McGrath Institute Blog

The Ignatian Examen is a prayer that helps us to identify and pay closer attention to God’s activity in everyday life. When fully adopted, the Examen becomes a habit, a daily inventory of the ways God has been at work in our lives and of the ways that we either have or have not responded to this activity of God.

Growing up, every night before bed, my mom read the Harry Potter books to me. This nighttime ritual of ours grew into a tradition that has been passed down through each of my siblings and has come to be a unifying factor in our family. Over the past couple of years, if I strolled through the living room at just the right time, I could catch a snippet of my mother’s soothing voice recounting the tales of Harry, Ron and Hermione or hear the animated gasps of my two youngest siblings, Noah and Reggie, as they listened in rapture. It was in those moments that I could travel the distance back to my childhood in a split second. Suddenly I’m seven years old again—scurrying into my pink-doused bedroom, worn blue security blanket rippling in my pudgy hands, bouncing into a nest of pillows as my mom cracks open our copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (SPOILERS AHEAD).

Most Catholic parents would agree on the importance of praying with our sons and daughters.  The Church teaches us that we are the primary faith educators of our children, and what better way to teach them about God than by talking to God? That being said, praying with young kids can be difficult at times. It’s hard to get toddlers and small children to sit still for thirty seconds let alone engage in a focused dialogue with an invisible God, and it can be tempting to put off lessons about prayer until our kids are a little bit older.    

The phrase lectio divina means “divine reading” in Latin and is a fitting name for this prayer practice of listening to Scripture with the ear of the heart. Lectio divina (often called “lectio” for short) is a dialogue with God through Scripture that includes the whole self: thoughts, images, memories, desires, etc. The movements within lectio divina involve reading, listening to, responding to and resting in the Word of God. It can be practiced alone or with a community.

On Monday, I would go to Notre Dame, Tuesday, Saint-Sulpice, Wednesday, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Thursday, Sacré-Cœur, and Friday, la Madeleine... I had googled the most beautiful churches in Paris and planned on attending mass at each one during my first week studying abroad. And so every evening, I ventured out into the still unfamiliar city and hid myself behind the massive cathedral columns, peering around at the stunning architecture and struggling diligently to identify familiar French words. And each evening, I would stumble back into the apartment, exhausted but beaming with excitement and a sense of accomplishment.