The Way of Discernment by Elizabeth Liebert

The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making by Elizabeth Liebert, 2008, 170 pages

Here is a handbook for how to use Ignatian discernment, written without technical language, which ably complements Margaret Silf’s Inner Compass without all the metaphors that sometime belabor Silf’s writing.  It is easy to absorb and helpful in striving for the goal Paul describes in Philippians 1: “This is my prayer for you, that your love may abound in knowledge and depth of insight, that you may discern what is best and be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes from Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”

Quotations from The Way of Discernment

Introduction

The more one discerns, the more likely it is that one will become a discerning person.  By the phrase “discerning person,” I mean a person who seeks, in all that he or she does, that which better responds to God’s call in the moment. – p. x

Chapter 1.  Discernment: What Is It?

Discernment has a long history in the Christian tradition.  Here are some of the more contemporary understandings:

1) Discernment is a gift.

2) Discernment is simultaneously a habit of faith.

3) Discernment is the desire to follow the Spirit of Jesus, who is present within daily life.

4) We grow into this gift of discernment through fidelity to a discerning lifestyle, which demands trust, includes failure, and matures through self-reflection and prayer.

5) Discernment grounds the capacity to live a fully and truly human life.

6) Christian discernment means living in such a way that the basic fact that we are daughters and sons of God shapes and colors our decisions, both small and great.

7) Discernment is a process.

8) Even though discernment is concrete, particular, and ultimately personal, Christian discernment is always set within the larger community of faith.

9) Discernment is a framework that enables us to join in partnership with God. – p. 9-10

Chapter 2.  The Foundations of Discernment

Here are five of the foundations of this discerning way of life:

1) the importance of desire in discernment,

2) the experience of understanding ourselves as simultaneously loved and saved sinners,

3) our role as co-creators with God,

4) the meaning and practice of spiritual indifference, and

5) the call to desire more in our lives. – p. 23

Chapter 3.  Focusing the Matter for Discernment

Making a decision is the occasion for seeking God, not the primary goal.  Discernment involves seeking God through the means of decision making. – p. 44

The assumptions we make as we begin discernment matter.  We can do three things to help identify our unconscious assumptions:

First we can make a habit of paying attention to what surprises us, or makes us anxious or defensive.

Second, we can pay attention to those persistent behaviors that we seem unable to change even though we want to.

Third we can seek our deep, God-implanted desires. – p. 44-45

Even though every discernment is unique, your search for data should always involve collecting four kinds of information:

1) interpersonal (from within your unique self),

2) interpersonal information (through face-to-face relationships),

3) structural information (from pondering those organizations, personal and impersonal, that exist regardless of the individual players), and

4) information from the natural world (from the environment in which we are embedded). – p. 48-49

After you’ve gathered your data, the next step is to interpret it, and it is helpful to use the same four categories as interpretative lenses:

1) interpersonal (your inner response),

2) interpersonal (the reactions between you and those persons close to you or who would be affected by your decision),

3) structural (what is suggested by an analysis of the institutions, systems, and structures in which you live and work – or into which you would be moving) and

4) the natural world (from the largest perspective, that of the grand scheme of things). – p. 49-50

Mary’s discernment question is, “How should I respond to my restlessness?”  Her first task is to let her restlessness speak to her more clearly.  Her practice of the Awareness Examen becomes more intentional, and she writes her observations in her journal.  She begins in an intentional pattern: prayer and exercise in the morning to complement the Awareness Examen at the close of the day.  She watches carefully for places, events, and persons that make her excitement rise.  She begins paying attention to her dreams.  She chooses exercises that approach discernment through intuition, body, imagination and nature. – p. 53

Chapter 4.  Memory’s Guidance

In chapters 4-10 we move to the heart of discernment, making the critical judgment about what God is calling you to through the concrete circumstance of the decision before you.  You have by now carefully framed your discernment issue and gathered the data necessary for a sound decision, all the while praying for the spiritual freedom to seek God through your decision. – p. 55

To do this, we will use a variety of “entry points” into discernment, each of which will suggest how God might be calling you through this particular decision.  Each chapter contains several exercises to help you prayerfully notice and evaluate the subjective process that, cumulatively, points toward how God is calling you. – p. 55

These entry points, covered chapter by chapter, are: 1) memory, 2) intuition, 3) body awareness, 4) imagination, 5) reason, 6) the power of religious affections (consolation and desolation), and 7) nature.

