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Discernment As a Way of Life

What should I be doing? Maybe this is not such a pressing question for you. You might think you know perfectly well what to do, mainly what others want you to do—bosses, spouses, children, parents, the government. The problem is getting it all done, and when you have some free time, you do what you want to do without a lot of fuss and deep thought. But most of us ask this question periodically. Occasionally it becomes a very important question; we face big decisions about how we should spend our time and money, about new jobs and career changes, about intractable family problems, about dilemmas involving work colleagues and friends. The question “What should I be doing?” rumbles in the background as we go about our everyday tasks: how to tackle the to-do list at home and at work, how much to spend on clothes and entertainment and food, when to drop in on that sick neighbor or make that phone call you’ve been putting off, how to love the people we love, how to love the people who drive us nuts.

Christians need to take these questions seriously. From one point of view, finding good answers to them is the Christian life, at least the Christian life as we live it on the ground every day. Striving to live as a Christian means finding the best ways to respond in love in our concrete circumstances. Life presents us with a never-ending succession of opportunities to bring the love of God to others, to act virtuously, to do the work of Christ. “Everywhere there is good to be done,” said St. Peter Faber. “Everywhere there is something to be planted and harvested.” We are constantly making choices about these things. As we make them we gradually become the kind of person God meant us to be.

As Christians we believe that God will help us make these choices. Jesus promised it: “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (Jn 14:26). Christians have invoked God’s help in making decisions from the very beginning. The first thing the apostles did after Jesus’s Ascension was to choose someone to replace Judas as a member of the Twelve. They nominated two men and prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry” (Acts 1:25). Ever since, Christians have prayed for God’s guidance. The Holy Spirit is active in our lives. If we call on him, and learn how to listen, we will be guided in our choices. We will be able to know what God wants.

“Examine everything carefully,” Paul writes to the Thessalonians (see 1 Thes 5:21).“Test the spirits to see whether they are from God,” says the apostle John (1 Jn 4:1). Over the centuries, the Church has developed a deep understanding of how to do this. This is discernment, a skill and an art, an essentially spiritual process rooted in prayer, but also a methodology, something we can learn about, and get better at over time.

What is Discernment?

The root of the word “discernment” is the Latin word discerno, meaning to sever or separate. It’s essentially the ability to separate what’s important from what’s irrelevant or misleading. One of the complaints sometimes heard about it is that the word “discernment” doesn’t have much real content, that it amounts to little more than common sense enlightened by faith. St. Ignatius Loyola, whose ideas about discernment we will follow closely in this book, thought otherwise. He used the word to mean both keenness of insight and skill in discriminating. It’s first seeing, then interpreting what is perceived. He thought that the ability to discern the spirits was one of the most important skills that a Christian can have.

Ignatian discernment is often thought to be synonymous with Ignatian decision making. Discernment is an important part of making good decisions—a necessary part in the Ignatian view—but discernment is something much broader. “Testing the spirits,” as scripture has it, is something that should go on all the time. God is always present in our world; the Holy Spirit is constantly active in our inner life. Other spirits are active too—“the enemy of our human nature,” as Ignatius put it. Discernment means tuning into this spiritual maelstrom and finding the way God is leading us. Discernment can help us with big decisions, but discernment is also active when we’re standing in a supermarket checkout line, sitting in a business meeting, and listening to a friend’s tale of woe.

In the Ignatian view, discernment is a state of reflective awareness of the spiritual significance of things. It’s a kind of detached engagement with the world, a way of being actively involved in life from a position of thoughtful sensitivity to spiritual realities. The Ignatian ideal is to be a “contemplative in action,” someone constantly attuned to the inner life as they continually seek to bring the love of God to the people and circumstances they encounter every day. When we become proficient at discernment, it becomes a way of life.

What Ignatius Discovered

Our mentor for discernment is Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, author of the Spiritual Exercises, and a major figure in both secular and religious history. The Jesuits became a world-wide missionary order, a major force in the sixteenth-century renewal of Catholicism, and the creators of an educational system that transformed Europe and beyond. Ignatian spirituality has had an enormous impact, spreading far beyond the Jesuits. It has shaped the outward-oriented, active outlook that is characteristic of much modern spirituality. Many think that Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises is the single most influential book on prayer and the spiritual life ever written.

Ignatian spirituality is rooted in an experience of conversion that Ignatius had at the age of thirty. Born to minor nobility in the Basque region of northern Spain, the young Ignatius led a disorderly life as a courtier at the court of Navarre and later as a knight in the duke’s army. In 1521 he was seriously wounded in battle and spent a year convalescing at home. There he had an experience of profound conversion to Christ. He abandoned his military career, renounced the privileges of his social class, and embarked on the path that led him to become one the Church’s greatest innovators and spiritual writers.

Ignatius’s key insight was that God speaks to us through the shifting sea of feelings, insights, leadings, and intuitions of our affective lives. Our desires are of particular importance. We are led astray by “disordered attachments”—desires that mislead us and crowd out our deepest, truest desires. The deepest desires are to know and serve God. The choices we make are about how to best fulfill these desires in the concrete circumstances of our lives. Ignatius believed that our deepest desires were placed in our hearts by God. So, when we discover what we really want, we discover what God wants too.

Ignatius’s ideas about discernment (and much more) are found in the Spiritual Exercises. In the Spiritual Exercises we meet Christ inviting each of us to find our place in his work of saving and healing the world. Ignatius would have us ask three questions: “What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What ought I do for Christ?” Discernment has a very important role in our answers to these questions. Finding the work we’re meant to do requires discernment—the attentiveness to the inner life where we can find God’s leading.

