Rummaging for God: Praying Backwards through Your DayBy Dennis Hamm, SJ

About 20 years ago, at breakfast and during the few hours that followed, I had a small revelation. This happened while I was living in a small community of five Jesuits, all graduate students in New Haven, Connecticut. I was alone in the kitchen, with my cereal and the New York Times, when another Jesuit came in and said: “I had the weirdest dream just before I woke up. It was a liturgical dream. The lector had just read the first reading and proceeded to announce, ‘The responsorial refrain today is, If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ Whereupon the entire congregation soberly repeated, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’” We both thought this enormously funny. At first, I wasn’t sure just why this was so humorous. After all, almost everyone would assent to the courageous truth of the maxim, “If at first…” It has to be a cross-cultural truism (“Keep on truckin’!”). Why, then, would these words sound so incongruous in a liturgy?

A little later in the day, I stumbled onto a clue. Another, similar phrase popped into my mind: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 95). It struck me that that sentence has exactly the same rhythm and the same syntax as: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Both begin with an if clause and end in an imperative. Both have seven beats. Maybe that was one of the unconscious sources of the humor.

The try-try-again statement sounds like the harden-not-your-hearts refrain, yet what a contrast! The latter is clearly biblical, a paraphrase of a verse from a psalm, one frequently used as a responsorial refrain at the Eucharist. The former, you know instinctively, is probably not in the Bible, not even in Proverbs. It is true enough, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. There is nothing of faith in it, no sense of God. The sentiment of the line from Psalm 95, however, expresses a conviction central to Hebrew and Christian faith, that we live a life in dialogue with God. The contrast between those two seven-beat lines has, ever since, been for me a paradigm illustrating that truth.

Yet how do we hear the voice of God? Our Christian tradition has at least four answers to that question. First, along with the faithful of most religions, we perceive the divine in what God has made, creation itself (that insight sits at the heart of Christian moral thinking). Second, we hear God’s voice in the Scriptures, which we even call “the word of God.” Third, we hear God in the authoritative teaching of the church, the living tradition of our believing community. Finally, we hear God by attending to our experience, and interpreting it in the light of all those other ways of hearing the divine voice–the structures of creation, the Bible, the living tradition of the community.

The phrase, “If today you hear his voice,” implies that the divine voice must somehow be accessible in our daily experience, for we are creatures who live one day at a time. If God wants to communicate with us, it has to happen in the course of a 24-hour day, for we live in no other time. And how do we go about this kind of listening? Long tradition has provided a helpful tool, which we call the “examination of consciousness” today. “Rummaging for God” is an expression that suggests going through a drawer full of stuff, feeling around, looking for something that you are sure must be in there somewhere. I think that image catches some of the feel of what is classically known in church language as the prayer of “examen.”

The examen, or examination, of conscience is an ancient practice in the church. In fact, even before Christianity, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics promoted a version of the practice. It is what most of us Catholics were taught to do to prepare for confession. In that form, the examen was a matter of examining one’s life in terms of the Ten Commandments to see how daily behavior stacked up against those divine criteria. St. Ignatius includes it as one of the exercises in his manual The Spiritual Exercises.

It is still a salutary thing to do but wears thin as a lifelong, daily practice. It is hard to motivate yourself to keep searching your experience for how you sinned. In recent decades, spiritual writers have worked with the implication that conscience in Romance languages like French (conscience) and Spanish (conciencia) means more than our English word conscience, in the sense of moral awareness and judgment; it also means “consciousness.”

Now prayer that deals with the full contents of your consciousness lets you cast your net much more broadly than prayer that limits itself to the contents of conscience, or moral awareness. A number of people–most famously, George Aschenbrenner, SJ, in an article in Review for Religious (1971)–have developed this idea in profoundly practical ways. Recently, the Institute of Jesuit Sources in St. Louis published a fascinating reflection by Joseph Tetlow, SJ, called The Most Postmodern Prayer: American Jesuit Identity and the Examen of Conscience, 1920-1990.

What I am proposing here is a way of doing the examen that works for me. It puts a special emphasis on feelings, for reasons that I hope will become apparent. First, I describe the format. Second, I invite you to spend a few minutes actually doing it. Third, I describe some of the consequences that I have discovered to flow from this kind of prayer.