We are not just shaped by memories; we ourselves shape the memories that shape us.  Memories are flexible. Memory is not only something that happens to us; it is also something we do.  We can, to a certain degree, select which memories on which we choose to dwell.  Memories shape hopes, and hopes in turn influence memories.  Memories create a “horizon of expectation” in which we live into the future.  This relationship of memory to hope provides a key to its use in discernment. – p. 58

Memory not only connects the threads of our own life, but also connects our life with the lives of those around us.  Memory helps us dissolve the barriers of perception between “them” and “us,” inviting us to find ourselves in the middle of the human family. – p. 58-59

Memory is the connective tissue that knits together the past, present, and future to create continuity in one’s life and on the theological assumption that God has been present in every event of one’s life and on the theological assumption that God has been present in every event of one’s life and can work through a memory to reveal that presence and to offer guidance. – p. 62

Memory’s second gift to discernment is its ability to help us experience our life as held and surrounded by grace. – p. 62

Memory can also bring back particular experiences connected with biblical texts. – p. 63

Most of us have had some moments where the mystery of God has broken through into our personal lives.  However, if we have not done much with them, they recede in our consciousness until they become too diffuse to be of much help in discernment.  Yet even one such experience of God can serve us well in discernment.  We can use it as a kind of baseline, a paradigmatic experience of god to which we can compare and contrast other, less clear experiences that may occur in our discernment. – p. 64

Chapter 5.  Intuition’s Knowing

Theologians ponder God’s communication in the post biblical world.  Thomas Aquinas held that an intuitive act of intellectual knowledge (he assumed other kinds of knowledge existed) is, by its nature, the most perfect act of knowledge, since it is an immediate grasp of concrete reality.  Indeed, he argued, the beatific vision consists precisely in this kind of immediate apprehension and direct knowing without conscious thinking and processing. – p. 74

Thomas Merton said, “In the depths of contemplative prayer there seems to be no division between subject and object, and there is no reason to make any statement either about God or about oneself.  He IS and this reality absorbs everything else.”  That is, we can intentionally grasp God’s reality, even when our rational processes stumble in their explanations. – p. 74

Chapter 6.  Body’s Awareness

The tension between sacredness and vulnerability is most visible when we receive or give care for bodies at their most vulnerable moments.  Taking my frail mother’s feet into my hands and carefully and gently massing them with delicately scented oil never failed to bring tears to my eyes.  I was holding and honoring the feet that walked so many steps caring for me, my brothers, and so many other people, feet that could scarcely carry her any longer. – p. 84

From the eleventh century’s Simeon the New Theologian, a beautiful meditation on the body:

We awaken in Christ’s body

as Christ awakens our bodies,

and my poor hand is Christ, He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.

 

I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly

whole, seamless in His Godhood).

 

I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous? – Then

open your heart to Him

 

and let yourself receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.

For if we genuinely love Him,

we wake up inside Christ’s body

 

where all our body, all over,

every most hidden part of it,

is realized in joy as Him,

and He makes us, utterly real,

 

and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed

 

and recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in His light

we awaken as the beloved

in every last part of our body.  – p. 93-94

 

Chapter 7.  Imagination’s Insight

Through imagination, we can try on various scenarios and test out possibilities before we settle on one path.  We can learn to befriend the imagination, examine the creative possibilities in imagination, and look at how images have been used in the biblical and spiritual traditions. – p. 95

Chapter 8.  Reason’s Considerations

As we come to deeply know any creature (through reasoning or any other way of knowing), we know something that God also knows and loves.  Discovering even a partial truth about that creature can bring us the joy of hearing a word from god addressed directly to us.  W e come more and more to know and love the truth of all things. – p. 114

There are various entry points to discernment, which you can use with great flexibility, weaving them in and out of different moments of the larger process:

1) seek the inner disposition of spiritual freedom upon which discernment rests,

2) discover and specify the issue or choice,

3) gather the appropriate data,

4) reflect and pray continuously, but especially throughout the weighing process,

5) using one or more of the entry points, formulate a tentative decision,

6) seek confirmation from God, and

7) assess the process and learn from looking back.

