow-up

  • Which obstacles to listening do you struggle with?
  • Choose one way to improve your listening and start doing it today.

Guided Lectio Divina for Discerners: He Loved Me and Gave Himself for Me

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

“He Loved Me and Gave Himself for Me!”

453px-Caravaggio-The_Conversion_on_the_Way_to_DamascusIntroduction: St. Paul, who was known as “Saul” before his encounter with Christ, was a good man and a devout Jew who was quite conscientious about keeping the Law of God. He desired to serve God, but was too focused on what he wanted to do for God, rather than on what God was doing. Saul’s zeal was so misguided that he sought to persecute the Christians, whom he felt were destroying the Jewish religion. On his way to Damascus, instead of accomplishing this task, he encountered Jesus the Savior, who revealed to Paul the depth of God’s mercy and love. Paul’s foundational experience of Christ’s saving and merciful love for him and for the people to whom he would send Paul shaped Paul’s entire life and mission. It was an experience of love, light, and beauty to which Paul returned to over and over again.

For this lectio divina, we’ll pray with one of the Scriptural accounts of Paul’s encounter with Christ from Acts, followed by a short description of the experience from a letter of Paul.

Lectio: Acts 9:1-19 and 1 Tim. 1:12-17

Acts 9:1-19 (Read from your Bible or click here for this first reading.)

1 Tim. 1:12-17

I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Meditatio

The Acts of the Apostles gives three different accounts of the conversion of Saint Paul because of its importance in the early Church (see Acts 9:1-19, Acts 22:3-16, and 26:2-18). In his letters, Paul often refers to his encounter with Christ, although often indirectly (see 1 Cor. 15:8, Gal. 1:11-16, 2 Cor. 4:6).

Initially, Paul had found fulfillment in living the Law to the point of perfection. But his encounter with Jesus changes all that. The brilliance of Jesus’ love and truth blinds Paul initially. He thought he had been able to see, but his temporary blindness enables him to see himself and his relationship with God and others in a whole new way. Paul must have felt great distress for being so wrong, for recognizing that he was persecuting the followers of Jesus, whom he now recognizes as the Messiah, the Son of God, his Light.

In his encounter with Jesus, Paul truly listens. He discovers that God’s merciful love in Christ gives the deepest meaning to his life, and he doesn’t have to do anything to win or earn that love. He just has to believe in it and receive it. Paul’s response is the beautiful and moving response of a discerning disciple, even though his world has just been turned upside down: “Lord, who are you? What do you want me to do?”

Praying with Paul’s dramatic encounter with Jesus, we can see that God may communicate to us in many ways: through an interior whisper or an insight, through others such as Ananias, or through an unexpected event that shakes us up. Jesus’ gaze of mercy on Paul transformed his life forever. But this profound transformation in Paul is not easy, nor is it over in three days. Paul’s growth in Christ and carrying out the call of Christ was lifelong.

In our times of discernment, we may experience similar moments to Paul in his encounter with Christ:

  • disturbance/shake-up (Paul fell to the ground)
  • great light
  • listening/attentive (light and voice)
  • dialogue
  • fasting (from both food and human sight)
  • absorbed in prayer and in one’s relationship with Christ
  • obedient to Christ’s call
  • receiving grace through the community and the celebration of the sacraments
  • guidance of an “elder” of the community
  • community confirms God’s call
  • obedience to the community
  • commitment to the entrusted mission of proclaiming/witnessing to Christ

How do we experience Christ’s invitations in our lives? When we are confronted with interruptions, unexpected changes, or times of transition, it can be difficult to see God’s light or invitation. But suppose we “refocused” our gaze from the distress of the unexpected experience to seeing it as an invitation from God, as Paul did? What insights would we receive if we did this? Discovering that we need to convert, change, or grow is an inherent part of receiving God’s call. How do I want to respond to God’s invitation?

Contemplatio

I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because…I received mercy. (See 1 Tim. 1:12-13)

From the second reading (from 1 Timothy) it’s clear how Paul’s encounter with Christ on the way to Damascus shaped his whole life. Paul’s descriptions of his relationship with Christ are marked by thanksgiving for Christ’s merciful love. It’s a deeply warm and personal relationship. This invites us to reflect:

  • What are our earliest memories of our relationship with God?
  • How have our encounters with Christ “marked” our lives, transformed us? How have I experienced Christ’s mercy, and how have I responded?
  • How would we characterize our relationship with Christ? How do we feel Jesus is inviting us to grow in our relationship with him?

Oratio

My favorite prayer posture is to sit or kneel on the floor near the tabernacle. As I was praying, I suddenly realized that this receptive and adoring posture–sitting at the feet of the Master–characterizes my relationship with Christ. At the feet of the Master, I am receptive to his call and his sending me; I listen, adore, love, receive his love, learn his way of gentleness, plead with him, receive forgiveness. I am blessed to be at his feet.

