I have been able to pick up Sue’s suggestion to look at this sooner than expected – couldn’t sleep! So I am writing this short article based on a longer article found at http://norprov.org/spirituality/ignatianprayer.htm a very helpful web site.
I am writing this with no direct experience of the examen but with the deepest respect and admiration for those who practice it. I have many friends amongst the Franciscans (who do practice) and they are characterised by a centred calm and earthy relevance that I find rare in others. So perhaps the challenge is for me to give it a go!
This is a form of Ignation prayer that explores the movement of the Spirit in our daily lives as we reflect on our day. There are five simple steps to the Examen, which should take 10-15 minutes to complete. Through this method of praying you can grow in a sense of self and the Source of self; you can become more sensitive to your own spirit with its longings, its powers, its Source; you will develop an openness to receive the supports that God offers.
Before you start: Try to be in a place where you are least likely to be disturbed, and where there is the least amount of external noise. Perhaps you might light a candle to symbolise the start of this activity. Sit comfortably and still yourself; relax, be aware of your breathing, your body and how you are feeling.
1. Recall that you are in the presence of God. As you quiet yourself, become aware that God is present within you, in the creation that surrounds you, in your body, in those around you. Ask the Holy Spirit to let you look on all you see with love.
2. Spend a moment looking over your day with gratitude for this day’s gifts. Be concrete and let special moments or pleasures spring to mind! Give thanks to God for favours received. Also look at your permanent gifts that allow your participation in this day. Recall your particular strengths in times of difficulty, your ability to hope in times of weakness, your sense of humour and your life of faith, your intelligence and health, your family and friends. As you move through the details of your day, give thanks to God for His presence in the big and the small things of your life.
3. Ask God to send you His Holy Spirit to help you look at your actions and attitudes and motives with honesty and patience. The Spirit gives a freedom to look upon yourself without condemnation and without complacency and thus be open to growth. Ask that you will learn and grow as you reflect, thus deepening your knowledge of self and your relationship with God.
4. Now review your day. This is the longest of the steps. Recall the events of your day; explore the context of your actions. Search for the internal movements of your heart and your interaction with what was before you. Ask what you were involved in and who you were with, and review your hopes and hesitations. As you daily and prayerfully explore the mystery of yourself in the midst of your actions you will grow more familiar with your own spirit and become more aware of the promptings of God’s Spirit within you. Allow God to speak, challenge, encourage and teach you.
5. The final step is our heart-to-heart talk with Jesus. Here you speak with Jesus about your day. You share your thoughts on your actions, attitudes, feelings and interactions. Perhaps during this time you may feel led to seek forgiveness, ask for direction, share a concern, express gratitude, etc. You might like to finish your time with the Lords Prayer.
Once you’ve done the Examen a few times, you will find your own rhythm and method. Cover all five points daily with freedom to dwell more on one than another. You might also like to add some music, candles or images to help you pray.
Well – over to you/us! Do add any thoughts or share any experience if you have tried the examen, either in the past or perhaps as a result of reading this.

My local church put on a celebration of work, as a Harvest Festival Event, they plied us with Fair Trade wine and home made humus, prior to a talk from, as it transpired, one of the key movers and shakers from the City of Bristol.  I sat enchanted, as he talked about his faith motivating him in his work, and some of his hopes for the projects he’d been involved in shaping.  I was wide eyed as he talked of a development near me that has bought a sense of pleasure to my regular trip to town, as to how Cabot Circus was supposed to be a place for people – and not purely a market place for big spenders.

He continued to drop the big names as he talked – “Jesus talked about business, in the Parable of the Talents”, he said, as though he’d just been chatting to him down the pub.  “I had to do something, when I realised Bristol had allowed the gap between rich and poor to widen.”  It would be easy to argue that there’s still a gap between rich and poor in Bristol, quite a big one.  Yet as this guy talked about the projects he’d been involved in, I became aware he had impacted me, in my little world, working and studying in Bristol, Bristol is different because a few people got involved in development.

Following the business man, the Vicar promised us, he would introduce us to someone who’d share with us some tools fro transforming our work place, enabling us to bring our skills into our work places.  We were then entertained by the lovely Chloe Goodchild, and I smiled as I tried to relate what she said to my own stress-loaded work place.

And yet on Mon morning, I noticed I was looking at work differently, I noticed things, I smiled.

The shocking thing about this, for me, is that my Christian roots are deeply imbedded in the understanding of transforming work – a concept I’d become subtly detached from.  I recognised I’d been allowing myself to become a slave to church, to go to church meetings – for churches sake!  And here was a service that felt as though it was their to bless me, and my Christian commitment to work and transform work.

I feel a need to review the balance, and re-think where I need to be in relation to church, I had indeed lost sight of my commitment to live before God where ever He put me.  I don’t know how other people manage this work/church balance, or if anyone else has been faced with a challenge to review the time they give to church?  Or how you see your work?, and if your involved in making church happen, how do you build church events in ways that might bless hard working people?

