Examine your Feelings (midweek)

Examine Your Feelings

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

February 10, 2016

Ash Wednesday

Here in Ashland, land of New Age and Spiritual-but-Not-Religious, we often hear it said, “Trust your feelings.”

I have to say, with some embarrassment, that whenever I hear that, I cringe. 

This is not because I have buried my feelings, cut off emotion, and learned the rigorous discipline of logic and data.  It is because in my experience, feelings can be very dangerous guides to thought and action. 

I have seen far too many families ruined, lives unhinged, marriages and partnerships destroyed, and people put in jail because they were “following their feelings.” 

As a result, whenever I see the original Star Wars movie, when the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi comes to Luke Skywalker and tells him, “Luke, trust your feelings,” I want to jump out of my chair, and yell, “NO, LUKE!  DO NOT TRUST YOUR FEELINGS.  THEY ARE VERY, VERY DANGEROUS!” 

The advice to trust feelings is good, as far as it goes.  We process a lot of material at a subconscious level, and our gut intuition sometimes is a very valuable—even a life-saving—factor in crisis situations.  And being authentically in touch with our emotions and able to sort our good ones and not-so-good ones is a crucial skill. 

But the fact is, none of us is perfect, and none of us have perfectly trained consciences or feelings.  We need to learn when and how to trust our feelings to not be misled by them.  And this is done in community.  It is what spiritual direction and retreats is about.  It is what Church is about.  It is what going to group is about—whether therapy or support group, or 12-Step meeting.  One of the things we first learn is how important our feelings are—not as signs of the truth of the world and what we should do, but rather as indicators about what is going on inside of us and of danger areas for us. 

A major part of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is the Examen, the examination of one’s conscience or replay of one’s day.  It has basically five steps, which can be done in as short as 20 minutes.   1) We begin by asking God for light, since we want to see these things through God’s eyes, not ours.  2) We continue by giving thanks for the day that is past, and drawing a vivid mind picture of all the good we enjoyed.  3) We then review the day, looking carefully at what happened, paying particular attention to how we felt about things, using what and how deeply we feel as points of entry into what is going on inside us.  Again, the point is to try to get God’s viewpoint, not simply replay ours.  4) With clear images of the day and our feelings before us, we then face what went wrong in the day, including our own shortcomings.  5) Finally, we look forward to the day to come with sincere petitions to God to help us in specific areas in our lives.  

I invite everyone to try Ignatian Examen, if you have not done so before, or even perhaps try to make this a daily practice for the Lenten season that begins today.   I have found it very powerful, and believe it might be useful to you.   It does help sort out feelings so that we can learn to trust them more. 

Grace and peace,  Fr. Tony+