December 20, 2004

"Looking at Ourselves"

We need to take time in prayer to come into the inner silence, the inner solitude, and try to become aware of the inner Presence within.  We need to let Him reveal who we really are.  We need to ask Him to show who we are in His eyes.  Repentance means change; it means to become a child.  It's a process.  It doesn't happen overnight. 

There are many voices that we have listened to in the past.  There are voices of the world and voices of our parents.  Have you ever had a parent say to you or heard an adult say to a child, "You're never going to amount to anything.  You're going to be just like your dad or just like your mother"?  We listen to these voices.  Or we listen to our peers at school.  Some of the cruel things that children say to one another!  Some of the cruel things that teachers say to children!  We also live out of the voices of our own flesh.  The flesh is always clamoring away.  Sometimes we listen to the voice of the enemy.  It takes discipline to hear God's voice with all these other voices going on inside of us.  There is so much hurt and rejection.  These things have to be worked through.  The old, false self has to be stripped away.

There is selfishness in all of us.  All of us have something in us that wants to be the sun and have everything else revolve around us.  When we're in His Presence, we can admit these things.  The great temptation that Satan offered to Eve, and she passed on to Adam, was that "God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad" (Gn 3:5).  That's exactly what Eve wanted-to be like God.  That's what we want, and our actions show it and say it: "We want to be in control.  We want to be strong.  We want to be independent.  We want to be God."  It's okay to be Godlike, but the false gods in our lives have to go. 

When we come into prayer and stand in the Presence of Truth, pure Truth, these false gods will go very quickly.  Things will begin to happen when we take His word personally and seriously.  This is listening to Jesus, and listening in a deep sense is obeying.  We are going to start doing something about whatever we understand Him saying to us.  Our lives can change remarkably fast now.  We will come to know that anyone who truly listens to God is learning that God truly is love.  He is pure love.  We will come into our true presence, our real self. 

One of the blocks to this is not being aware of who we really are.  The examen of conscience will help us in this active purification.  St. Ignatius said that he would rather have his disciples miss their meditation than miss their examen.  Isn't that something?  He certainly didn't want them to miss their meditation time.  But he said that if we have to choose, skip the meditation because the examen of conscience is too important.  If we wish to overcome our faults, we have to be aware of them.  The experts advise us to work on one fault at a time.  Just take one at a time.  If we take everything at once, we could get so discouraged that we may not even begin! 

So we take one specific area that the Spirit has revealed to us that is blocking us from a genuine encounter with God-some area that is blocking our growth in holiness, our in-depth spirituality, good witnessing, personality flaws, being a good parent, our vocational call.  We take that one thing that is blocking us and we stay with it for a week.  It could easily be gone by then.  Then we take something else.  This helps us to face ourselves very honestly.  For those who have not done this before, it is good to have a specific time of the day, whether right before bed or in the shower or whatever, where we can take three minutes to examine ourselves.  It doesn't take long, but for those who are accustomed to it, it has become a habit.  The Little Flower didn't have a certain time of the day when she did this because she was habitually conscious of this and would fall to her knees right then and there and tell God that she was sorry.  She would ask for His healing right then. 

A prayer life without a healthy and humbling self-knowledge, which this examen brings, would very likely become shallow and could lead to false mysticism, self-centeredness, and practicing the presence of self rather than the Presence of God.   

Excerpt from Contemplative Prayer series, "Bearing Fruit in the Word," Omaha, NE, 1984.