RE-LIVING OUR EXPERIENCES
(EXAMINATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS)
We get in touch with God through our daily Experiences.
If we look back to a particular day's experiences, we would realize
that we have had ever so many experiences. Who can count them?
Our experiences give birth to our personal history.
Experiences come in the form of feelings (such as joy, sorrow, anxiety, expectation, spiritual dryness, spiritual consolations...etc.), ideas, questionings, doubts, temptations, inspirations, insights, actions, interpersonal relationships, various other interior movements, participation in spiritual exercises (such as personal prayer, Eucharist, receiving the sacrament of reconciliation, adoration , thanksgiving...etc.)...
It is important to be aware of these experiences in a prayerfully reflective way...
To re-live such experiences means that we love ourselves in a Christian way...
When we re-live our daily experiences we recognize that many of our experiences have a positive orientation towards faith, hope and love. They stimulate us to live a better and more constructive life.. Such experiences are surely life-giving, life-affirming and life-saving.
But, we also realize that we knowingly or unknowingly go through several experiences that have a negative or life-denying orientation. They, in fact, have a tendency to destroy our life of faith, hope and love and leave us in total darkness.
The saying, "An unexamined life is not worth living", assumes lots of significance in this context.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, in his spiritual classic known as "The Spiritual Exercises" (#43) gives us some guidelines as to how to re-live our daily life-experiences in the context of Prayer. What I propose here is an adapted form of that method.
His guidelines regarding this are known as "Examination of Consciousness". Spiritual writers used to refer to this as "Examen / Examination of Conscience". But it is not merely or only an examination of Conscience. It has much wider and deeper perspectives...
A fruitful re-living of our daily experiences (good and bad, positive and negative, neutral, life-affirming and life-denying) in the context of prayer may include the following steps:
1) Choose a convenient time to pray. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen! Spend a few moments of quietening oneself in silence...
2) Gently become aware of the way of breathing in and breathing out... no force...
Just become aware of the way I breath in and breath out...
3) Become aware of the Divine presence in me and around me... (If God is with us, who can be against us?)
3) Focus my memory, understanding and will on the various experiences of the day...
4) First, let me re-live the positive experiences of the day right from the time I got up in the morning to the present moment... Re-live as many experiences as possible... As I re-live the experiences, allow the heart to whisper a prayer of thanksgiving to God who has been present in that experience/s empowering me and moulding me into a new person according His image and likeness...
5) Then, I take up the negative experiences, the so-called life-denying ones...
No need to be anxious here... God is present in the negative experiences too, challenging me to accept them and transcend them. God's love will burn them and purify them...
Becoming aware of the negative experiences means I accept my responsibility in letting them into my life without discerning them... Asking the Lord pardon and forgiveness for the negative experiences is a step in the right direction...
6) Surrender all experiences (life-affirming and life-denying ones) to the healing touch of the Lord with great faith, hope and love. Believe that this great act of spiritual surrender, of course with God's grace, would transform me into a new person. I can confidently face life again precisely because God is love, and He is present in the whole universe, in my brothers and sisters and in me.
7) Let me end with reciting the prayer, "Our Father".
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