The Prayer of Examen

The Examen is a short review of the day, prayed at its end. Ignatius of Loyola built it into the daily rhythm of the Jesuits in the 1540s, and told them that if illness or travel forced them to drop everything else, this was the one practice to keep.

That is a striking instruction from a man who wrote a month-long programme of spiritual exercises. His reasoning was that the Examen is the practice that makes the others useful: it is where you notice what actually happened to you, and noticing is the precondition for everything else.

It takes fifteen minutes and needs nothing but a quiet chair.

The five movements

1. Gratitude

Look back over the day and name what you are grateful for. Start here deliberately — before the accounting, before the failures.

Small and specific beats large and abstract. The coffee someone brought you. Ten minutes of unexpected quiet. A conversation that went better than you feared.

2. Ask for light

A brief request: that you would see the day as it was, rather than as your mood is currently reporting it.

This is the step that distinguishes the Examen from ordinary self-assessment. Left alone, we review our days through whatever we are feeling at 10pm — a tired person concludes the day was a failure, an elated one that it was a triumph, and neither is looking at the day.

3. Review the day

Walk through it in order. Morning, midday, afternoon, evening. Not the highlights — the actual sequence.

Where were you? Who were you with? What did you feel, and when did the feeling change? Ignatius was unusually interested in the movements of feeling through a day, and he was right to be: they mark where something was happening.

Take your time. This is the long step.

4. Face what was wrong

Where did you turn away — from God, from another person, from what you knew you should do?

Name it without a speech. The Examen is not an occasion for self-laceration; Ignatius was firm that excessive scruple is its own disorder. Name the thing, ask forgiveness, and move on.

5. Look to tomorrow

What is coming, and what will you need? Ask for it specifically. The difficult conversation at eleven, the patience you will not have by six, the courage to send the email you have been sitting on.

An example

Gratitude. The walk between meetings. Tom remembering to ask about Mum.

Light. Let me see today as it was, not as I feel at ten o'clock.

Review. Woke tired and anxious about the eleven o'clock. The meeting went fine — the anxiety was doing nothing useful for two hours beforehand. Flat through the afternoon. Around four, short with Ruth over something that did not matter; felt the irritation rise and said it anyway. Better in the evening. Noticed I was happiest walking between buildings, which keeps happening and I keep not doing anything about.

What was wrong. The four o'clock. I knew while I was doing it. And I have not said anything since.

Tomorrow. Apologise to Ruth, in the morning, before it gets old. The budget meeting at two — help me not to prepare for it all morning instead of working.

Doing it in writing

Ignatius did not require writing, and the Examen works perfectly well spoken or silent. But writing it does two things worth having.

It stops the review skidding. Spoken internally, step three tends to compress into a general impression within about ninety seconds. Writing forces the sequence.

And it accumulates. Two months of written Examens read back at once will show you patterns no single evening could: that the bad hour is nearly always the same hour, that a particular person or task reliably precedes it, that the thing you keep meaning to change is now on thirty consecutive pages. That is the real yield of the practice, and it only exists if it is written.

When the day was bad

Some evenings the review is unpleasant. A day you handled badly, or one where something happened to you that no amount of reviewing improves.

Two things help. First, keep step one. Finding something to be grateful for on a bad day is not denial — it is refusing to let the worst hour edit the whole day, which it will otherwise do.

Second, keep step four short. The purpose is to name and be done. If the Examen becomes an evening of self-recrimination it will be abandoned within a fortnight, and rightly.

On a genuinely terrible day, the honest version is: one thing I am grateful for, one sentence about what happened, one request for tomorrow. Three minutes. Better than skipping it.

Common questions

What is the prayer of Examen?

A structured review of the day, prayed at its end: give thanks, ask to see the day clearly, walk back through it hour by hour, face what went wrong, and ask for what tomorrow needs. It comes from Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises and is the core daily practice of Ignatian spirituality.

When should I pray the Examen?

Traditionally at the end of the day, and Ignatius had his order pray it twice — at midday and at night. Evening is the usual modern practice. If you are too tired to think by bedtime, pray it earlier in the evening, or pray it the following morning over the previous day — the review matters more than the hour.

How long does the Examen take?

Fifteen minutes is the standard shape, most of it in the review step. Five minutes is a legitimate short form and three is better than nothing on an exhausted night. Written, it usually runs closer to twenty.

What is the difference between the Examen and confession?

The Examen is a review of the whole day — gratitude, feeling, what went well and what did not — of which facing your failures is one step of five. Confession, in the sacramental sense, deals specifically with sin and its forgiveness. The Examen may show you what to bring to confession, but it is a wider practice and is not a substitute for it in traditions that observe sacramental confession.

Is the Examen only for Catholics?

No. It originates with Ignatius and is central to Jesuit life, but it has been taken up widely across traditions — Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans and evangelicals all practise it, often under the name "the daily review". Nothing in the five movements is distinctively Catholic.