The examination of consciousness – or the Examen prayer – is a staple in the lives of all Jesuits. We all do it, and with good reasons. It allows us to see how the Lord has (or has not) been working in our lives each day; we see his fingerprints, and we also see which area of our lives need the grace of God so to further more growth. I shall hereby use two analogies to highlight its importance.
For those of you who have had the opportunity to work with quantitative data in any kind of research, or if you recall the days of good ol' high school math, you will know the graph with the x and y axes. It is often on such a graph configuration that we plot our data points, to see what our results are telling us. If we have a few data points, we may be able to see how the line is shaping up, but we simply cannot be sure of its accuracy. On the other hand, we can be much more certain of the shape of the graph – and hence what the data are indicating – when more data points are collected and plotted. A line with 25 data points is much more reliable than that with 5.
