Daily Examen
The Daily Examen is an Ignatian prayer practice of reviewing the day in God's presence — noticing where grace was at work and where you fell short — to grow in self-awareness and spiritual attentiveness.
What Is the Daily Examen?
The Daily Examen is a structured prayer practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century. It is a brief, daily review of the day in God's presence — not a guilt spiral, not a productivity recap, but a deliberate act of spiritual attention.
Ignatius believed that without intentional reflection, a day simply passes. Experiences accumulate without meaning. Patterns go unnoticed. God's movement in ordinary moments gets missed. The Examen was his answer: a short practice that turns the day into a text worth reading.
It typically takes ten to fifteen minutes. Ignatius considered it so important that even on days too busy for other prayer, the Examen should not be skipped.
The Five Movements
Ignatius outlined the Examen in five movements. Different teachers present them differently, but the core structure holds:
1. Gratitude. Begin by acknowledging the day's gifts — not a forced list, but a genuine noticing of what was good. The meal. The conversation. The moment of unexpected quiet. Gratitude orients the heart before anything else.
2. Ask for light. Ask the Holy Spirit for clarity and honesty. This is not about self-analysis — it is about seeing the day as God sees it. The request itself is an act of dependence.
3. Review the day. Walk back through the hours. Not chronologically if that doesn't suit you — but attentively. Where did you feel drawn toward God? Where did you pull away? Where were you most yourself? Where did you act out of fear, pride, or distraction?
4. Face your failures. Without self-flagellation, name where you fell short. Seek forgiveness. This is not meant to wound — it is meant to free. An honest accounting is lighter than the weight of what goes unexamined.
5. Look toward tomorrow. What does tomorrow hold? Where might you need grace? End with a brief prayer — an act of surrender of the day to come.
Why It Matters for Men
Most men are not in the habit of reflection. We are trained to move forward, to solve the next problem, to avoid the internal work that feels unproductive. The Examen is a direct counter to this.
It does something that almost no other daily practice does: it builds self-awareness in relationship to God. Not the therapeutic self-awareness of the journaling self-help genre, but the kind that emerges when you ask, honestly, where was I faithful today? Where wasn't I?
Over time, patterns emerge. You begin to notice your particular vulnerabilities — the situations that reliably draw you into irritability, lust, cowardice, or pride. You also begin to notice your particular gifts — where you come alive, where grace flows through you most naturally. Both kinds of knowledge are spiritually essential.
The Examen in the Pistis App
The third step of the Pistis daily formation loop is the Examen. After reading a Scripture verse and writing a brief reflection, you are brought to a structured examination of the previous day.
The prompts are simple — not a lengthy questionnaire, but a few focused questions designed to surface what actually happened. The goal is fifteen minutes that reorient a man's relationship to his own interior life and to God.
The Examen is not the whole of the Christian life. But for men who want to grow — who sense the gap between what they believe and who they are becoming — it is one of the most reliable tools the tradition offers.
See also: Ignatian Prayer — the broader Ignatian tradition; Christian Formation — how practices like the Examen shape character over time.