Welcome to The Examine, your daily prayer hosted by Father James Martin and brought to you by America Media, a Jesuit ministry.

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I'm Father Jim Martin. I'm about to lead you through a traditional Jesuit prayer that will

help you notice where God has been in your day. But first, let's begin with

our weekly reflection, which is released every Sunday. Now, I know that not everyone listening

to this podcast is living in the United States.

We have a lot of listeners, for example, in the Philippines.

For those of us in the United States, however, Thanksgiving is coming up.

And if you think about it, that's a strange thing to say for the Christian, isn't it?

Because giving thanks should be a daily occurrence,

not an annual one. St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, once said that

ingratitude was the worst of all sins, and in fact the origin of all sins. And you can see what

he meant. If you're not grateful for what you already have in your

life, you tend to want more and more and then get a bit greedy, and then acquisitive, and then

impatient and then grasping, and so on. From there, it's just a short step to sinful behavior.

This is one reason among many that St. Ignatius invites us to start the daily

examine with gratitude. Not only because it's a positive way to start off reviewing our day

and encourages us to see the good first, but because it grounds us in the reality of our lives.

Gratitude is about looking at what God has already done,

rather than looking at what you might need or want in the future,

...