Examen Prayer | Step 5: Renewal Step

The Ignatian Examen Prayer. This practice will help you to slow down, develop an “attitude of gratitude” and pay attention to the presence of the Sacred in your everyday life. The 5th and final step is the Renewal Step.

Transcript

Hi there,

This is Lee,

Britta's husband again sitting in this final time for our last step of the Examine prayer.

And so happy to be sharing this with you today as we put all the pieces together.

So I want to say right off the bat,

If this is the first video you're watching about the Examine,

Go back and watch the others because this is not going to make any sense what we're going to talk about today.

And do spend some time with each of these beautiful steps.

There are five steps to the Examine,

Which we'll quickly review.

And I'm going to assume that you've taken some time to pause and put them all together.

And then I'm going to give you this final step,

The fifth step of the Examine,

Which is really what the whole thing is about.

Just a reminder that Examine prayer is this opportunity for us to dance with grace,

To see the love song that God,

That grace is singing to us and how we participate in it,

And to see it with courage and compassion.

And that'll bring us to our final step,

Which is the renewal step,

The renewal step.

So I'll do a very quick review of the steps that bring us to the renewal step.

And again,

You want to do these,

Spend some time doing these before we open to that last step.

So first step,

The pre-step,

Right?

We remind ourselves we're always and forever in the presence of grace.

Whatever grace is to you,

That very personal image for Ignatius,

Being loved intimately,

That personal notion of God or God's grace.

So whatever that is for you,

You spend some time reminding yourselves that you are in the presence of grace.

Once we do that,

Then we call to mind those gratitudes.

We pray those gratitudes from the previous 24 hours.

What are the gifts,

The blessings and the things that you call to mind and heart that are gifts,

Right?

We're so richly blessed.

And in the words of Ignatius,

It's like,

My eyes are opened.

Just open my eyes to the gratitudes.

That brings us to the next step,

The second step of the exam,

Which is the petition step.

And that is a specific request to grace to say,

Okay,

It's a love song here that you're inviting me to sing with you.

I give you permission.

So that petition step is to give permission to grace.

It's to ask,

Show me how I'm participating in this love song,

Right?

Show me how I'm participating in the love song.

And so we give grace permission.

That's a very courageous thing to do,

Right?

And so once we've done that,

Then we review third step of the exam and we review our day,

Both for the positives and the negatives,

Both for the ways that grace has invited us to participate.

And we've said yes,

And both the ways that grace invited us to participate in this love story,

So to speak.

And we said,

No,

We acted unlovingly.

We want to see both of those.

And notice if you have a tendency to favor one over the other.

Sometimes generally,

As in our human condition,

We tend to either maybe think we're the worst thing ever and we beat ourselves up and everything's awful and terrible and my fault,

Which is really actually a way of not growing in grace,

But so is the other.

Well,

I've done nothing wrong and I'm just,

I'm a font of love,

A pure font of love.

Well,

That's usually not true either,

Right?

And the human condition is a little bit more delicate and important than that.

So see if you favor one over the other.

You want to open yourself to both.

How have I said yes to love and how have I not?

So we take that time to review and then that leads us to the fourth step,

The forgivenesses and let goes for any ways that I haven't,

Or for the ways that I have said yes to love,

I want to celebrate those.

Yes,

Thank you,

Grace.

We're dancing together.

And for the ways I haven't,

We'll put those in the forgivenesses and I let them go and say,

Grace,

You know,

I really didn't,

Wasn't very loving yesterday in this conversation I had with her or him or in this interaction at work.

I'm sorry.

I want to grow in love.

I'm going to give those back to you and drop them in the ocean of the mercy of grace.

And once we've done that,

That's all a setup to our final step,

Which is the renewal step.

The renewal step we might think of this way.

It's one small act of courage.

Having seen what I've seen,

Having learned what I've learned with the cooperation of Grace through this prayer time,

How can I grow in love?

What's one small act of courage,

One commitment I can make in the next 24 hours that having seen what I've seen and having learned something about myself,

What's one thing I can do to grow in love?

So perhaps it's a phone call to someone who I haven't been kind to.

Perhaps it's,

I haven't made space for myself,

You know,

To lovingly celebrate my own life.

Maybe I'm going to add 15 minutes of examine to my daily routine or a celebration or something that feels good and loving,

Right?

Maybe I'm going to open my heart to receive grace from others.

Something that you can commit to.

So I'm going to pause for a moment.

You may want to pause the video here to having let all these steps build up to this moment of renewal and see what you discover through your renewal step.

And this is a step just to get practical about it that you want to accomplish in the next 24 hours.

This is not a step like,

Oh,

I want to be more loving to the world.

I promise it's not that.

It's one specific actionable thing that you can do in the next 24 hours.

And you may want to share it with someone or write it in your journal as a way to be accountable to it.

Okay,

So it's really where the rubber meets the road.

And this is a way of growing in love.

That's why we do it.

It's a way of growing in love.

So each day I can grow and I can become more loving and dance in that love song,

Which is what it's all about more and more.

So let's pause here.

You may want to pause the video and let that,

Let any of these steps come to you and,

And then find that renewal step.

So let's sit in silence for a moment.

And if you need more time,

Certainly take more time,

But I'm going to just conclude here by saying,

Once you found that renewal step,

You commit to it.

And you let it live in you and you celebrate that action of grace in your life until the next evening or morning when you come back to your examine again.

And this is the way the examine can become a daily part of your life.

And my hope and desire for you is that this connection to grace that the examine opens us to becomes a living,

Flowing font of grace and a reminder of this dance,

This participation grace that we were all invited to.

So with that blessings on your day and your journey.