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January 13 - February 3, 2025
Like a small child who “hides” by covering her eyes, thinking that if she can’t see you, you can’t see her, we think that if we don’t acknowledge what is true about us, maybe God won’t notice it either!
ancient tradition as the examen of consciousness, or what we might call a daily review. This is a simple discipline that helps us to become more God conscious,
The examen of consciousness involves taking a few moments at the end of each day to go back over the events of the day and invite God to show us where he was present with us and how we responded to his presence.
the examen of conscience. It is similar to the examen of consciousness in that it involves reviewing your day or your week, only this time asking God to bring to mind attitudes, actions and moments when you fell short of exhibiting the character of Christ or the fruit of the Spirit. When we enter into the examen of conscience, we are willing to listen without defending and to see without rationalizing.
The examen of conscience involves three elements
The first element is simply seeing something that went wrong in a behavior or an action.
The next move is being willing to name our failure for what it is and also to name what was going on inside us,
The final move is confession.
purgation, in which God gradually strips us of more and more layers of our own sinfulness.
purgation causes us to become aware of unconscious sins and omissions;
final stage in the purgation process deals with the deep-seated attitudes and inner orientations out of which our behavior patterns flow. Here God is dealing primarily with our “trust structures,”
Here we make the devastating discovery of all the ways in which we are captive to our own anxieties, driven by our need to control God and others and impose our own order on things.
get a glimpse of the false self that functions primarily to keep us safe rather than helping us to know how to abandon ourselves to God.
Confession is the endgame in the self-examination process, but it is the part we shrink from the most. Confession requires the willingness to acknowledge and take responsibility not only for the outward manifestations of our sin but also for the inner
Confession requires us to say our failure out loud to ourselves, to God and to the person(s) we have hurt and to take steps to renounce it for Christ’s sake, even making restitution if that is needed.
to stop short of confession is to stop short of the deepest levels of transformation.
Confession, when practiced fully, is personal (between me and God), interpersonal (with a trusted friend or confessor, with the person I have hurt or offended) and corporate (in the context of worship in community). The interplay among these three keeps confession healthy and productive.
when we are confessing our sin to God but not to the people around us in ordinary, nitty-gritty life, there is not much real spiritual transformation going on.
Discernment is first of all a habit, a way of seeing that eventually permeates our whole life. It is the journey from spiritual blindness (not seeing God anywhere or seeing him only where we expect to see him) to spiritual sight (finding God everywhere, especially where we least expect it). Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and best known for developing a set of spiritual exercises intended to hone people’s capacity for this discipline, defined the aim of discernment as “finding God in all things in order that we might love and serve God in all”
The habit of discernment is a quality of attentiveness to God that is so intimate that over time we develop an intuitive sense of God’s heart and purpose in any given moment. We become familiar with God’s voice—
While discernment is listed as a spiritual gift, it is also a mark of Christian maturity. In Romans 12:1-2 Paul is very matter-of-fact in identifying the ability to discern the will of God as a natural byproduct of spiritual transformation,
The Scriptures are clear that discernment, when it is given, is always a gift. We cannot force discernment, but we can find ways to open ourselves to it.
There are at least three beliefs that are crucial for a right practice of discernment. The first is belief in the goodness of God.
Discernment requires interior freedom, a state of wide-openness to God and the capacity to relinquish whatever might keep me from choosing for God.
If we have not yet gotten to a place where we are “quite certain that there is no ‘catch,’ no limit, to the goodness of God’s intentions or his power to carry them out,” we will always hold ourselves back from being fully open to knowing the will of God.
The second foundational building block of the discernment process is the belief that love is our primary calling.
The third foundational building block is the belief that God does communicate with us through the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is given to help us know the demands of love in our situation.
At that point, Sunday was anything but a day of rest in our family. Let’s face it: for church people it is a day for highly programmed services, youth programs, committee meetings, membership classes and small groups that wear everyone out and keep family members coming and going all day.
You will long for a community whose traditions enable you to honor the sabbath rather than making it a day of Christian busyness.
Sabbath keeping is more than just taking a day of rest; it is a way of ordering one’s life around a pattern of working six days and then resting on the seventh.
The day itself is set apart, devoted completely to rest, worship and delighting in God, but the rest of the week must be lived in such a way as to make sabbath possible. Paid work needs to be contained to five days of the week. Household chores, shopping and errand-running need to be complete before the sabbath comes, or they must wait.