This sevenfold way of moving through discernment to a decision becomes more like a graceful dance than a lockstep march. – p. 118

As careful and precise as Ignatius was in his reasoning process, his preferred entry point was through feelings. – p. 120

Chapter 9.  The Power of Religious Affections

The language of faith is, in large part, the language of feelings.  Spiritual life is the passion for God expressed through our unique selves and our unique contexts.  The power of emotion lies in its ability to move us to action.  If we don’t feel anything, we probably don’t act. – p.122-123

It was a struggle for me to learn that all feeling were attached to each other and that I couldn’t have the “good” ones if I insisted on denying the “bad” ones.  Fortunately, I discovered that the emotions that caused me trouble could actually be brought before God.  Gradually God’s grace transforms unruly emotions from the inside out. – p. 123-124

Emotions are themselves a kind of reasoning: they are not in opposition to reasoning – in fact, all reasoning has some level of emotion attached to it. – . 124

If we divide the word into its constituent parts, e-motion, it is easy to see that it means “toward motion.”  We cannot make sound decisions without emotions.  They constitute an essential component of knowing and judging. – p. 124

Educators have a name for the teaching that occurs when something is never mentioned; they call it the “null curriculum.”  The null curriculum in our churches too often teaches that if we have rage, anger, or other strong emotion, then we don’t belong in church. – p. 126

Origen (185-254) was one of the earliest Christian thinkers to comment systematically on the role of affections in discernment.  He taught that when passions and emotions cloud personal freedom, a spirit other than the Holy Spirit is at play.  So if we feel compelled to act or think in certain ways, we should be suspicious that we lack the freedom that grounds discernment.  On the other hand, if our inner liberty is preserved and grows, it is a sign that the Holy Spirit is at work. – p. 126

In Life of Antony Athanasius (c. 357) held that when feelings are either very strong or widely vacillating – enough to perturb a person’ calm – we should be suspicious that the Holy Spirit is not behind it.  Confusion and din cause fear, dejection, grief, remorse, and the like.  The presence of the Holy, by contrast, “comes so quietly and gently that immediately joy, gladness, and courage arise in the soul.”  Fear is taken away and replaced by strength, calmness of thought, joy, and a settled state. – p. 127

1100 years later, Ignatius offered a metaphor: “In the case of those going from good to better, the good angel touches the soul gently, lightly, and sweetly, like a drop of water going into a sponge.  The evil spirit touches it sharply, with noise and disturbance, like a drop of water falling onto a stone.” – p. 127

Think of religious affections as complex interrelationships of thoughts, feelings, and will that allow us to respond in one way rather than another.  Two significant religious affections in discernment are consolation and desolation.  Both are frequently misunderstood.  Consolation does not mean feeling good, nor does desolation mean feeling bad. – p. 127-128

For Ignatius consolation means three things:

1) feelings such as peace and gladness (also “negative” feelings such as remorse, if they draw us toward God;

2) the causes of such feelings (ultimately the Holy Spirit), and

3) the positive consequences of these particular feelings (such as greater hope, faith and charity). – p. 128

Desolation is exactly the opposite and contains:

1) feelings such as darkness, turmoil, discouragement, unhappiness, and tepidity,

2) the cause of such feelings (ultimately a spirit opposed to the Holy Spirit), and

3) the results of such feelings, namely a decrease in hope, faith, and love. – p. 128

Once we recognize spiritual desolations, we can resist and even reject them.  On the other hand, we can delight in spiritual consolations, using the encouragement that they give to strengthen our spiritual walk. – p. 128

If you find yourself with less faith, hope, or love, be suspect that the path you are on is not the best way to follow God. – p. 128

Chapter 10.  Nature’s Perspective

From theologian Mark Wallace: The Holy Spirit dwells at the heart of all living things as its life force: “The then and there incarnation of God in Jesus is recapitulated in the here and now embodiment of the Spirit in the world – an embodiment that harks back to God’s birthing of order out of chaos.”  All persons of the Trinity, then, are intimately involved with Creation. – p. 135

Why should a Christian love nature?  Nature is a privileged way to move away from a focus on oneself as the horizon of existence and to the very horizon of ultimate mystery.  Nature moves our perspective from ours toward God’s.  We are one small part of a vast and interconnected web that is God’s creation.  Nature invites us to a new and freeing humility. – p. 136

Mary Oliver’s poem Praying:

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

 

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

 

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

 

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak. – p. 136