A Method: Five Steps1. Pray for light. Since we are not simply daydreaming or reminiscing but rather looking for some sense of how the Spirit of God is leading us, it only makes sense to pray for some illumination. The goal is not simply memory but graced understanding. That’s a gift from God devoutly to be begged. “Lord, help me understand this blooming, buzzing confusion.”

2. Review the day in thanksgiving. Note how different this is from looking immediately for your sins. Nobody likes to poke around in the memory bank to uncover smallness, weakness, lack of generosity. But everybody likes beautiful gifts, and that is precisely what the past 24 hours contain–gifts of existence, work, relationships, food, challenges. Gratitude is the foundation of our whole relationship with God. So use whatever cues help you to walk through the day from the moment of awakening–even the dreams you recall upon awakening. Walk through the past 24 hours, from hour to hour, from place to place, task to task, person to person, thanking the Lord for every gift you encounter.

3. Review the feelings that surface in the replay of the day. Our feelings, positive and negative, the painful and the pleasing, are clear signals of where the action was during the day. Simply pay attention to any and all of those feelings as they surface, the whole range: delight, boredom, fear, anticipation, resentment, anger, peace, contentment, impatience, desire, hope, regret, shame, uncertainty, compassion, disgust, gratitude, pride, rage, doubt, confidence, admiration, shyness–whatever was there. Some of us may be hesitant to focus on feelings in this over-psychologized age, but I believe that these feelings are the liveliest index to what is happening in our lives. This leads us to the fourth moment:

4. Choose one of those feelings (positive or negative) and pray from it. That is, choose the remembered feeling that most caught your attention. The feeling is a sign that something important was going on. Now simply express spontaneously the prayer that surfaces as you attend to the source of the feeling–praise, petition, contrition, cry for help or healing, whatever.

5. Look toward tomorrow. Using your appointment calendar if that helps, face your immediate future. What feelings surface as you look at the tasks, meetings, and appointments that face you? Fear? Delighted anticipation? Self-doubt? Temptation to procrastinate? Zestful planning? Regret? Weakness? Whatever it is, turn it into prayer–for help, for healing, whatever comes spontaneously. To round off the examen, say the Lord’s Prayer.

A mnemonic for recalling the five points: LT3F (light, thanks, feelings, focus, future).

Do ItTake a few minutes to pray through the past 24 hours, and toward the next 24 hours, with that five-point format.

ConsequencesHere are some of the consequences flowing from this kind of prayer:

1. There is always something to pray about. For a person who does this kind of prayer at least once a day, there is never the question: What should I talk to God about? Until you die, you always have a past 24 hours, and you always have some feelings about what’s next.

2. The gratitude moment is worthwhile in itself. “Dedicate yourselves to gratitude,” Paul tells the Colossians. Even if we drift off into slumber after reviewing the gifts of the day, we have praised the Lord.

3. We learn to face the Lord where we are, as we are. There is no other way to be present to God, of course, but we often fool ourselves into thinking that we have to “put on our best face” before we address our God.

4. We learn to respect our feelings. Feelings count. They are morally neutral until we make some choice about acting upon or dealing with them. But if we don’t attend to them, we miss what they have to tell us about the quality of our lives.

5. Praying from feelings, we are liberated from them. An unattended emotion can dominate and manipulate us. Attending to and praying from and about the persons and situations that give rise to the emotions helps us to cease being unwitting slaves of our emotions.

6. We actually find something to bring to confession. That is, we stumble across our sins without making them the primary focus.

7. We can experience an inner healing. People have found that praying about (as opposed to fretting about or denying) feelings leads to a healing of mental life. We probably get a head start on our dreamwork when we do this.

8. This kind of prayer helps us get over our Deism. Deism is belief in a sort of “clock-maker” God, a God who does indeed exist but does not have much, if anything, to do with his people’s ongoing life. The God we have come to know through our Jewish and Christian experience is more present than we usually think.

9. Praying this way is an antidote to the spiritual disease of Pelagianism.Pelagianism was the heresy that approached life with God as a do-it-yourself project (“If at first you don’t succeed…”), whereas a true theology of grace and freedom sees life as response to God’s love (“If today you hear God’s voice…”).

A final thought. How can anyone dare to say that paying attention to felt experience is a listening to the voice of God? On the face of it, it does sound like a dangerous presumption. But, notice, I am not equating memory with the voice of God. I am saying that, if we are to listen for the God who creates and sustains us, we need to take seriously and prayerfully the meeting between the creatures we are and all else that God holds lovingly in existence. That “interface” is the felt experience of my day. It deserves prayerful attention. It is a big part of how we know and respond to God.



