"About This Life" (Acts 5:20) # 9
I have been created by the God of
Love, and re-created by the redemptive Love of Jesus. My heart has a deep
desire to experience love and to become whom I behold in contemplative prayer.
Yet, both my heart and mind need to be reformed if I am to be aware of and
respond to the call of love more generously. The gift of a sensitized,
interior awareness is a most essential gift of the holy Spirit desperately
needed today. St. Paul speaks to the Corinthian community about this gift
of awareness: "Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith. Test
yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?" (2
Cr. 13:5).
Today, many people in our culture
unfortunately find themselves living daily life often in an 'atmosphere' of
incessant busyness, noisiness and distraction. How imperative it is, then, to ask the holy Spirit for a gift of interior
awareness and recognition--to be sensitive to the loving presence of God in my
daily life; to be able to recognize God's love and to respond to it; and, to be
able to say with the beloved disciple in my daily living, "it is the Lord"
(John 21:7).
In his book, The Hidden Self Grown
Strong, Fr. George Aschenbrenner, S.J. speaks of
the essential, daily need to make time for a "consciousness examen"
(a formal examen or awareness examen).
This is a time each day of holy Spirit-led prayer that focuses on how God has
loved me in the ordinary details of this particular day. I hold up my day to
the light of the Father's love that is always available to me through each day.
As I make the formal examen a daily practice my heart
becomes more aware of God's ever-present love, and also more aware of "how
often and how easily [I] can be oblivious to that, or refuse to respond to
love. This realization awakens [my] heart with healthy guilt with sorrow and
repentance (which are experiences of God's love as well)" (Aschenbrenner,
p. 107). As I encounter "God's forgiveness in Jesus as a repentant sinner
sorrow is transformed into hopeful, vigorous gratitude and a zeal burning to
serve God's loving justice in the world" (Aschenbrenner,
p. 107).
This justice is God's merciful
fidelity to His saving will revealed above all in Jesus. Jesus brought about
this loving justice through the sacrificial offering of his life on the cross.
Jesus desires to continue to live this victory of justice through the humanity
of each contemplative intercessor:
"I, the LORD, have called you for
the victory of justice, I have grasped you by the hand; I formed you,
and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations..." (Is.
42:6-7)
Scriptures: Luke 24:15-16; 1Cr. 3:16;
Questions:
1)
Do
I make the time each day for an awareness examen in
order to "get in touch" with the moments of God's love?
2)
Am
I aware as well of at least a few of the times each day when I have been too
self-preoccupied or when I have refused to respond to God's love?