Don’t get me wrong, I have mixed feelings about my current job, I feel silence by the way the bullies trample on younger staff, and have no idea how I can challenge this.  I also feel called to develop other area’s of work, as well as my current day job.

It would be good to hear your work/faith experiences, and any tips for me in bringing the best I can bring to work.  and lets keep praying about the work we’re called to do.

I have just come back from a short trip to a Danish Kindergarten. I was there with work to find out about their practice. I visited 1 kindergarten, similar to most in Denmark it uses forest school practice, however the place we visited is said by some over there to be the best in Denmark!.

This setting is situated in the middle of no where!. It has a picturesque thatched house and is surrounded by woods. The outdoor play area was huge! with the sort of play equipment you would see at center parcs!, zip wires, rope swings etc. For part of the day ( few hrs) we all went into the woods.

I spend a lot of time with nursery’s / children! It’s my job!. I have never had such a sense of peace, calm, and awe and wonder. For me spending time with this group was a “thin place”, a place where I had such a sense of God’s delight. What really stood out for me was the childrens joy, delight at the natural world. The educators and the leader particularly have really nurtured this. Almost every few steps a child would stop kneel down, gently pick up a beetle or a slug, show their friends. This has really challenged me, when was the last time I took delight at the world around me, when was the last time I stopped and stared at a beetle, with a blue belly. It wasn’t just that the children took delight about what was around them, it was that the staff actively encouraged it. The children knew what was ok to eat in the woods and what was poisonous, they happily ate green shoots growing on an old tree bark but knew to not eat the poisonous orange fungi. The staff had so much respect for the children and the world around them, they wanted to share their love of the world with the children.

My challenge to myself and my question for you is do we stop and see the wonder of the world? when was the last time you were in awe and wonder of creation?. On that note I am going to make the most of my day off at home and go for a walk in the meadow near my house to enjoy the creation here!.

I’ve been thinking a lot about vocabulary just recently. About words and titles and the way sometimes they are helpful, and sometimes – not. I’ll try and explain what I mean. We’ve probably all had experience of ‘job’sworth’ syndrome – encountering a person who has been given a particular task to do and is sticking rigidly to it with no intention of thinking for themselves when challenges arise that are outside normal experience. The person is subsumed by the role they have been given. Their normal decision making powers are somehow hampered by a fear of stepping outside a clearly defined set of boundaries. As a result of the job or title they have been given, they are somehow lessened as a person.
As a manager in the past I’ve also experienced the reverse, where giving someone a new area of responsibility (or a new title which helps define their responsibilities), has stimulated them to greater creativity, clearer motivation and a flowering of their natural talents. They have experienced their job or title as a recognition of their worth, and responded by becoming a more rounded person.
Within churches we often see a clearly defined hierarchy with one person at the top called Vicar or Priest. This title helps us to recognise that this is a person whom we can approach for help, a person with some authority in matters with which the church is concerned – positive. But it might also cause us to begin to abdicate our own responsibilities for one another because we assume that the Vicar is in charge of pastoral matters – negative. So my question is, what’s in a name? Do we need titles within the family of faith? And if so, is it time to rethink what those titles should be, in order that they free people to fulfil their potential, rather than shackling them to a job description?

“Thank you for providing this oasis. It has been a life saver” Comment in Messy space comment book

We have just arrived back from greenbelt. We were running Messy Space again this year, along with a worship service. Photos are attached. So often when you are working at greenbelt it can be so busy that the festival passes you by. This year I really want to encounter God, to have a glimpse of his presence and I did!. there were a few special moments for me these were:

Seeing Angela and Laurence working so well with a 17 yr old very disabled boy with cerebral palsy. They enabled him to paint a picture and for his parents to sit in the cafe and have a drink.

Harry and Joel Baker in proost, I was so proud of them, the little boys I once knew have grown into exceptionally talented, confident lovely young men.

Agents of the future- their worship is infectious, creative, mad and wonderful- I really feel I have so much to learn- haven’t got my head round it fully but wow what a session they ran in centaur.

These are just a few moments for me, where I caught glimpses of God’s wonderful multi faceted creation. What were yours?