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"Dear children! At this time, in a special way I call you: 'pray with the heart'. Little children, you speak much and pray little. Read and meditate on Sacred Scripture, and may the words written in it be life for you. I encourage and love you, so that in God you may find your peace and the joy of living. Thank you for having responded to my call." 


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February 2, 2012

"Dear children; I am with you for so much time and already for so long I have been pointing you to God’s presence and his infinite love, which I desire for all of you to come to know. And you, my children? You continue to be deaf and blind as you look at the world around you and do not want to see where it is going without my Son. You are renouncing him – and he is the source of all graces. You listen to me while I am speaking to you, but your hearts are closed and you are not hearing me. You are not praying to the Holy Spirit to illuminate you. My children, pride has come to rule. I am pointing out humility to you. My children, remember that only a humble soul shines with purity and beauty because it has come to know the love of God. Only a humble soul becomes Heaven, because my Son is in it. Thank you. Again I implore you to pray for those whom my Son has chosen – those are your shepherds."

(It is reported that 25,000 people were present in the stadium in Naples where Mirjana received her apparition. Crowds started to gather at 3.00am in the morning for the apparition at 8:45am and came from all parts of Italy, braving the snow and hazardous weather throughout the country. Mass was concelebrated by more than 60 priests prior to the apparition, and a welcome from Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples, the former Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, was read from the altar.  Last year, on the same date, Mirjana was also in Naples to receive her apparition).



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"Dear children,  Today also I am calling you to personal conversion.  You be the ones who will be converted, and in your lives be witnesses.  Love, forgive and bring the joy of the Risen One to this world where my Son died, and where people do not feel the need to seek Him and discover Him in their lives. You be adorers of my Son and may your hope be hope to those whose hearts do not have Jesus.  Dear children, thank you again today for having responded to my call."

Watch the video of apparation at St Joseph Church in Kalamazoo, Michiganwith Ivan Dragicevic  here.... 


Ivan's talk in full version from marytv.tv:
Ivan began his testimony on January 31, 2012, with the greeting: "My dear priests, my dear friends in Christ, and also in a special way everyone who is joining us in prayer over the internet, I would like to greet all of you as well."   The following is his testimony about Our Lady's apparition in St. Joseph Church that evening:

Our Lady came very joyful and happy and she greeted all of us with the greeting, "Praised be Jesus, my dear children!" After that she extended her hands over the priests present here and prayed over them for a longer time.  And after that she prayed over everyone present here and she prayed for a longer time for those who are sick among us.  And after that I especially recommended all of the sick present here to her.  After that Our Lady blessed us with her motherly blessing and she blessed all of those things that you brought to be blessed.  And after that Our Lady turned to all of us and said:

"Dear children,  Today also I am calling you to personal conversion.  You be the ones who will be converted, and in your lives be witnesses.  Love, forgive and bring the joy of the Risen One to this world where my Son died, and where people do not feel the need to seek Him and discover Him in their lives. You be adorers of my Son and may your hope be hope to those whose hearts do not have Jesus.  Dear children, thank you again today for having responded to my call."

I then recommended all of  you to her, all of your needs, all of your petitions, all of your families.  After that Our Lady continued to pray over all of us here, and in that prayer Our Lady departed in the light and in the light of the Cross, with the greeting, "Go in peace my dear children!" I know that many of you here have been to Medjugorje. Or you have heard of it from friends who have been there. Or you have watched videos about it. How many of you have been? How many have not been? For those who have not been, I would like to take you back to the early days of the apparitions, so you can have an idea of how the apparitions began.

1981, I was a child at the time, I was 16 years old. I was very shy, very reserved. And those years, 1981, those were difficult years. It was the time of communism. Yugoslavia existed at that time, a time without freedom, without freedom of speech and freedom to express your faith. Life was difficult. My parent and I worked very hard every day in the fields, in the tobacco fields and in the vineyards. I got up every morning at 5:00 am. Because I was the oldest of the children, I had to be the first one. I worked hard every day. And every day, in that difficult labor I asked my parents when some holiday or feast day would come up, so I could rest. So I could go play soccer with my friends.

