Five minutes that work on you for years
The Examen is a short evening prayer Saint Ignatius of Loyola gave the Church almost five hundred years ago. He thought it was the single most important habit in his Society of Jesus, more important than long meditation. Five minutes, every night, in five small steps. A prayer the busiest person can keep, and a prayer that quietly does what years of self-help books do not.
It is also a Shrewsbury prayer, in a quiet way. The Discernment Year for men considering the priesthood, run between St Joseph's Stockport and Shrewsbury Cathedral, is built on this kind of structured daily prayer. The 12 men in formation for the priesthood in our diocese pray something like this every night. So can you.
Why the Examen?
Bishop Davies returns again and again to a single theme: ongoing conversion.
It is by striving to live our own conversion that we can best support a new generation of converts. For Lent calls us to recognise that every member of the Church must always be a convert.
Pastoral Letter for Lent 2026.
Conversion is not a one-off event. It is a daily reorientation of the heart toward Christ. The Examen is the tool the Church gives us for that daily reorientation. Without it, our days run past us unnoticed. With it, we begin to recognise where God is at work in our lives, and where we keep stepping past him.
The five steps
Sit somewhere quiet. Light a candle if you can. Make the sign of the cross. Then walk through these five steps, in order.
- Give thanks. Look back over the day and name three concrete gifts. Not generalities. The specific cup of tea. The text from your sister. The traffic that cleared. Gratitude opens the heart for everything that follows.
- Ask for light. Pray to the Holy Spirit to show you the day as he sees it, not as you remember it. Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth (Psalm 104:30).
- Review the day. Walk through the hours from waking to now. Notice the moments where you felt close to God, generous, peaceful. Notice the moments where you closed off, snapped, lied, refused, drifted.
- Ask for forgiveness. Where you sinned, name it plainly. Sorrow without drama. If something is grave, take it to confession. If it is the small dust of the day, let the Lord lift it now.
- Resolve for tomorrow. Choose one specific thing. Not "be holier." Try: "tomorrow I will phone Mum before lunch", or "I will not check my email before Mass". Small. Doable. Concrete.
End with an Our Father and a sign of the cross.
What changes
For the first week, almost nothing. You will feel like you are listing things. By the second or third week, the prayer begins to walk around with you during the day. You catch yourself in the moment before the sharp word. You see the gift while it is happening. You start to recognise patterns: the times of day you are most fragile, the people who bring out the worst, the situations where God keeps offering grace and you keep rushing past it.
That is the prayer doing its work. The Catechism speaks of conversion as a continuous task for the whole Church (CCC 1428). The Examen makes that task concrete in a single evening.
Common questions
- What if I fall asleep? Do it earlier in the evening, sitting up. Or do it on the way home from work. The point is to do it.
- What if the same sin keeps coming up? Good. That is the prayer telling you something. Take it to confession. Bring it to spiritual direction. Do not be ashamed of slow ground.
- What if I miss a night? Start again the next night. Do not double up. Do not give up.
This is the rhythm Bishop Davies keeps describing for our whole diocese in this 175th year: keep returning, keep beginning again, keep asking the Lord to make you new.
Your next step tonight
Try the Examen tonight, before bed, sitting up. Five minutes. Five steps. Use the framework above.
- If you would like to go deeper, the Universalis app pairs the Examen with the Mass readings of the day.
- If you would like spiritual direction as you build the habit, ask your parish priest, or write to info@dioceseofshrewsbury.org and ask for a list of priests in the diocese who offer it.
The Examen is small. That is its strength. Pray it tonight, and pray it again tomorrow, and let it work on you for years.
