Spiritual and moral auditing

AUDITING need not only be financial. More important than financial, it should be done to verify the spiritual and moral conditions of our life. Are we in good shape? Are we aware of the problems? Are we already thinking of the appropriate solutions and remedies?

This spiritual and moral auditing is done mainly through the examination of conscience, which we should try to do regularly, if not daily, just before going to bed. It will give us a good picture of our spiritual life, monitoring its developments and challenges, and defining its directions for growth and fruitfulness.

More importantly, it gives an occasion to say sorry to God, to patch up things with him and to begin again. It’s where the theories of spirituality are poised to practice, where desires are positioned to action.

The examination of conscience is a wonderful tool for our spiritual maintenance, where we do a little tweaking here and there, a little tightening and oiling of the different parts of our life, a little self-motivating exercise for our tired if not harassed selves.

We cannot deny the fact that even without major trials and sins, we need to do some regular cleaning of our spiritual life. Everything else needs that—our body, the car, the garden, our tables, our cabinets, etc. Without this frequent dusting and wiping, things just pile up into a mess. We always collect dirt all day long.

And these days when we are subjected to so many competing elements, we cannot deny the fact that we have to contend with an environment whose spiritual and moral ecology is complicated, if not downright polluted. Precisely, the complicated and confused air can unleash and create more deforming factors.

Even our most civilized methods of communication are swamped with twisted and distorted values. If we are not careful, we would unknowingly imbibe these contaminated values, slowly building up a disaster that can explode sooner or later.

We have to be more sensitive to our need for examination of conscience. In it, we put ourselves in the presence of God, who is a father to us, ever understanding and quick to forgive, and who gives us light to see things objectively.

When done well, we can see the roots of our problems, and can have an idea of what to do with them. We should never remain only in the level of symptoms. And solutions and antidotes, one way or another, are always available to our problems no matter how difficult they are.

It’s amazing that if through the examination of conscience we manage to micro-manage our spiritual life well, always coming up with prompt resolutions no matter how small they are, then we can really take giant steps in our spiritual life. Impossible dreams, like chastity, become a throbbing reality.

Truth is we just cannot allow ourselves to go namby-pamby in our lives, letting ourselves to drift to any direction our moods, feelings and instincts may take us. We need to be quite serious, putting reason infused by faith and charity as the lead agent of our life.

Obviously, this would need a certain discipline and training. And as they go, they will always require effort and a lot of sacrifices. We have to convince ourselves that these are important. They are indispensable. We need to rebel against that enveloping culture that makes us long only for the good time and rot in complacency.

Our true joy, our genuine liberation, as our Lord has told us, can only be attained through the cross. There’s no other formula. Our loving can only be put right, with the proper motive, content and direction, when purified by the cross.

We have to help one another learn this most indispensable skill. At the moment, most people are yet ignorant of this practice, and those who know are often stifled by awkwardness and sheer incompetence.

We need to know, more or less, the parameters involved in our spiritual life, so we would know how to develop it and not feel lost. For this, we need to study and get advice from experts and spiritual directors.

While the examination of conscience can always be done in simple ways, I think we also need to know some arts we can borrow from the fields of accounting, medicine and military science, like inventory reports, intelligence work, diagnosis, proper prescriptions of “pills,” special diets and regimens, etc.

With our challenging times, we cannot remain in the level of the “provinciano.” We have to be very literate in our spiritual affairs!