And that day did arrive. It was the 24th of June, 1981. It was the feast day of St. John the Baptist. It was a Wednesday. That morning, like on every other feast day, our parents let me sleep in a little longer - but not long enough for us to miss Mass. My mother came to my room several times, waking me up, saying to me, "We are going to be late, what are you waiting for?" You know how mothers can be! There wasn't much to think about. I got up quickly, got dressed, and woke up my 2 younger brothers. We crossed the fields together to go to church. I went to the 11:00 am Mass that morning. I was there in body, but I am not certain if I was there in heart and soul. I could hardly wait for that Mass to end. I came home. The habit my parents had was to ask me a question. My mother asked me that question. "Ivan, what was the gospel reading today?" I will never forget that. And I didn't know!

After that we sat at the family table and had lunch together. And before the end of that lunch, some of my friends from the village came by and asked me to play soccer with them. And somewhere around 3:00 pm that afternoon we went to a field near my home and we played soccer. And when we all got tired, we started heading back to our homes. As we were walking back to our homes we encounter three girls, Ivanka, Mirjana, and Vicka. I knew one of those girls well because she and I went to the same school. She was a year older than me. But I didn't know the other two girls well because at that time they didn't live in Medjugorje. Mirjana lived in Sarajevo, Ivanka lived in Mostar. But they would come during the summer vacation to Medjugorje to spend the summer with their grandparents.

And so my three friends asked the three girls "Where are you going and what are you doing." They said they were going for a walk to look for the family sheep. I didn't' ask them anything because, as I said earlier, I was very shy and I didn't talk much with girls. When my friends finished this conversation we continued on our way to our homes. The majority of my friends went towards the village. But since my home was a bit further away from the village one friend came with me so I could quickly change clothes so that we could go back to his house that evening to watch television. At that time there were only five or six families that had color televisions. So we would gather in one of those homes to watch basketball or soccer. And so it was that evening. We watched the first half of that game. Ant at the half time of that game, I said to my friend, "Come back to my house with me so we can have something to eat and then we can go back and watch the second half of that game."

And so we went back to my home and ate something, and we were slowly heading back to his home to go watch the second half of the game, but we never got there. Nor have we to this day ever seen the second half of that game, nor do we know the result of that game because something else happened. As we were waking on that path, we heard a voice. Somebody was calling us in the distance. "Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, come see Our Lady!" I heard the voice but I didn't see anyone neither in front of me nor behind me. The path was very narrow, overgrown with bushes and shrubs. And since we didn't see anyone we three continued on our way. But the further along we went, the louder and closer that voice became. And in one moment I heard that voice, so close, I turned to look behind me, and I saw one of those three girls we had seen earlier, named Vicka. She was running towards the two of us. She was barefoot and trembling with fear. With her trembling voice she was saying, "Come with me, come with me to Our Lady on the Hill." I stopped and looked at her I didn't know what she was talking about.

As I said, I was 16 years old at the time, I was a child. I turned to my friend and ask, "What is she talking about, what is she saying Our Lady?" And I said, "Forget about her, she's nuts, let's go watch the second half of the game!" But she was so persistent and she was calling us to go with her. And I said to my friend, "Something strange is happening with her because that is not the Vicka I know." And so we were slowly walking with her, and as we watched how she was behaving and saw how she was shaking, we didn't feel so great anymore either. We came to that place and we saw the other two young girls, Ivanka and Mirjana. They were kneeling, turned in the direction of the hill and looking at something. As we came close to the hill, Vicka turned in the direction of the hill and pointing said, "Look up there." I looked three times, and I saw the most beautiful image of Our Lady, in normal size, and as soon as I saw it, I immediately ran home. I don't think anyone could have caught up with me. I came home, and I didn't say anything to anyone, not to my parents, nor to my brothers. I locked myself in my bedroom. And I think if I had had 100 keys and locks, I would have put them all on the door!

It was a night of so much fear, a night of so many questions running through my mind. Is this possible? How is this possible? Was that really Our Lady? I saw, but still I wasn't certain. And believe me, up to that point in my life, I could never have dreamt of something like this. And I never had any special devotion to Our Lady. I had never read of apparitions and as a child, I didn't like to read much anyway. I was a practicing believer. I went to church. I prayed with my parents. I grew up in the faith. I was raised in the faith. I was no better or worse than the others. But that night that was before me truly was a night of such great fear. And you know what I was most afraid of? I was most afraid of this that night. "What if Our Lady comes to my room tonight? How will I escape, where will I run to?" I could hardly wait for morning to come. But morning seemed to never come and that night was so long for me...

