About
Welcome to a new take on a 500-year-old prayer.
Reimagining the Examen is a fresh and customized prayer experience inspired by St. Ignatius’s Examen, a practice that helps you review your day with God. With modern Examens tailored to your mood, needs, and situation, our app invites you pray from where you are, wherever you are. Choose from more than thirty guided reflections about relationships, pending decisions, and gratitude, or select the day’s allotted reflection.
Either way, you’re swipes away from a small but mighty practice—one that brings clarity, mindfulness, and grace, and invites God into your nitty-gritty.
Reimagining the Examen, created by Loyola Press, is based on Mark Thibodeaux, SJ’s best-selling book, Reimagining the Ignatian Examen, which offers flexible and adaptable versions of the Examen.
What is the Examen?
St. Ignatius of Loyola created the Examen to be a very short prayer that can be prayed at any time. In the Examen, we review our recent past to find God and his blessings in our daily life. Ignatius would say that the Examen should be the most important moment of our day, because this moment affects every other moment.
How Do I Pray the Examen?
There are five simple steps to the Examen, which this app leads you through:
- Relish the moments that went well and all of the gifts you have today.
- Request that the Spirit lead you through your review of the day.
- Review your day.
- Repent of any mistakes or failures.
- Resolve, in concrete ways, to live tomorrow well.
Benefits
The Examen brings our God’s presence into the mud and muck of our day. It helps:
- unite you even closer to God;
- reveal God’s perspective on your everyday life;
- stir you to praise God for the countless gifts that have popped up in your day, and to find God’s presence in those gifts;
- give you an opportunity to recognize and apologize for your faults, and to grieve your failures and hurts and receive healing from them;
- bring insight into what is really going on beneath the surface of your thoughts, words, and actions—into the very source of your motivations;
- you discern how to handle the trickier aspects of your life, to know what gifts you need from God to do the right thing tomorrow, and to ask God for those gifts explicitly.
Mark E. Thibodeaux, SJ
Speaker, author, and spiritual director
