…Examining One's Conscience…
(from a March 6, 1977 Conference)

There has to be a unity and a harmony about our life.  It should not be made up of a lot of separate and unconnected bits and pieces.  It should be one life for God, and all the different activities of each day should fit together peacefully and in a balanced way so that we feel whole about it and offer it all to God as our life and not as a lot of separate little bits of life.  It is not a good sign if we are capable of counting up the things we have done for God during the day and the things that were purely secular.  It is our whole life that God wants, and anything that was not fit to offer to God was not fit to do at all.

If our whole life is to be a unity and have a wholeness and wholesomeness about it, we really need a regulating mechanism to supervise the whole of life and see that all its parts fit in together and contribute to a life for God.  If we were so holy that we always sought god in everything and always did God’s will and never did anything for purely selfish reasons, then we should not need a regulating mechanism to bring all our different activities and duties into harmony for the glory of God.  In fact, however, we are all, to some extent at least, selfish or self-seeking, and this tendency to seek ourselves rather than the glory of God can infiltrate almost all of the things we do, even the purely spiritual ones. . .

To watch over all the different activities in our life and to see that they are done for God and do fit into one whole harmonious life, we need another spiritual exercise which is free from the danger of self-seeking.  We need a guiding exercise, an overseeing one.  The exercise to which I am referring is the examination of conscience. . .

The first point I want to make is about the importance of this exercise.  Many of the saints have stressed its importance.  At least one founder of a great religious order [Fr. Keep is probably speaking of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits] prescribed only two spiritual duties to the members of his order as being so important that they were never to be omitted.  They were the reception of the sacraments and the examination of conscience.  Another saint, St. John Chrysostom, said that if anyone did this examination of conscience well for a whole month, he would become established in a perfect habit of virtue.  St. Basil, too, says that before all else, to keep oneself from evil and make some progress in the good, this exercise must be set up as a sentinel.   So we can take it for certain that this self-examination is of the first importance in the spiritual life.

There are many people who do make a periodical examination of conscience.  All do it just before going to confession, and devout people make a short examination each evening before going to bed.  Some do it even more often.  But if it is to be fruitful and really lead to an improvement of life, it is necessary to go about it in the right way.  It is not at all difficult to scratch around for what one has done wrong and become bogged down in external details which are of almost no help whatever.  What we want to do by means of the examination of conscience is to reduce the evils in the soul and to increase its good points.  If we do commit some sins in our actions, they are, of course, wrong and we want to avoid them in the future.  But to decide that you have told a lie, or criticized someone, or been impatient, or something like that, and to resolve not to do it again does very little good at all.  You have examined your conduct rather than your conscience.  The conscience is very deep down within you. . .

It is the habits we have to tackle in an examination of conscience.  To have told two lies is wrong, and we should be sorry for doing it.  But as far as amending our lives goes, as far as changing for the better, the fact that I know I told two lies has very little relevance unless they were the result of a habit in the soul.  Why did I tell them? . . .

There is an easy way to get at the true state of your soul. . . At any moment, if you want to know where you are and what is the state of your soul, all you have to do is ask yourself the simple question, “Where is my heart?”  You do this to find out at any moment the chief or dominant disposition of your heart, to find out what is inspiring and directing it, what is keeping it in its possession. . .

It is much more important to know and deal with the inner impulses of the heart than to deal simply with their varied external effects.  In a moment, at any moment of the day, you can make an inward glance and ask yourself where you stand or where your heart is . . . and at once you see and you can correct what you see if it needs correcting. . .

If you have a water-can with a perforated head on it, the water comes out of innumerable small holes.  If you wanted to stop the water coming out, it would be very tedious to fill up each hole one by one . . . It would be much more efficient to tilt the whole can or to plug the spout from the inside.  So with self-correction, it is very tedious, slow, and not very effective to try to cut off each of our separate faulty actions one by one in order to grow in perfection.  No, what you want to do is to cut them off at the source.  Change your heart and they will all be put right at once.  If you examined your conscience and found that you had twice spoken critically of someone, once been impatient, and three times unkind, it might well be seen from the glance that your heart was antagonistic to a certain person, and because of that you had criticized her, been impatient with her, and treated her unkindly.  The cure is not simply to say “I will not criticize people again.  That is trying to block the holes in the water-can.  What you do is to say “Where is my heart?” and you find antagonism in it.  Get rid of that and you will not criticize or be impatient or unkind to that person. . .

So you see, the examination of conscience is not a matter of statistics.  It is not improved by over interest in details.  If you have been willfully distracted at prayer, it is much more important to know why than to know how many times.  If you know it was twenty times, it will not help you to correct it any better than if it was sixty times.  The whole point was that you were thinking about that treat you were going to enjoy, or that person you dislike, or feeling sorry for yourself, or failing to trust God and giving way to fear for the future, or something like that perhaps.  Get down to the cause of the trouble.  Use this inner glance.  Govern your whole life with it.  It regulates the heart all the time we keep using it.  It grows into a habit after a while, and without even being fully aware that we are doing it, we are watching our heart and correcting it. . .

Why not ask yourself now where your heart is, and spend a few moments thanking and loving God in silence if it is where it should be, and if it is not, then let us make it so.  Let us determine to be heartfelt in our love for God.  Let us clean the inside of the cup and not just the outside as so many people try to do.

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