Examen – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
I’m proud to say that I’m Jesuit educated, I earned my Bachelor’s in History and Theology with minors in French and Philosophy from Rockhurst University in Kansas City. My time at Rockhurst was one of the most formative periods in my life, a time when I feel like I really did grow into the adult I’ve become from the teenager that I was when I arrived for move in day my Freshman Year. One of the great things that the Jesuits promote is self-awareness, understanding how we exist amid the Cosmos, how we are who we are. A daily exercise of this sort of self-awareness is the Examen, a meditation devised by St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, almost 500 years ago now.
I’ve tried doing the Examen at different points in my life, pausing during the day, most often before bed, to reflect back on the day I just lived, the highs and the lows, and offering my gratitude for all of those experiences. Naturally though there are distractions all around, whether my phone announcing new messages or the sound of a dog barking outside, or even my own thoughts about what it is I’m actually trying to do. The word examen stuck out to me yesterday, I know it as the French word for an exam, and I had a sneaking suspicion that it was originally a Latin word, after all it has that classic Latin prefix ex- included.
When I turned to my favorite Latin dictionaries, I found sure enough that the word exāmen is of Latin origin, coming from a combination of the prefix ex- and the verb agō meaning “I drive”, with the -men suffix added to render exagō a noun. Thus, exagmen becomes exāmen. Still, the meaning of this word, or rather its particular uses strike me as amusing. It is not only an examining of conscience in the Jesuit sense, but also a means of balancing something. Yet there’s a third meaning that came up, exāmen has been used to refer to exāmen apium, a swarm of bees.
At first, I’m not entirely fond of the idea of an examination of conscience having anything in common with a swarm of bees; perhaps there’s some lingering misgivings from my own childhood experiences being stung by bees (both occasions were my fault). Still, the idea that the Latin name for a group of bees, like how we might say a flock of birds or a herd of bison, would be an exāmen is curious to me. It seems as though the idea is that when we do examine our consciences, or when we consider something as fully as possible, we ought to be able to get into every little crevice of that question like a swarm of bees can.
This phrase exāmen apium is used by a number of ancient Roman authors, yet in every moment while that phrase literally means a swarm of bees it often seems to herald bad omens, whether it be a swarm of bees appearing on a standard or on the statues of an emperor or in the middle of a market. So, how can we interpret this to be more than just an odd Roman connection between bees and Jesuit meditations? Think of what might be the best thing to do after getting such an omen; rather than stand idly by and let “fate” take its course, why not instead stop, and think about what you have done to receive such a warning, and what you can do to change how things are going? One of the great disservices that our civilization’s heritage has given to us is a belief in fate, that things are decided and there’s nothing we can do to fix them. Nothing could be further from the truth! It’s up to us to examine our lives and figure out where we’ve gone wrong, and then to do the hard thing and fix our problems.
That is what at the end of the day the Examen means to me. It’s an opportunity to become a better version of myself, a reassessment that, when I don’t forget about it, happens every day.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 