Sometimes when I’m coming to the end of my prayer time, I will joyfully remind Jesus, “I’m not going anywhere” — meaning that I will stay at his feet always. It’s a little renewal of my fidelity to the All-Faithful One.

Renew your relationship with Jesus in your own words. 

Actio

Be mindful of Jesus’ merciful love for you throughout your day today, choosing at least three times throughout the day where you will stop and thank Jesus for the gift of his love for you.

6 Ways To Recognize God in Our Life

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

Several Christian artists have written songs that refer to God’s “fingerprints” in our lives. We may have to look for them, but our lives are covered with signs of God’s love at work in us, although sometimes these signs are hidden. How can we grow in awareness of God’s presence and saving love in our life? Here are four simple ways to get started:

1. List your life—all the big events of your life. Can you see a pattern of how God has been present in your life? Later, you may wish to bring one of the events on your list to prayer.

2. Choose one of the events in your life that has influenced you and journal about it. (You can also bring it to prayer.)

3. If there’s a time in your life that you feel God wasn’t present, simply bring that hurt to God in prayer and ask him to reveal to you, at the best moment, how God was with you.

4. Make it a practice to bring your day or week to a prayerful review with the examen. (I’ll post more on how to do this later. If you want to get started right away, you can visit Father Michael Denk’s website and download his Examen App.)

Follow-up

Sometimes it is easier to enter into a new awareness by actively doing or creating something helps us to reflect with images, craftsmanship, or physical activity. Try one (or both) of the following:

  • Make a timeline, patchwork, or scrapbook of your own life – which includes both the “outer” or visible significant events of your life, and the “inner” or invisible significant events.
  • Draw your life as a pathway. Has it gone up a mountain, or through a dark forest? What signposts have shown you the way? Have you crossed beautiful meadows? Hit any roadblocks? What are the landmarks or milestones on your path? Where did your path begin, and where does it lead?

Praying with Our Past: Lights and Thanksgiving

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

As we pray with our past, we may see with new eyes:

2) We may begin to see a pattern in certain events of our lives, or recognize how blessed we have been—a recognition we may not have had at the time. We may remember moments that we had dismissed where God touched us deeply.

As a sister, I make an annual retreat every year. People tell me that they admire sisters for making silent retreats—but making retreat is no hardship. Usually, my retreat is one my favorite weeks of the year because I get to spend quality time with my Beloved! Still, if I come to the retreat from a time that is busier or more distracted than usual, sometimes it can take me a couple of days to settle into the deep silence.

One particular year, I remember struggling a bit more than usual to get into the silence and deeper prayer of the retreat. As usual, I prayed with a passage of the Bible, and later in the day went to speak with the retreat director. I talked about what happened during my prayer time, and then moved on to how I was struggling to get into the retreat. After a few minutes, the director stopped me. “Tell more more about your prayer time with that passage,” he encouraged me. “It seems to me that God was speaking to you very powerfully there.”

Startled, I was quiet for a few minutes, then I recalled my prayer and spoke about it. As I spoke, I realized he was right. Several days later, I thanked him for helping me to pay attention to this profound moment where God spoke to me—a moment that I had overlooked because I was distracted by something else! That moment of prayer became the key to my entire retreat.

Praying with our past can be a powerful experience of God’s saving love:

  • We better realize how faithful and intimate God is in our life
  • We grow in trust
  • We come to understand our relationship with God better: how God seems to work in our lives
  • We grow in being able to recognize how God is working in our lives right now

When we pray with our past, we can always conclude our prayer with an act of thanksgiving for how God has revealed his faithful love in our lives.

To Pray With
Luke 24:13-35

After Jesus’ death, the two disciples who left Jerusalem to go to Emmaus needed to share their sorrow and confusion with Jesus. As they unknowingly shared and retold their story to the Risen Jesus, Jesus opened their hearts to the mystery of grace at work in their lives to the point that they were able to understand their time with Jesus in a new way, and eventually recognize Jesus with them in the breaking of the bread.

Follow the steps for Lectio Divina in praying with the beautiful story of Jesus’ Resurrection appearance to the disciples on the way to Emmaus. After your prayer, you may find the following reflection questions helpful:

1. Imagine that you are one of the disciples walking on the road to Emmaus, and you are joined by a mysterious, trustworthy Stranger. Share with him your most recent experience of being angry, betrayed, discouraged, grieving, or lost. How does it feel to tell Jesus how you feel? Does Jesus say something to you?

2. Have you ever had an experience of prayer that set you on fire? How have you allowed that fire to burn, grow, and set your life alight?    

3. The disciples didn’t recognize Jesus on the road. When have you been surprised by God? Where might God be standing in your life right now, or walking alongside you, but unrecognized?

