THIS practice should be done by everyone everyday. It´s a necessity. If any business enterprise has to do some daily accounting for obvious reasons, then making an accounting of our personal and spiritual life through an examination of conscience should also be a must.
To a certain extent, the grave problems if not moral crises we are having in the whole world these days can be attributed to this neglect of examining our conscience. It seems our consciences are made to rot, to detach from its true foundation.
Things can be even that bad that many young people nowadays ask what conscience is all about. This, at least to me, is an alarming sign.
Conscience, as our Catechism teaches, “is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” (1778)
In another point, the Catechism says: “Conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” (1795) That´s right. Given the way we are, whether we like it or not, are aware of it or not, God is always with us and in us, and he makes himself heard in our conscience.
And so we can readily see how important it is to take extreme care of our conscience. Muffling it, or worse, deforming it, would be truly a disaster to us. It´s like distancing ourselves from God who is our all and who intervenes and guides us in every moment of our life. We are nothing without him.
Caring for our conscience means always forming it properly, educating it so that its native connection with God would always be strengthened rather than weakened and deformed because of the many elements that can deaden and dull it.
There´s a lot of ignorance, confusion and error in moral truths around. Vices, perversions and other anomalies are not only emerging but are also becoming parts of cultures with their corresponding structures and lifeblood to sustain them.
We have to recover our sensitivity toward our conscience. St. Paul warned us in one of his letters that we should try to keep simple, humble and sincere so that our consciences would thrive. Otherwise, we would have what he termed a ¨shipwreck of our consciences.¨
A daily examination of conscience is vital to us. It keeps us in touch and in close watch of the developments of our spiritual and moral life. We would be aware of the many factors—the pressures, the various conditionings that are usually subtle and tricky, the temptations and sins—that greatly affect our lives. We can easily identify the problems.
With this regular examination of conscience, we get to promptly put things to order, and hopefully each time we end the day, no matter how it went, we can manage to reconcile ourselves with our Lord, to be at peace with him, even if we still have to do lot to make things right.
Yes, the examination of conscience brings peace to our life, something that is becoming scarcer and scarcer everyday. I know that in spite of appearances, many people are actually in some stranglehold of worries, problems, concerns, anxieties...
Our Catechism advises that we should try to maintain a certain sense of ¨interiority,¨ which I understand as a kind of spirit of recollection, so that we would be able to see the more subtle reality, the spiritual and moral events of our life, that are often compromised because of the deafening spin of activism of the world today.
Besides that, our Catechism also encourages us to do the examination of conscience before the Cross of Christ. I suppose it is to move us to repentance upon seeing the sharpest contrast between Christ´s overwhelming love for us and our continuing depravity.
We can make use of Lent to take this business of making an examination of conscience seriously. It´s a practice that really needs to be more appreciated. It has been neglected for quite sometime now, and even those who do some traces of it, do it badly.
When it´s done properly, we can truly say that we would be experiencing a growing identification of ourselves with Christ, which is actually our life´s goal. Christ is the complete fulfillment of our creation. We would not be complete as persons and as children of God without him. He is the fullness of our humanity. He just cannot be an optional item in our life.