What Exodus 90 is
Exodus 90 is a Catholic programme for men that grew out of seminary formation around 2011 and has been prayed at scale since 2015. For ninety days three pillars carry the way: prayer, asceticism and fraternity. Asceticism is the part people talk about, because it makes a story: cold showers, no alcohol, no sweets, no television, no unnecessary screens, fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, exercise three times a week.
What actually carries it is the third pillar. The men walk the path in small groups, meet weekly, and check in daily with a designated brother, the anchor. Those who start alone usually stop.
By now the single programme has become a yearly cycle, with shorter formats in Lent, in Advent, and the forty days of St. Michael's Lent, running from August to the feast of the Archangels on 29 September.
Why an examen belongs there
The first pillar, prayer, is more precisely regulated than most people expect. Required are a daily holy hour with silent contemplative prayer, the Morning Offering, the reading with a short reflection, and at the close of the day the examen.
Worth noting is what Exodus does not require: the rosary is explicitly not a mandatory discipline. The reasoning is that vocal prayer should not crowd out silent attention. The examen stays; the rosary is left free.
The five steps as Exodus describes them
- Become aware of God's presence. Do not start with the ledger. First notice who you are sitting in front of.
- Give thanks for the day. Concretely, not in general. Not "thank you for everything", but for the one thing that was good today.
- Walk back through the day and name what was wrong. In order, from waking until now. Without excusing and without tearing yourself apart.
- Ask forgiveness. For what has been named, explicitly.
- Make one resolution for tomorrow. A single one, small enough to actually keep.
That follows, in essence, the structure Ignatius sets out in the Spiritual Exercises (no. 43). The lists are not identical: Exodus opens with becoming aware of God's presence; in Ignatius, thanksgiving is followed by a petition for light, which Exodus does not list separately, and some steps are grouped differently. What both share is the decisive point: thanksgiving comes before examination, because otherwise the review turns into an indictment.
Why this is the discipline that slips
A cold shower is unpleasant but unambiguous. You did it or you did not. Fasting likewise. The examen, by contrast, can be imagined entirely. At half past ten after a long day, the temptation to tick the box and assume you reflected somewhere in the car is considerable.
There is a second, more honest problem: many men were never shown how. Asceticism is understood immediately. Structuring a quarter of an hour of silence without sliding into rumination or scorekeeping is a learnable skill, and nobody learns it from a checklist.
That is why the examen is the point at which a fraternity either grows or falls apart. It is the one part of the programme that can continue after the ninety days, and the one part for which it is worth continuing.
The examen after the ninety days
Programmes have a beginning and an end, and that is their strength. The examen has neither. Ignatius recommends it twice a day and assumes a man will pray it for life.
Whoever continues afterwards soon notices that the exercise yields its real return only over time. A single evening shows little. Six weeks show patterns: that impatience almost always has the same trigger, that certain days are regularly followed by a collapse, that one resolution has been standing there unchanged for three weeks. Ignatius calls this the discernment of spirits, and it needs material reaching beyond today.
Lumen is built for exactly that: a guided examen for every evening, with a journal that stays on the device and is encrypted there. There is no account and no server holding these entries. The app is available in German, English, Polish and other languages.