Ignatius’s ideas about discernment are distilled into twenty-two “rules for the discernment of spirits” that he appended to the end of the Spiritual Exercises. We will go through these rules in some detail in this book, but we will also look at some of the other ideas in the Spiritual Exercises that put discernment in the right context and provide the foundation for it.

First—a few words about the Spiritual Exercises. The Spiritual Exercises is not a book that you would pick up for inspiring spiritual reading. The book the Spiritual Exercises is the outline for an intensive retreat-prayer experience, also known as the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius wrote the book for spiritual directors who lead people through this retreat. In Ignatius’s day, the usual form of the Spiritual Exercises was an intensive thirty-day retreat. Today the Exercises are usually given over the course of many months in a format that allows people to continue with their normal activities.

Ignatius designed the Exercises to bring about a deep conversion to Christ and his work. “Design” isn’t quite the right word for what Ignatius did. The Spiritual Exercises (and the rules for discernment) are the fruit of years of patient observation and trial and error as Ignatius worked to help people grow closer to God. He didn’t design a program as much as he discovered spiritual truths and principles of human psychology that have always been true. His great accomplishment was to assemble these truths into a coherent package, which became the basis for a powerful program of conversion.

The empirical origins of Ignatian spirituality is one reason for its practicality. It’s not burdened with theory, and it doesn’t call on people to scale rarified spiritual heights. It is centered on the person of Jesus. Its aim is to help us join Christ’s work in the world and thereby come to know and love him more deeply. One of the mottos of Ignatian spirituality is “finding God in all things.” This implies that the good is plural. There are many ways to God.

Ignatian discernment is practical too. Some complain that the discernment they are familiar with is vague and subjective. Ignatian discernment is neither. It is a skill and a methodology. The skill part is about acquiring habits of prayerful attentiveness and learning how to interpret spiritual senses and inner movements of the heart. The methodology is applying these skills (and other tools) to the choices and decisions we face in real life. Discernment is hard to define, but here’s a stab at it: Discernment is the wisdom that enables us to distinguish between feelings, ideas, and motives that are from the Holy Spirit and those that aren’t. It shows us the choices that lead to God and those that don’t.

Why Our Choices Matter

Let’s begin with a fundamental question—the question that philosophy and theology begin with. Why are we here? Ignatius gave his answer in a short passage at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises called The First Principle and Foundation. The first sentence answers the question “Why are we here?” “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” This tells us what we’re on earth to do, but it tells us other things too. It tells us that we are created to do this. That is, the deepest, truest truth about us is that God created us to praise, reverence, and serve him. This is what we really want. This is what God really wants too. The seeds of the answer to the eternal question “What is God’s will?” lie in that sentence. We will know what God wants when we know what we really want.

What it means to love God varies from time to time and place to place and person to person. We live in a world of vast complexity. The First Principle and Foundation continues:

The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created. Hence, man is to make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him.

This is how we are to love and serve God. The way to God is through the “things on the face of the earth.” God is not “up there.” He is here—in the work we do, our friends and family, our responsibilities, our ambitions and hopes and disappointments, the opportunities and misfortunes that come our way, the way we interact with the institutions of society. Nothing is so small, so fleeting, so distasteful, or so awful that it’s excluded from God’s love. All of it is meaningful. All of it has the potential to take us to God.

It follows that the choices we make about these things are just about the most important things we do. Here is the great challenge of life: to choose the good (“make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end”) and avoid the bad (“rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him”). This is why our choices matter, and this is where discernment comes in. It points the way toward the choices that will bring us closer to the end for which we were created.

Choosing the Good

Ignatius assumes—and we assume here too—that people interested in discernment have committed themselves to pursuing the good. He says that those who want to do the Exercises should “enter upon them with magnanimity and generosity” toward God. Discernment is not for people who are deceiving others, entangled in crime, engaged in malicious behavior, or are otherwise walking on the dark side. It’s irrelevant for people who aren’t sure whether they want the good at all. This doesn’t mean that we have to attain a high level of holiness in order to discern well. It does mean that our lives need to be fundamentally oriented toward God.

It also means that Ignatian discernment is about making choices between two or more good alternatives. Tomorrow morning, when you ask yourself “What should I do?” the options for the day do not include misleading your boss, retaliating for a slight, or hiding something from your spouse. You might not be full of magnanimity and generosity all the time, but your intention is to do the right thing, which means that you want what God wants for the day.

It follows that discernment won’t steer us in directions that are unpleasant and alienating. It’s not uncommon for Christians to think that the most difficult, challenging, and grimmest option is the one that God wants: I need to spend my lunch break trying to be nice to that guy I can’t stand. I should volunteer to give a talk even though I hate speaking in front of groups. I should quit my job and work in a soup kitchen. This way of thinking has its roots in a certain kind of severe spirituality that greatly values austerity and sacrifice. A kind of heroic virtue can be seen as the ideal, giving rise to the feeling that to follow a path that is pleasing and satisfying to us is to settle for second best.

If we want more of God, he will point us in a direction that is consistent with our deepest desires. Our deepest desires are his deepest desires. Discernment leads to choices that make us more and more into the person we are meant to be. Our journey with God may take us to surprising places, but these will not be places that are repugnant to us or that alienate us from ourselves.

Another misconception is that discernment involves decoding secret messages. “God’s will” is seen as a deep enigma shrouded in mystery. God scatters a bunch of hints and clues; discernment is about figuring out what they mean. Admittedly, discernment is often uncertain, but God doesn’t enjoy hiding things from us and making decisions difficult. The hard work of discernment is sifting through our illusions and conflicting desires to find the way that truly satisfies us.

Discernment isn’t about finding answers. It’s about a deepening relationship with God. It’s a journey together; it’s more like dancing together than walking alone. This is the promise that discernment holds out: We can live in the Spirit. We can hear God. We can find what will give us greatest joy. We can attain what we really want.