By Mark Argent
One of the less familiar corners of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is the obscurely-named Particular Examen. It lurks in the first part of the Exercises, where the general focus is on sin and the forgiveness of God. The word ‘particular’ is included because the person engaging with the Exercises is invited to keep track of the times when they fall into a particular sin, perhaps making some small gesture (such as discretely striking their breast) each time they catch themselves, periodically taking stock of their performance. Confidently, Ignatius suggests a somewhat unconventional diagram with the purpose of helping people keep track of how they are improving.
On the face of it, this does not seem so helpful. There’s something egotistical about the idea that you can eliminate your sinfulness purely by trying harder, and one of the lessons of psychoanalysis is that to push something away, or in this case fend it off with generalisations, tends to give it real power, often unhelpfully expressed.
Yet, throughout the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius actually places much less emphasis on sin and so much more emphasising the love of God. There is little surprise, then, that he caused the Spanish Inquisition to raise an eyebrow when it sought to expose activities which it did not see as being in keeping with appropriate Christian thought at the time.
One of the modern approaches, which try to catch the essence of Ignatius’ idea in ways appropriate to our times, turns it inside out. Rather than inviting someone to keep track of occurrences of a particular sin, the suggestion is instead to choose a personal motto, and to check in several times a day with how successful one is in living it out. The snag is that people tend to choose a motto emphasising generally good things, often too vague to make much difference. That’s also a long way from Ignatius’ idea of something particular.
An area of the Spiritual Exercises which receives rather more attention are the two sets of Rules for discernment of spirits. Also rooted in late Mediæval spirituality, these have stepped across the centuries more easily. Side-stepping the language of ‘angels and devils’, these provide a toolkit for dealing with the sense that some things draw us to God, some things push us away, and patience is needed because we sometimes get the balance between these things wrong.
One way of using the Particular Examen when things are difficult is to make the assumption that the ‘bad spirit’ has the upper hand, then write down in one column a list of the words that summarise the situation in one column, and, for each word, write in the second column what seems to be its opposite. If the ‘bad spirit’ is behind what’s in the first column, then the suggestion is that the ‘good spirit’ is behind their opposites, so, to make a phrase out of the opposites is to get a quick summary of where the ‘good spirit’ might be pulling.
An example is someone who brought into their prayer a generalised sense that they were ‘not good enough’ and ‘doomed to fail. They turned these into ‘good’ and ‘free to succeed’ and brought about a marked change in their outlook. It could sound like a simple game with words rather than a more meaningful spiritual tool, but it was enough in this case to interrupt the sense of ‘how things are bound to be doomed’ and that God was somehow in collusion with this.
There are a couple of subtleties in play here. One is that the motto is private, so it doesn’t matter if it is a couple of words that wouldn’t make much sense to anyone else. Another is that it is important to change the motto or phrase over time. The purpose of this tool is to deal with a particular moment. When circumstances change, it is important to have the freedom to stop using the motto, or to change it to deal with a new situation in order to get the most out of the experience.
Another subtlety is that this process doesn’t involve looking back into a person’s story, so it side-steps the tendency to be defined by one’s past and gets in touch with the reality that religious experience happens in the present, here and now, though the past or external influences may make this reality harder to see.
This approach is also about actively choosing to expose oneself to particular aspects of the forgiveness of God. This isn’t only in relation to sin, but about the potential for the forgiveness of God to step across barriers, freeing us from those things which would take hold of us and prevent us from moving forward with God, including our guilts, regrets, burdens and pressures.
Identifying where there is a sense of being drawn away from God and using a motto as a way of turning to face in the other direction is to invite God to come close.