Praying with Our Past: Shadows & Mercy

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

“Salvation history” is how God is at work in the lives of the People of God. Each of us has our own personal salvation history. From time to time, we need to genuinely bring our history to God because our past is such an important part of who we we have become. Praying with our history is not about remembering our past for its own sake, but so that we can discover God’s faithful presence throughout our lives.

When we reflect on our personal history, two things are likely to happen: we experience resistance, and/or we begin to see patterns in our life.

1) We may experience resistance. Perhaps we fear we will be overwhelmed by the pain, suffering, or sinfulness of our lives. It may be too difficult to think about certain times in our lives. If we find great resistance, offer that resistance to the Lord. We need to be gentle with ourselves—we can do this a little at a time, or perhaps simply leave aside the most difficult part of our personal history until we feel ready to bring it to prayer.

Our favorite Old Testament story can be helpful at this point. Very often, the best stories from the Old Testament are about a time of failure, weakness, or infidelity on the part of God’s people. And yet in this darkness, God reveals over and over again his faithful love for his people.

When we have the courage to face the pain or darkness of our past, we receive the grace to experience God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness. Along with many spiritual writers, Father Rupnik agrees that the experience of God’s mercy is the foundational spiritual experience. It is God’s love that shapes us into his people, that places us in his story of salvation. When we recognize that we are truly unworthy, we can discover that God loves us as we are!

Looking back on our life’s journey can help us to see our past more clearly, but the goal isn’t to get lost—or stuck—in our past. Instead, we seek to discover and cherish the ways God has worked in our lives, our own sacred memories. Praying with our past—even the difficult moments—we can allow our  foundational experiences with God to take root in us, nurture our spiritual lives, and build our relationship with God.

When we are praying with difficult experiences in our past, it’s helpful to remember:

* Be gentle with ourselves. If something is too painful to remember, we can wait until we’re ready, until it’s the right time. We can also choose to pray with it with the help of someone we trust, whether a friend, mentor, or counselor.

* God doesn’t will evil for us or for anyone. If we were sinned against, or chose to sin against others—these were not and are not God’s direct will for us. But, just as God turned the most evil and tragic event in all of human history (the crucifixion of his only Son) into the means of the Redemption of all humanity, so God can take any circumstance of our lives—no matter how bad—and bring good out of it. When we pray with painful events from our past, we do so in the hope of discovering (or re-discovering) God’s faithful love. If we cannot see his love, we can make an act of trust in his love, and then pray for the grace to see how God has loved us.

* Focus not on the suffering but on God’s presence. We survived it—how? How we have healed or grown from it? How have we learned from it? Is God inviting us to heal further? Might God be inviting me to use that painful circumstance to remember that God is also mysteriously present in the pain or difficulty that we’re undergoing right now?

To Pray With

  • Pray with Psalm 139.
  • After you have prayed with Psalm 139, write your own version of the psalm. How would you describe how God has been with you and saved you in your life? (For an unusual example, read Francis Thompson’s famous poem, “The Hound of Heaven.”) What image would you use to describe how God acts in your life?

Praying with Your Story

/ Sr. Marie Paul Curley / Leave a comment

Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. (One of my favorite stories from the Old Testament: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. (One of my favorite stories from the Old Testament: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

Just as it is important to “begin where you are,” it can also be helpful from time to time to look back over your life and pray with where you have come from. Even if you are just starting to seek a relationship with God, God has been with you up to this point, even though you may not have recognized his presence. To understand God’s invitations, it is helpful to understand how he has been at work in your life so far.

Every day promises a new revelation of God’s love, yet our God of surprises is also consistent in the ways he works with us. God knows us better than we know ourselves, and so he works with us and within us in the ways that help us to grow, to live in always greater love and greater freedom.

In the powerful film, Freedom Writers, a new teacher at a poor inner-city high school tries to create a learning environment for the students whose worlds have been constantly rocked with racial violence. To help the recalcitrant students recognize their common humanity, she creatively has them share their stories by playing a simple “line game:” If something she says is true about them, they step toward the line that runs down the center of the classroom. Gradually, she leads them from the ordinary (who likes a particular song) to the painful: How many have lost a loved one to gang violence. As the students start to share bits of their stories with their teacher and with each other—simply by stepping toward the line—everything begins to change. The classroom is transformed from a tense potential war zone into a place of community, sharing, learning, and friendships.

Imagine how powerful it would be for us to share our stories with God. The next few posts will encourage us to do just that.

Pen_UncappedTo Journal

A) What is one of your favorite stories from the Old Testament? Why is it a favorite?

B) Can you see a connection between your story and the Old Testament story that you chose? How do you identify with the people in the story? What touches you about the action of God in the story?