The Soul of Discernment

A Spiritual Practice for Communities and Institutions

Elizabeth Liebert

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611646016
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Soul of Discernment provides concrete steps for groups of people who work together and need to make important decisions: church sessions, nonprofit hiring committees, etc. Liebert calls this process the Social Discernment Cycle, a process for seeking God's call in a particular situation. "It is called 'social' because it deals primarily with human communities in their social-structural, rather than interpersonal aspects, Liebert explains. "It is a cycle because one completed round of discernment prepares for the next. The Social Discernment Cycle is particularly apt for any discernment that involves a structure, system, or institution.

This book helps groups work through this cycle to answer the question, "How is God leading us, individually or together, to act in this particular moment in our organization?

PART 1An Invitation to Social Discernment

Chapter 1

Discernment in an Age of Complexity

Discernment, the Christian spiritual practice of seeking and responding to God’s call in the midst of all the forces, options, and decisions that mark our lives, may very well be the single most important Christian spiritual practice for dealing with the complexity of our contemporary lives. Discernment concerns human agency in relation to the Divine. These are huge claims. Let me unpack them piece by piece.

What is discernment? What content does this strange word attempt to convey? In a fine book on discernment practices for leadership groups, Ruth Haley Barton speaks of discernment as “the capacity to recognize and respond to the presence and the activity of God—both in the ordinary moments and the larger decisions of our lives.”¹ In the case of discernment, “capacity” implies both gift and skill, so we might describe discernment as the gift and the skill in individuals and groups to recognize how God is operative in and around them. In the Christian understanding of God, humans, and the God-human relationship, discernment is a gift. Its author is the Holy Spirit, whose particular role in God’s out-facing toward creation is to animate, teach, enliven, provoke, empower, and nourish believers.² In this understanding, even the desire to seek God comes first from God, is supported and nourished by God, and has as its goal our greater and greater immersion in God.³ God desires to provide the tools and support for all people to live in such a way that they live out their destinies as God’s beloved children, so we can assume that the gift of discernment is given in some measure to all who ask for it. Our stance as members of God’s beloved community is twofold: asking for the gift of discernment and, as it is given, learning to live discerningly until we develop habitually listening hearts and lives responsive to God’s call to us as individuals and communities.

Discernment is likewise a skill because it can be developed and honed by prayer and practice.⁴ In this sense, discernment is a spiritual practice, that is, something we do repeatedly that helps us move closer and closer to God. Over time we can learn to see more deeply, discriminate more finely between a good and an apparent good, learn the subtleties of how to live without falling into extremes, and learn to unmask the deceptions of the evil one, whom both Ignatius of Loyola and C. S. Lewis have portrayed in their differing discussions on discerning.⁵

Discernment is about distinguishing between goods and choosing the better. We don’t, then, use discernment to choose between something that is clearly morally evil and something that is morally good, for the simple reason that God, the author of all good, cannot be calling us to do that which contradicts God’s very nature. Choosing between good and evil relies, not on discernment, but on the moral decision-making traditions of our various spiritual and religious traditions. In our contemporary world, however, what constitutes a moral evil is often not immediately clear. In this situation, discernment may indeed help us to clarify how to respond.

I have said that discernment is a Christian practice. Does that mean that only Christians can discern? Christians from such widely differing theological positions as Pentecostals and Quakers and Orthodox have developed systems of discernment, albeit based on different theological assumptions about God and on different spiritual practices. But others besides Christians can also seek a higher wisdom than might be immediately available, and thereby “discern.” The outcomes of their discernment must then be judged against some vision of wisdom or the good. In this work, however, I speak as a Christian trying to elucidate a practice that has been present in the Christian tradition since the time of the New Testament. I freely use Christian theological terms, because discernment grew up within communities that used them. Nonetheless, I welcome persons from a variety of Christian traditions, or no tradition, to employ these practices, and I hope that they can find them helpful.

Second, what might it mean to seek God’s call?⁶ Most Christians have been taught that “God’s will” is something that we should seek and follow. But the term “God’s will” too easily evokes something static, immutable, and transcending creation that, once discovered, must be followed to the smallest detail.⁷ God’s will used in this sense is something inscrutable, unable to be influenced by any action of ours. The response can only be to study Scripture for clues about God’s will and then do the best we can without knowing whether we have fully carried out God’s will. Such an orientation encourages literal readings of Scripture, especially in contested areas of Christian life. Deuteronomy 30:14, however, suggests a different understanding of God’s will: “The word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (emphasis added). I believe, then, that there is a way to understand God-human communication that leaves room for a different understanding of God’s will.

This broader understanding begins with the universe as a whole: it is open, flexible, and evolving. On the human level, we experience the boundedness that we call “the laws of nature.” But when we look either more macroscopically or microscopically, we begin to see that the universe itself is dynamic and ever changing. Think of the theories of the origin and continual expansion of the universe or quantum mechanics, the mathematical description of the motion and interaction of subatomic particles, including mind-bending notions of wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle. Since the universe reflects its maker, we can expect that God, too, is dynamic, ever changing, continuously creating—not simply repeating what has already been created. And since we are created in the image of God, we are able to participate, with God, in the creation of our future. So my second claim: discernment concerns human agency in relationship to the divine.

