Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools by Tyler Staton
Week 10: Chapter 9 — The Prayer of Examen
Read Chapter 9 of Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools. Primary passages: Psalm 139:23–24; Luke 24:13–35.
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Staton introduces the Ignatian Examen as one of the most practical and most transformative prayer disciplines available to ordinary people — a daily review of experience in God's presence that trains us to notice where God was moving and where we resisted. These questions help you begin to practice it.
Discussion Questions
8 questions1.Before reading about the Examen, how did you typically end your days in terms of reflection or prayer? Did you review your day with God, or did the day simply end and the next one begin?
2.Staton introduces the Ignatian Examen — developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century — as a structured practice of reviewing each day in five movements: gratitude, review, attention to feelings, confession, and looking forward. What is your initial reaction to a prayer practice this structured? Does structure feel like a container for prayer or a constraint on it?
3.He draws on the story of the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) — two disciples walking away from Jerusalem in disappointment, Jesus walking alongside them unrecognized, their hearts burning within them — as a picture of what the Examen is designed to help us notice. The disciples only recognized Jesus in retrospect, at the breaking of bread. Have you ever recognized God's presence in an experience only after it was over? What made you able to see it in hindsight?
a.What are the "burning heart" moments in your recent days — moments where something in you responded to beauty, truth, or goodness in a way that might have been God's nudge?
b.What are the moments you might have been walking away from Jerusalem — moving in the wrong direction without realizing it?
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