Articles By: Juanita Rasmus

One of the practices that I remember sharing with our daughters was the practice of the examen. The Ignatian examen invites you to reflect on your day—not to be confused with the examination of conscience—and it gives you the ability to identify feelings that all too often get stuffed after a long day of interacting with classmates or co-workers.

I attended a retreat shortly after I had just been diagnosed with cancer in my right kidney. When I asked God what needed healing the most he said, “Let go of your need to control.”

This holiday season I decided to move into the New Year in a more contemplative fashion. While those around me are discussing new years resolutions and such I have decided to pray my way into the days post Christmas. I attended a retreat several months back were we prayed the liturgy of the hours. Yes, just like the monks, in this case the monks of Genesee Abbey.

With the incredible popularity of the book (and now the movie) Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, many would-be prayer dropouts are seeking an experience of God. In their dialogue in the most recent issue of Conversations, Dr. David Benner and Dr. Gary Moon offer a conversation around Benner’s book “Opening to God” that would have saved Elizabeth Gilbert time, money and the flood of inoculations that are required for traveling to India and Indonesia.

Benner is transparent when he states, “My experience of that openness is far from constant… the moments when I have known this openness are rarer than I’d like, but they leave a taste I can never forget.”

Elizabeth Gilbert ate her way through Italy and ended up buying larger jeans to accommodate her ravenous appetite for all things Italian. In Benner’s dialogue on the impact of the feeling of alignment with God the wholeness and the sense of belonging he declares, “Like any taste of God, it leaves me hungering for more.” I read eagerly yet meditatively, being reminded of my own moments of sheer delight in God and God’s presence.

My husband Rudy says that he thinks I was a Christian in utero. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that all of my life I believed in the power of God. When I was a little girl at my grandmother’s house, she would tuck us in at night in this huge bed, and she would lead us in prayer. There, I began to establish a sense of the fact there is a God out there.

Because of the kind of kid I was—very compliant—I assumed that I had found God. I found God in Vacation Bible School with the rules that said, “Don’t chew gum in here.” I found God when I wanted to join the choir, and they said, “You’ve got to be baptized first; that’s the rule.” And then, of course, ultimately, I found God in the big rules—the Ten Commandments. Real rules of what it means to be a Christian. This God was crafted around rules that filled the imagination of a little girl who wanted to be a “good” girl, who wanted not to break rules. I lived for quite a while with that God that I found. I shared that God with my husband, who married me in 1985. In 1990, he accepted Christ. He says he was a late bloomer. In 1991, he accepted his call to ministry. And I accepted mine.