Came across this quote from Martin Laird, “God is our homeland. Dominant initiatives afoot at the present time, however, seem rather convinced that they know what God thinks, what land God is giving to some, what lands God is taking from others. Lands of ideology, lands of aggression and violence, lands of tribal egocentricity threaten to overtake the land of hope and glory, directing the pomp and circumstance to themselves. This book, by contrast, proceeds from an ancient Christian view that the foundation of every land is silence (Ws 18: 14), where God simply and perpetually gives Himself. This Self-gift is manifested in the creation, in the people of God and their inspired (if stumbling) pursuit of a just society, and most fully, in the Christian view of things in Jesus Christ. This is the homeland to which every spiritual pilgrim is constantly being ‘called home’, as St Augustine says ‘from the noise that is around us to the joys that are silent. Why do we rush about… looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?’… Let us journey home then to the silence of our own fathoms by becoming still”. (Martin Laird ‘Into the Silent Land’)

It’s a great book and challenged me at many levels. Having nearly finished the book I remain passionately challenged about the notion of ‘drilling down’ into myself to find God within… yet stubbornly unable to actually DO IT!!

Any wisdom, experience, ideas about this welcomed! dave

Hiya folks, stumbled on the following article today, and thought maybe a few Sanctuary readers might like to comment on Jimmy’s views.

here’s the opening comments and the link, hope you like it.

“The words of God do not justify cruelty to women”

“Discrimination and abuse wrongly backed by doctrine are damaging society, argues the former US president”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/jimmy-carter-womens-rights-equality

My faith journey moved away from ‘in-depth personalised guidance’ in favour of a ‘love God and do what you want’ approach many years ago when I realised that I, like many other Christians, was hooked into an inflated view of my own importance in Kingdom business! God has been very gracious to me over the last ten years as I have simply tried to understand how to love Him and ensure that this is applied in my relationships as well as the general direction I have taken – His ability to work redemption into my many mistakes has been second to none!

But this guidance thing is a strange business don’t you think. In scripture we have wonderful and bizarre evidence of God guiding in mysterious ways. There was Gideon and his fleece, the Urim and Thummim (stones, a bit like dice I guess, that the priests used to make decisions), you have the early disciples casting lots for Judas’s replacement, Jesus tells his disciples to follow someone to get an upper room etc etc etc! Later day Christianity is just as bizarre it seems to me over guidance! Promise boxes, people who divine their circumstances for clues about the purposes of God, flicking open the bible (I’ve done it myself!), prophecies (often in old testament language!) etc etc etc!

For myself I find a matrix of considerations helps me with guidance, these include; prayer (listening and talking!), discourse (only with others of a sound mind!), scripture, contemplation, sermons (some times!), reflection on my past experience, allowing God to surprise me (!!) and a few other things.

I was wondering – have you come across any good stories about guidance? How do you do it? What do you think of the subject??

Hiya Folk

I’ve recently been thinking about the way words shape my faith, and the way I do and think about things

this is partly in response to a book I’m reading, which I suspect I’ll be posting about as it’s blowing my little mind, and also undoubtedly about the work Mary left us with, only faintly noticed by me at the time I heard it, and yet…

through all the hours we spend in church as Christians, using books and music to celebrate our faith, how do these words shape us? is it that sometimes somethings speaks at a deeper level, or that words allow our inner longings to surface?

perhaps it’s easier to name the things that inspire you than know how they’ve influenced you?

and yet, there are a few books that provide me with such a tangible image, and make easy contact with the material and the supernatural, I feel I’ve found something worth keeping hold of

for me also, growing up in a house dominated by a pervading sense of tragedy, doom, shame and anxiety, my faith journey has been a path of shacking of enough debris to pollute the Thames.  much of this was in the from of words, prickly, itchy words that wouldn’t be ignored, yet turned out to be lies

am only just beginning to explore this, so am hoping to hear your experiences, but will try to give you one for starters

- reading the Psalms has had a vibrant impact on my understanding of my faith, I find the openness to experience and freedom from denial liberating.

looking forward to hearing from you

Forever and for ever a man’s will must await the quickening contact of the Divine.

HEBRIDEAN ALTERS by Alistair Maclean

Mary Palmer

poet and member of sanctuary community

 

Dance

Sometimes life

is cruel with mirrors –

and we dance alone   

 

Sometimes filled

with catastrophic chords

and darkness

 

But sometimes full of light

and the laughter of others.

 

Through it all, help us

to trust You call the tune

to learn how to move

through our lives with grace.

  

 

Healing

Heal those feelings in me

brittle as leaf skeletons

that shatter to touch

 

those bruised memories

stamped as leaves to mud

those buds turned black

 

help me forgive

inspire new shoots to flourish

turn gentle to the sun

Amen

 

Sculptor of stars and dreams

director of the storm

and moods of the sea

breathe words of healing through me

Amen

 

Forgive us when we disable others

ignore them, turn our backs

refuse to allow for their needs

their difference.

 

Help us to face our own crippled soul

our own blindness and deformities.

To see with your eyes, the beauty there

and in accepting ourselves, love others.

Amen

 

Three in one

an eternal knot

bind us to you

 

Three in one

untangle hard knots

of our own making

 

Three in one

strengthen our ties

with one another

Amen   

 

 all by Mary Palmer,  published in ’sanctuary – pocket liturgies’ Proost 2007