Of course, humans are not free to the degree that God is. We are limited by, for example, a particular genetic structure; the culture, political system, and family into which we have been born; our gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. We are also limited by our own choices: when we choose one thing, we cannot simultaneously have every other option. Yet in the midst of these limitations, there exists in human persons a genuine ability to cocreate with God our particular futures, as well as to contribute to the collective future of our communities and, indeed, of everything living on earth.⁸ We exercise this cocreative potential through our choices, limited though they may be. It also means, significantly, that there is no such thing as a minutely detailed template called “God’s will” that exists outside space and time, immutable and largely unknowable. Indeed God’s will in one’s life is cocreated in a dynamic relationship between God and individual persons and between God and the systems that make up life in various cultures, the natural world, and beyond, to the universe as we know it.⁹

Put another way, all humans face an uncertain future, and we must live into it by the decisions that we make. We are creatures whose deepest self-realization comes from moving into God’s dynamic future with all the life and skill with which we have been endowed, within the concrete situations of our particular and finite lives. Our fulfillment, then, lies in becoming the deepest, most alive persons that we can be and that our concrete situations will allow, and simultaneously contributing to the flourishing of those we touch. It is this understanding that I am trying to evoke by using the phrase “God’s call” in place of “God’s will.”¹⁰

The definition at the head of this chapter might imply that there is a single practice that carries the name “discernment.” In fact, there are many systems of discernment. A quick overview focused on discernment by and in groups will help locate the varieties of practices that come under the heading of discernment.

Historical Highlights: Discernment for Groups

Although the notion of discernment is treated briefly in the New Testament—the most obvious group discernment is the Christian community discerning about its common life as recorded in Acts 15¹¹—it took several centuries of Christian history before discernment began to be treated systematically. The emphasis in the earliest centuries, and to a large extent thereafter, is on discernment as a means of personal spiritual growth. The classic image for this earliest period is the seeker approaching the Abba or Amma (male or female wisdom figure) asking for a word pertaining to his or her spiritual condition. Yet there are moments in the tradition where discernment with and in groups emerges. In Benedict’s Rule (ca. 525), the basic monastic guideline for almost a thousand years, discernment appears under the term “discretion.”¹² In this setting, discretion was a kind of moderation, a control on the other virtues, a sensitivity concerning a person’s strengths and weaknesses. Discretion was essential for the abbot in order to govern the monastery wisely. So Benedict counsels the abbot to consult all members of the community because wisdom is given to all, even the newest. During this period, the notions of discernment, discernment of spirits, and discretion are firmly lodged in the writings of the early church theologians and their practice located primarily within the monastic setting.

The sixteenth century’s religious ferment spilled over into spiritual theology. Echoing the developments in the natural sciences, the first science of spiritual guidance appeared. In this context, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) wrote his immensely influential Spiritual Exercises, or directions for a guide to lead a retreatant through an intense period of prayer. Discernment lies at the root of the relationship between the guide and the retreatant. Though Ignatius is often stereotyped as being rigid and controlling, his directions to the spiritual guide set exactly the opposite tone: the guide is to treat each retreatant uniquely, to discern the spirits experienced by each, and to teach this discernment to each retreatant. He tried to be very precise in his Rules for Discernment of Spirits, a series of aphorisms about how to read the various interior movements stirred up in an individual during the course of the retreat. He also developed processes to help retreatants choose (“elect”) a vocation; this section of the Spiritual Exercises offers wisdom for discerning decision making still effective today and upon which I frequently rely. Ignatius’s earliest companions adapted the Rules for Discernment of Spirits and Means of Making an Election to make a series of decisions that would affect their life together.¹³ The record of this process, with its roots in the Spiritual Exercises, forms one of the clearest examples of a group discerning together about issues of significance to all of them.

The Reformation caused a shift from monastic discernment to the context of the ordinary Protestant pastor and congregation. That move effectively shifted much of the formal practice of discernment from the clerical spiritual director or confessor onto the individual Christian, but largely without the structures and processes for the laity to learn discernment. While discernment did not disappear within Protestantism, this much more diffuse situation did not tend to produce a focused and constructive contribution to the writing on discernment, making it harder to trace its trajectory. A major Protestant contribution to the notion of discernment flows from renewed emphasis on the priesthood of all believers. Among other fruits, baptism was understood to issue in the responsibility to assist other Christians in living out the Christian life. As this doctrine became expressed in practice, those pursuing discernment also shifted from a “spiritual elite” who worked personally with a spiritual director to anyone who desired to know how better to advance in Christian life and holiness.¹⁴

Slightly later than Ignatius, but apparently independent of the long history and practice of discernment of spirits that culminated in the Spiritual Exercises, a branch of the Reformation that rejected both Roman Catholicism and the new Protestant movement did begin to develop a rich and focused practice of group discernment. The followers of George Fox (1624–91), the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were soon called, eschewed clerical orders, theology, doctrine, and liturgy, seeking to be guided immediately and directly by the Inner Light. Without benefit of a normative understanding of Scriptures, tradition, theology, or hierarchical structure, they soon found themselves struggling with bizarre behavior in some of their members. How could one assess whether various interpretations of the Inner Light were constructive or destructive if there were no touchstones beyond individual interior experiences of the Inner Light? They settled on one: affirmation by the assembled meeting, thus setting individual discernment within a communal context. The same discernment sensibilities at work in the meeting for worship were carried over to the meeting for business. It could be said, then, that all decisions made during Quaker meetings are a form of group discernment. A relatively recent practice, the Clearness Committee, developed in response to the need for individual guidance. In this form of discernment, an individual facing a de...