He became aware of the strange life he was leading, of him doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
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It was another thing she’d let her husband talk her into. Along with the visit to his mother that weekend (she’d fallen again because she refused to use her walker and now had a welt on her forehead the size of a golf ball), and the evening in the cold outside his office the night before (he’d dropped the key through the slats in the floorboard; they spent two hours experimenting with various ways to retrieve it; the hot dog skewers finally did the trick—her idea. “I’m so grateful you’re here, honey,” he’d smiled as he unlocked the door and walked to his desk and grabbed his phone.) The Lenten faith enrichment talk. “It might inspire you,” he’d said.
Did this sort of thing ever inspire her? The apple juice in plastic cups, the plastic fold-up chairs, the parish hall with the shimmery beige floor that radiated the same cold she felt from the people sitting around her. She winced when the Jesuit headlined his talk with “consolations” and “desolations.” Oh brother. She’d heard this one before. She turned and looked at the exit in the back of the room, considering options. She could go to the bathroom and not return, meet her husband afterwards. But what to do in the meantime? She conceded to hear him out.
He was tall, lean, mid 60s. Listening to him transported her back to the halls of her high school lined with yellow lockers, the student Mass every Friday where she sat in the back with the choir, the scratchy navy blue blazers. Living life at the core, he said, means listening first, then acting. God dwells within us, at the center of our being; His aim is for us to live a life of abundance. And so this listening entails cultivating a keen awareness of your moods and inner life. The stake of acting without reflection is that a person’s life becomes characterized by unfulfilled desires and meaninglessness. You might have an epiphany one day at your job, where you think, What the hell am I doing in this meh wasteland, day in and day out? With these awful people? How did I even get here? I can’t see how any of this has to do with me.
Listening, then, is critical, to finding fulfillment, to living with meaning. St. Ignatius developed a spiritual exercise for listening, reflecting on our lives. Back to the consolations and desolations. These describe states that you may find yourself in throughout the day; they serve as beacons. You identify these states by listening to your heart, not your intellect.
Consolations are outpourings love. It’s in these moments that God is manifest. They are moments that instill joy, positivity, hope; feelings of warm, deep interior peace and contentedness. It’s the thrill of hearing news of a baby’s birth, the sweetness of praying the rosary on a walk through the woods in the snow, the connection established from visiting a friend, sharing and unloading and knowing again all the details of each other’s lives.
Desolations are the opposite. These moments mark an absence from God. They’re circumstances that leave you feeling slothful, agitated, unsettled. It’s a conviction that all is not right with the world, that things aren’t going to work out. The shoe is about to drop. Desolation triggers memories of trauma, humiliation, acute unfairness. It’s that island from Narnia where the dreams come true; but they are the scary dreams that compel you to shriek into the night and you wake yourself up and spend the wee hours of the morning lying in bed, unsettled and shaken. It’s a sense that there is someone sinister outside, he’s right at the door, clawing and angry, intent on finding you.
His exercise is called the Examen. It’s generally done at the end of the day, and starts by praying to the Spirit for insight, then placing the day before you, like a bag full of groceries set on the kitchen counter after a trip to the store. You take out a various incident or exchange, as the Spirit leads you. You handle it, look at it, evaluate it. But the focus isn’t on the event itself, but rather on your interior reaction to it. Did it bring about feelings of hope, positive energy, joy? Or rather, did it generate confusion, agitation or malice? Oftentimes, this process of stepping away allows you to identify interior movements that you didn’t recognize as they transpired. These insights provide signposts for future action; they inevitably invite change and repentance.
The fruit of a daily Examen isn’t self-perfection, but a life lived at the core, in the Spirit. It yields a supernatural hope for the future…
She sits back and closes her eyes. Memories and phrases pass through her mind. One day at a time. Let go and let God. Their trip up the Redwood Highway, through the Oregon coast, to Astoria and Aberdeen. The logs floating in the river, that enormous dilapidated building with the sunken roof and the long narrow dock stretching over the water. Her husband noting how the architecture was quintessential Pacific Northwest. The swimming holes; how he insisted on diving into all of them, even the gross ones covered in films of white sludge. Her best friend, Bonnie, and her husband, Chad, his cowlicks and curly hair, and how they’d summit every quarter off in some cabin they’d rent for the weekend; escape the noise and chaos of their lives to strategize where they wanted to be.
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