In all things and at all times
Seasons, moments and the gift of the Examen (discernment part 7)
Welcome to all who have recently joined Why not be a saint? Grateful for you here. As a quick update, I’ve been working through a series of newsletters on discernment. I think it’s a woefully missing skill for many Christians but a vital part of our witness to the gospel. Hope you find this series helpful. As always, I welcome your interaction, and if you like what you read, please share it with others (it’s all free here at Why not be a saint?)
What time is it? A quick check of your clock and calendar will tell you: Wednesday April 16, 2025. But I could also tell you that it’s Spy Wednesday1, Holy Week, 2025. That’s an entirely different telling of time.
Common today is an understanding of time stripped of most meaning, a boiled down reduction of equal measures of duration, one minute ticking to the next, now no different from then. But our clocks betray us - not all moments are equal.
You probably know the experience. A moment arrives that reconfigures your living: a diagnosis is given, an affection is kindled, a truth is revealed, a plus sign appears (or never appears) on the test stick, and the tectonic plates of your life have shifted. Now and then are worlds apart.
James K.A. Smith’s How to Inhabit Time is a wonderfully rich meditation on the spiritual significance of timekeeping. “Knowing when we are can change everything”2 writes Smith. Christianity takes history seriously because time is the landscape where God makes himself known. God meets us where we are, which includes our place in history. We have no experience of God but in time.
This might strike you as rather abstract theologizing but its utterly practical. Smith notes that “faithfulness requires knowing when we are in order to discern what we are called to.”3 Yet we so often fail to take stock of the time, the moment, the era we find ourselves in. The questions we rightly wrestle with are not only about what must we do, but also what does faithfulness call us to do now.
Wise discernment involves alert attention to the nuances of what time it is, in our lives and in our world. The men of Issachar, Scripture tells us, “understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” (1 Chronicles 12:32) They saw something in the moment that called for a response appropriate to the time — because not all time is equal.
Discernment is always nested in the knowledge of what time it is. Ignatius, our patron saint of discernment, understands discernment as the invitation to find God in all things. It’s no stretch, then, to include in our understanding of discernment the capacity to find God at all times.
One way to discerningly inhabit time is to observe the important reality of seasons. This metaphor from nature calls us to live in harmony with the changing conditions in spring, summer, fall and winter. What season is it in your life and how does a particular choice or decision fit within this season?
Ecclesiastes 3 tells us there is a time for everything but they don’t happen at the same time (although Spring here in Ontario regularly swerves between fall, winter and spring within hours). Wisdom says we sow in spring, grow in summer, harvest in fall. You can try to fight the seasonal reality all you want but it’ll smack you in the head. So what time is it in your life - is it a time of building? A season of harvesting or healing? A time to give up? To uproot? To give birth to something new? To release something? Timing is not everything but it is important in becoming a discerning person.
Right now I’m learning how to be a parent to adult children. My oldest is finishing third year university studies and the youngest wrapping up first year nursing studies. The child that left in late August for university is not the same child who will return home this spring. It would be parental malpractice to respond to my children as I did when they were five or even fifteen. The season of their growth and maturation as emerging adults necessitates a shift from guidance to companionship, less instruction and more listening.
At the same time, I find myself in another marital season. My wife and I are rediscovering life as a couple, but not like the first flush of romance. It would be strange to try to replicate that original cocktail of hormones, desire and infatuation. On the other side of many years and seasons, where age has softened both bodies and hearts, with so much less to prove and still so much more to learn, we are re-orienting ourselves in this season, enjoying companionship on the long course of love (and do read Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love, who wonders why we only have love stories about the start of love? Where are the tales of couples who walk the full course of love?)
We will not discern well without an awareness of the season we are in. Without a sense of time and history, we become a prisoner of the moment and no longer know how to read or treasure or receive the gift of our days.
The contemplative Christian tradition trains us to find God not only in stretches of seasons but also in each passing moment. So much of our lives is a shuffling through small, seemingly insignificant, moments. It’s the mundane and menial, the routine, boring and dreariness of much living. Is all of this a waiting line for something more to happen, for ecstasy or transcendence crash into our daily living?
Not a bit - God is present in the everyday, whether or not we witness Him. Think of Moses looking at a burning bush. I remember hearing Rabbi Lawrence reflect on Exodus 3, noting how it takes kindling four to six minutes not just to burn, but to burn up and be consumed (the text tells us that “Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.”) Here is Moses, taking four to six minutes to simply observe a pretty ordinary fire, only to discover the bush is not burning up but instead it is the presence of God the burns. Our lives are filled with moments like this, the ordinary flaming out with holiness, too often passed over because of a failure of attention.
In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius offers a gift to form eyes that find God in all things and at all times. It’s a prayerful exercise called the Examen, a cornerstone discipline in developing the discerning heart. Since we mostly live harried and hurried lives, pressed by multiple concerns and pushed in multiple directions, we easily miss God’s presence with us throughout the day. The Examen trains us to pay attention to the ways God meets us with the hours of our day, sleuthing for the sacred all around us.
The practice of the Examen is simple. You review your day (hour by hour, and only the past 24 hours) and ask yourself two questions: where today was I most closely connected to God, to life and to others? (and variations like: where today did I experience gratitude? Where was I able to give and receive the most love today? Where today did I feel most alive and energized, shining with peace or joy?), and secondly, where today did I sense being disconnected from God, life and others? (along with variations like: where today was my heart curdled by ingratitude? Where today did I feel depleted and drained of life? Where did I withhold or close myself to love? Where did peace and joy leach away?).
The Examen trains us to become detectives of divinity in each day, attending to the feelings, actions, attitudes and words of the day, and prayerfully exploring them. It takes effortful, intentional practice to become the kind of person who is able to find God in all things and at all times. Disciplines like the Examen help us become attentive to the presence of God and his love which surrounds us and calls out to us all day long.
Author Annie Dillard observes, “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
The examen is the practice of being there; being present, awake to the God who meets us everywhere and always.
Holy Week has a story for each day: Lazarus Saturday, Palm Sunday, Great Monday, Fig Tuesday, Spy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy (Black) Saturday, Resurrection Sunday. Check out Wikipedia’s page on Holy Week here.
James K.A. Smith, How to inhabit time, p. xiii.
Smith, p. 19.