I would now like to complete what I have called my blue-print for prayer by using each letter of the two words – OUR FATHER by turning to the last two letters ‘E’ and ‘R’. ‘E’ can remind us of an extremely ancient practice called the Examination of Conscience.
At the very beginning of every Mass we start by examining our consciences. We do this so that we can see ever more clearly the sin and the selfishness that can alone prevent us from offering ourselves to God with a ‘pure and humble heart’, and all that can prevent us from receiving his love in return.
What happens on the day that we go to celebrate Mass with the whole Catholic community, should also happen every day of our lives. For if we are going to imitate Christ and the way He lived His life, we must endeavour to make every day of our lives into a sacrifice as Jesus himself did, offering everything that he said and did to His Father and receiving his love in return.
Examination of Conscience
Whilst staying for a brief time at a Cistercian monastery I met the holiest man I have ever known. He had been in spiritual darkness for many years. Then, one day he became ill and was admitted to the monastery infirmary where he received Holy Communion each day. On three distinct occasions, just as he was about to receive communion, he heard these words, “Only you have been keeping Me out.”
We are doing exactly the same and that is why the letter ‘E’ in the blueprint is to remind us to examine our consciences each day, to pause for a few moments to review our lives since we last prayed. It is time to ask God to show us everything we have done or failed to do that has kept Him out and resolve to try to do better next time with his help and strength that we must daily seek in personal prayer.
However in recent years and by recent years I mean in the last five hundred years or more an unwelcome trend had seeped into Catholic Spirituality that is light years away from the spirituality of the first Christians. Let me explain by telling you a story that is attributed to the Cure d’Ars. He tells of the man who would come into church several times a day, hold his head in his hand when he wasn’t beating his breast and audibly bemoan his sinfulness. One day he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned round to find Christ looking at him full of compassion. John, he said, “Why do you spend all your time thinking of yourself and your miserable sins. Can you stop and spend a little more time thinking of me?”
Modern Catholic Education – a False Start.
When, at the hight of the Renaissance John Colet founded St Paul’s school in London, then of course a Catholic school, it was to introduce into that school a form of moral education that owed as much to Roman stoicism as to Christianity. All other schools followed the example of St Paul’s. The words of the Delphic Oracle, ‘to know thyself’ was the starting point for what was predominantly a stoical spirituality to make oneself perfect. Then, having discovered the moral morass that enthralled them, they turned to the teaching of the great stoics to discover how to make themselves perfect. What was taught in the schools, with the rise of Humanism after the Renaissance, most particularly in the public schools, and grammar schools, was continued, but in a far more demanding way in religious life, at least for beginners.
What seeped into secular education then began to seep into the religious education taught to Novices in their noviciates, most particularly in the new anthropocentric congregations.
How Religious Renaissance men are made
Would-be religious stoics were taught to spend at least two sessions a day mulling over their human misery, with the help of a little book where their daily faults and failings had been written down. Beads were used to count the time they had been tempted and how they had failed or succeeded. And just in case they still did not see the enormity of their sinfulness, fellow novices were encouraged to humiliate them publicly by confronting them with their version of the truth about themselves, aided and abetted by superiors. I am not speaking from hearsay or book knowledge, but from personal experience of how ways to perfection that were outlawed in the early Church wormed their way into Catholic secular and spiritual education after the Renaissance. And they are still with us today in many different guises. It seems that one of the greatest compliments that you can pay a man today, and it usually is a man, is to describe him as a Renaissance man!
The examination of conscience or the examen or whatever you call it should be comparatively brief and should lead a person to realise that sin will never be conquered without the strength and the support of the love of Christ in daily prayer. The main point of daily examination of conscience which should be brief therefore, is not to determine how were are going to overcome it, but how in future we are going to have more quality space and time for the prayer in which to turn to the only One who can do for us what we can never do for ourselves. Above all else at the examination of conscience continually review how much time you are giving to the prayer from where alone your salvation, your redemption, your transformation and your transfiguration will come.
Repentance
Nevertheless when sin has been committed, it is time to repent by making an Act of Contrition for how we have failed in the past. A formal act of contrition could be used, or perhaps the recitation of what came to be called the ‘Jesus Prayer’ said several times over, slowly and prayerfully – ‘Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’.
But a sincere expression of personal sorrow, in our own words would be better still. Then we could make a firm purpose of amendment, a genuine decision to try and behave better in future. Finally, as we become a little more aware of the moral stumbling blocks that trip us up, it is time to try and forestall them.
If there is a lazy streak in us, or if we have a hot temper, or are prone to making unkind remarks at the expense of others, it is the time to take the necessary steps to avoid falling into these same faults in the forthcoming day. However, the realization that only God’s grace, his goodness, his loving kindness can alone make you into a new person in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ should be paramount. If as the Gospels say you are to become as perfect as God is perfect you must keep reminding yourself that the way forward depends more on prayer than anything else. Endless concentration on self leads to scrupulosity, endless concentration of God leads to sanctity. That is why yet again and probably not for the last time I quote St Teresa of Avila – “There is only one way to perfection and that is to pray, if anyone points in a different direction then they are deceiving you”.
In order to develop the prayer that can continually help us to raise our hearts and minds to God as we practise the asceticism of the heart please follow the Podcast on prayer on this web-site entitled The Hermit – Wisdom from the Western Isles
Not obsessing over how miserably awful I am. Letting God work on me. Makes sense.
And reminds me of a snarky ‘ninth Beatitude’ – ‘Blessed are the miserable, for they shall spread misery.’ I shouldn’t joke, maybe. I’ve run across attitudes not unlike that.