But finally morning did arrive. And my parents had already heard in the village that I had been there the day before. And they were waiting outside my bedroom door. You know in those times of communism there was great fear. What will happen? The first thing my parents said, "Be careful what you say, don't play with those kinds of things. You will go to jail if you speak like that." It wouldn't have been unusual at that time, to be taken off to jail without any due process. I told my parents what I saw.

And on that second day, a lot of people began to gather from all over the place. They were with us all day and protected us as much as possible from the police and from the authorities. And somewhere around three o'clock that afternoon, those people who had spent that day with us said to us, "Let us go with you to that place where you saw Our Lady last night. Maybe Our Lady left something, some kind of a sign to convince is that she was here."

And so spontaneously, together with the people we slowly climbed the hill. And before we got to that place, maybe about 20 meters away, Our Lady was already waiting for us. She was holding Baby Jesus in her arms. She was floating on a cloud. She had a crown of stars. She was smiling and she was motioning with her hand for us to come closer.

Never in my life will I ever forget that day. I think I am going to live 5 years less after that day. In that moment I could no longer go either forwards or backwards. My legs buckled underneath me. But in one moment, not with my strength, I ran over those bushes and shrubs, it was like we were floating. We didn't feel any kind of pain. We went closer to her. We came close to her. In her left hand she was holding Jesus. She took her right hand, and she was placing it on our heads, and she began to speak her first words. "Dear children, I am with you. I am your Mother. Do not be afraid of anything. I will protect you. I will help you. I will guide you." But it was difficult to calm down and come to our senses.

One of the girls from among us, who was most relaxed, asked her, "Who are you and what is your name?" And she responded, "I am the Queen of Peace. And I have come, my dear children because God has sent me. My dear children, peace, peace, and only peace. There must be peace, my dear children. Peace must reign between God and man and between people. My dear children, this world and this humanity is finding itself in a great danger. There is a threat that it will destroy itself." Those were the first words - that was the first message that Our Lady gave through us to the world. On that second day we recognized in her our Mother, and to this day there are still three of us who see Our Lady.

My dear friends, I do not want you to look at me as a saint or as someone who is perfect, because I am not. I am trying to be better and more holy, that is my desire and that desire is deeply imprinted upon my heart. Just because I have seen Our Lady doesn't mean I have converted overnight. I know that my conversion is a process just like it is for all of us. And it is a program for my live. It is a program for which I need to make a decision every day and in which I need to be persistent and in which I need to make a daily decision to change. I need to leave sin behind on a daily basis. And I need to open myself to the Holy Spirit and open myself to grace. I must accept the words of Christ and the words of the Gospel and in that way grow in holiness.

There is a question that has been in my mind for thirty years. And that question is "Mother why me? Mother, were there not better ones than I? Mother will I be able to accomplish all those things that you ask of me in the way that you want them accomplished? Mother are you satisfied with me?" Not a day goes by that that question is not repeated in my mind.

I remember well at an encounter with Our Lady that I was alone with her. I spent a lot of time asking myself if I should ask this. I asked her, "Mother why me? Why did you choose me?" And she smiled and she said,"You know dear children I don't always look for the best ones." And do you think I ever asked her that question after that? I never asked that question again.

And so thirty years ago Our Lady chose me to be her instrument, to be the instrument in her hands and in the hands of the Lord. She enrolled me in her school, in her school of peace, of love and of prayer. I wish to be a good student in this school. And I wish to accomplish the homework assignment I receive from Our Lady as well as possible. Truly through these thirty years, I always ask myself, "Mother, why don't you appear to everyone? Because then Mother everyone would believe you." And then I wouldn't need to be here with you today!  

But we cannot enter into all those divine plans that the Father has for all of us all at once. We must be open to those divine plans. We must know how to recognize them and accept them. Even though we don't see, we must be happy that our Mother is with us. In the Gospel it says, "Blessed are those who do not see, and yet believe." Believe me it is not easy and it is not simple to be with Our Lady every day and to speak with her every day, and then after each of those encounters with her to come back to this earth and live on this earth. Because when Our Lady comes every day, she brings us a piece of heaven. If you were to see Our Lady for just one second, I don't know whether your life on this earth would be interesting after that one second. Every day after every encounter with her I always need several hours to come back to this earth and to the realities of this world. (Ivan Dragicevic, in Kalamazoo Michigan, 01/31/12, transcribed from the recording by Mary TV)

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