Meditations for Layfolks - Examination of Conscience

The reason why we fail so often in our attempts to overcome our faults is that we start quite the wrong way round. Usually our efforts are directed to the task of evercoming evil, a dull and spirit less endeavour. As a result, our eyes are trained to look on the less pleasant side of our character, to the discouraging occupation of counting up the number of times we have done wrong. What can come from this but an unhopeful vision of life? We look back on the past day or year, and it is measured for us simply by the sins we have committed. No doubt it is very important to be conscious of our shortcomings, for otherwise we shall grow into the fashion of the Pharisee and be self-complacent sinners. But, on the other hand, a too exclusive view of our falls from grace will absolutely paralyze all our efforts, and we shall be so numbed by despair as to be unable to proceed. But worst of all is it that we call this unedifying process an " examination of conscience." Surely this is to confuse all sorts of ideas. If I examine my conscience do I really expect to find only evil in it? Have I not a right to peer about and see whether or not there is some good there as well? Is it fair to myself to suppose that I have never done anything well? Surely this will necessarily be the result of concentrating on what I have done wrong without keeping equally before my eyes what little, of course under God's grace, of real good there has been in my life. In any case I have no business to call it an examination of conscience, for conscience is not simply composed of evil, is not indeed anything at all of that fashion. To examine my conscience I must actually review my whole being, good and ill alike; it must be thoroughly undertaken and not lightly rushed through. Do not very many of the terrible scruples that grow so easily out of modern spiritual training arise from this practice of scrutinizing too closely the evil and avoiding the good in ourselves?

Conscience is simply my whole nature articulate. It is the voice, changing and never stationary, that results from my faith, my actual way of living, from my ideals, etc.; hence the better and finer rny state of soul, the more refined and delicate my conscience will become. As I advance up the scale of creation towards the perfect figure of our Master, I necessarily look more and more askance at wrongdoing, and feel a terrible hatred for all injustice. But as I get more and more hardened in sin, naturally my conscience becomes less and less susceptible to the prompting of any higher ideal; indeed, no prompting at all comes from within, for it has no longer any meaning to me. If, then, I am to examine my conscience, I must surely go right behind all the merely apparent actions of good and evil and see the causes of my deeds. It is not examining my conscience to know that I am uncharitable, untruthful, impatient, impure. I want to know why I fall, or what makes me fall. The sin is a sin, but when I have learnt that much, I cannot hope to make progress unless I can also find out the reason of it. A general would be a foolish fellow who was content to count up merely the number of times he had been defeated, and considered that he had done all he ought to do when he had published the statistics of his losses. A government that gave an accurate list of its defeats at bye-elections, and left the matter there, would hardly be thought to have done anything except to discourage its supporters. In every case it is necessary to find the failures, but still more important to discover their causes; and for this it is essential to go over the whole ground, to discuss both good and evil, and not to be content with a bare enumeration, but to probe more deeply into the ultimate reasons for things. Yet does it not happen that I speak of an examination of conscience when I have hurriedly gone through in my night prayers my sins during the day?

What, then, have I to do? I must examine my conscience: that is, I must look at myself as nearly as I can as God sees me. I must not be as that foolish man of whom Saint James tells us that he saw himself in the glass and then went off and forgot what manner of man he was. Perhaps I am even more foolish and never even look at the glass to see what I am like. To change the metaphor, I stand on the brink of my own soul, shivering and never daring to sound its depths, for fear that I should find much that I should have to change. But I must face myself and count up the evil and the good, nor be content with the enumeration. I must look for the causes of things. Thus surely many a child has been confessing its sins of untruthfulness and never realized that its real trouble was cowardice. Night by night it had examined its "conscience" in the sense of finding out what it had done wrong; but it had not been taught to discover the causes of its troubles, with the result that it never improved. Had it been properly instructed it would have found that it was not really untruthful, had no desire to tell a lie, but was simply terrified into lying because it feared the consequences. Thus it should have set to work, not to meditate on the virtue of truth, but on the virtue of courage. It has never improved, because it never knew what caused its untruthfulness.

- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.