2nd Sunday of the Year A

The fact that we have green vestments today after the white of Christmas is the liturgical equivalent of ‘back to auld claithes and purridge.’ It reminds me of the old saying that God must love ordinary people, because he has created so many of them, except that we’re talking about Sundays. There are fifty two of them in the year, thirty three of which the liturgy calls ordinary, and if we can understand the significance of this, the central importance of the ordinary in the life of anyone who is seriously seeking to know God, we will have understood something very important.

And yet it’s not always easy. There’s something in us, something quite deep and quite primitive, which expects to find God, not in the ordinary, but in the extraordinary. We see it in the Gospels. People are always asking for signs and you can sense Jesus’ frustration at this. At one point Philip asks him when he will show them the Father, to which he replies, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me.” And we see it down through the ages as people flock to see the sun spin or chase after the latest fad promising often good but naïve people a quick spiritual fix. It’s as if Jesus had never come into the world, as if the Word had never been made flesh and lived among us, as if Christmas had never happened. Like the people of Palestine two thousand years ago we rub shoulders with God every day, he is clos to us in the ordinary events of our daily lives, and we are too busy seeking him in the extraordinary to notice. And so I would like to offer to you this morning, not for the first time, a tool which can help us move beyond all this and begin to see what is staring us in the face. It’s called the Examen of Consciousness, it comes from St Ignatius, it helps millions find God in everything that is ordinary and there’s something about it this week on the back of your bulletin. But you can read that later.

For anyone who is serious about using the examen to unlock the mystery of God in the ordinary, there are five simple steps which need take no more than ten minutes to go through, usually towards the end of the day. And the first is to give thanks. This is something you might think would come at the end of prayer, but coming at the beginning of the examen it’s an act of faith in the fact that God has been present in this day whether I have been aware of it or not. The conviction that this is true, that God is active in our lives, is the whole basis of this prayer and without it there’s little point in going any further.

The second step is to ask for guidance or enlightenment. If we are to become aware of the movement of God in our lives each day it will not be by simply thinking about it. Only the Spirit of God can reveal to us what we are looking for in the examen and so we ask the Spirit to do this; to unpack the day for us and enable us to see and understand what was going on in it as we move on to the third step, the longest of the five, which is the reflection on the day itself.

Sometimes when talking to people about this stage I have used the image of replaying the video of the day. Recently, however, when I tried to buy some blank videos for my Dad, I was told by the man that they were now obsolete, so I suppose I will have to start talking about the DVD just as they, too, become obsolete in the face of all these new machines which do it all themselves. But whatever image we use, this third stage is about going over the day and allowing God to draw our attention to key moments or events, always bearing in mind that what the Spirit thinks significant may not be what we thought was significant. But what is it we do with these significant moments?

Well, we go more deeply into them by first of all acknowledging honestly to ourselves what exactly happened, how we were feeling and how we reacted to both the feelings and the events. Honesty and openness to this along with a developing self-knowledge are vital to the examen given that they are the key to what lies even deeper. And what lies even deeper is the movement of God in us along with what we could call ‘the counter- movement’ a movement which resists and opposes the movement of God, a movement which people down through the ages would have called the movement of Satan. Ignatius, of course, called the first consolation and the second desolation and it is evidence of these two at work that we are looking for in the examen. And at least in their more obvious forms it is not too difficult to tell the difference between them. Consolation, being from God, builds up faith, hope and love. It’s entirely consistent with Jesus and everything he stands for: compassion, refusal to judge, love for our enemies, reaching out to those in need and so on. Desolation, on the other hand, undermines faith, hope and love and grows out of everything Jesus calls us beyond: envy, hatred of self and others, selfishness in all its shapes and forms, rash judgment and all the rest. Both consolation and desolation will be at work deep within us in the course of any given day and the purpose of step three of the examen is uncover them and see them for what they are.

Steps four and five are quite simple. Four is to thank God for the times when we have been guided by consolation and express our sorrow or regret for other times when Satan has been our guide before moving to the last part of the prayer which is the future. For most of us, life is quite repetetive. We do the same things, meet the same people and generally react the way we have always done. But as we grow in knowledge of ourselves and how consolation and desolation are at work in us, there opens up before us the possibility that we can begin to change some of our destructive patterns of behaviour. And so the examen ends by asking God to help us do this.

Use it well, and, more and more often in the course of all that happens to you you will find yourself saying those words of John the Baptist: There he is! ‘There’s the lamb of God.’


BIDDING PRAYERS


Over Christmas we celebrated the mystery of the Incarnation by which God became part of our world and part of our human experience. And so, as we begin our journey through the Ordinary Sundays of the Year, we ask for the grace we need to recognize the God of the Incarnation in everything that happens in the course of our ordinary daily lives, leaving behind the primitive notion that God will be found in what is spectacular, extraordinary or miraculous…………..Lord hear us

In today’s Gospel, John sees Jesus walking towards him and immediately knows within himself that this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John did not know this because he had worked it out for himself. He knew it because the Spirit of God had revealed it to him. And so we pray for a profound openness to the movement of that same Spirit in ourselves, revealing things to us which, left to ourselves, we could never know………………….Lord hear us

The Examen of Consciousness is a way of praying designed to help us recognize the movement of the Spirit in our lives. It involves recognizing that there are other spirits at work in us too, tendencies and inclinations which are in direct conflict with the Spirit of God, and for this to happen we need to grow in self-knowledge. With God’s help we move beyond self-delussion and pretence, exposing to the light of truth the things deep within ourselves which move and motivate us. And so we pray for this grace for evryone present here today………….Lord hear us.

Consolation and desolation are at work, not just within the lives of individuals, but within society too. Deep within everything that happens God is calling humanity to new ways of living rooted in the Gospel. But there are other spirits at workd too, pulling us in the opposite direction. These are the spirits of atheism, consumerism, materialism and so on. And so we pray that the world will learn to respond to the movement of God and reject what, since it is fundamentally false, is inevitably harmful and destructive too……………………….Lord hear us

As he begins his First Letter to the Corinthians today, St Paul wishes the people of that city ‘grace and peace.’ The Mass each week often begins with that same greeting, recognizing that the grace and peace we speak of come from the Father, through Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. The reason Jesus came into the world was to show us the Father and this is only possible because the Spirit lives and moves in us. And so we pray that, every time we come her for Mass, we will enter more deeply into this great mystery…………………………………………….Lord hear us

When we run after the latest story of a statue that moves or some other similar kind of apparent marvel, basing our faith on such things rather than on God himself, it is usually a sign that we continue to inhabit the world of religion rather than faith. And so we pray for all who are constantly caught up in such things which, by their very nature, never satisfy and so are always in search of the next miracle, that we or they will come to know the God of the Incarnation, the God of the ordinary……..Lord hear us