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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