The Way of Discernment

Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

Elizabeth Liebert

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780664228705
• eBook ISBN: 9781611640106
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We all make decisions constantly--some with careful reflection, some without much thought. But what if we understood these decisions, minor as well as major, as matters of faithful Christian living? In this helpful and encouraging book, Elizabeth Liebert introduces the practice of discernment and guides readers through the process of faithful decision making. Following the way of discernment means becoming increasingly able to notice where God is at work in the world and in one's own life--and becoming increasingly generous with one's own life in response. After briefly exploring the Christian tradition of discernment, Liebert then turns to practical steps and exercises that will help readers as they seek God's call in the midst of their decisions, allowing readers to internalize some of these practices and incorporate them into their daily lives.

PART ONE

An Invitation to Christian Discernment

1

Discernment: What Is It?

The term “discernment” seems to be cropping up in unlikely places—unlikely, that is, considering its roots as a Christian spiritual practice. In corporate boardrooms, management consultants teach discernment as a substitute for Robert’s Rules of Order. Coworkers go on retreat to discern the new company advertising tagline. Hospital administrations discern the new mission statement for the health-care system. Young people discern their college choice and then their majors. “Discernment” often seems to be synonymous for decision making: instead of deciding, we now discern. But what is discernment anyhow? What are its roots? What theological presuppositions is it built upon? And how might we go about discerning? These questions occupy us in this chapter. We begin, as we will in every chapter, with a spiritual practice, a simple prayer of several steps. These prayer exercises are the experiential heart of this book; they are designed to move you from thinking about to actually practicing discernment. I invite you, then, to move out of the activity of reading and into the disposition of prayer. Once you have completed the spiritual practice, you can become a reader again.

Practice: Awareness Examen

The Awareness Examen helps us look for the traces of God’s actions in our daily life. It is usually done in the evening looking back over the day, but you may also use it to pray about any other meaningful period of time (such as a week or a year), or discrete event (such as a meeting or a class). Allow between five and fifteen minutes for this spiritual exercise. This prayer is very flexible. You may use only the roman or italic lines, or you may use the entire prayer.

Give thanks for all God’s gifts and benefits

Jesus, you have been present today throughout our world….

I rejoice in …

Ask for light

Be near now. Let us look together at my day.

Let me see through your loving eyes….

Review the day: thoughts, words, deeds, desires, consolations, desolations

When did I listen to your voice today? …

When did I resist listening to you today? …

Express gratitude, sorrow, and purpose of amendment

Jesus, everything is gift from you.

I give you thanks and praise for the gifts of today….

I ask your healing in …

I ask your forgiveness and mercy for…

Ask for the graces you desire for tomorrow

Jesus, continue to be present with me in my life each day….¹

THE FIRST OF MANY PRACTICES

The spiritual practice called the Awareness Examen² is a contemporary renewal of the classic spiritual discipline called Examination of Conscience. “Conscience” describes that human capacity for distinguishing right from wrong, drawing us toward the right or better moral action. Examination of Conscience and discernment are related because they both rely on careful discrimination and choices about how to live our lives. Over time, unfortunately, Examination of Conscience came to be more and more restricted to naming sinful acts, and as that shift took place, it became easy to lose sight of God, focused as the spiritual practice became on human sinfulness. The Awareness Examen restores the focus on God; it literally shifts the figure and the ground in the practice. In the Awareness Examen, we look for and celebrate God’s presence and action in our lives, and only in this context do we also notice how we might have fallen short in our response.

With this simple practice of the Awareness Examen, we begin to train our ability to notice, which undergirds our subsequent discernment. Over time, it helps us come to know ourselves in the light of God, and thereby come to know God. It helps us pay attention to our desires so we learn to recognize those that are life-giving. It hones our ability to notice what God is doing in the concrete circumstances of our lives. More importantly, it invites ever-deeper cooperation with God’s desires for our lives. Retreat leader Timothy Gallagher says it well: “The prayer of examen is the specific searching every day to find where God’s love is active this day, where God’s love is leading today, to discern what within me may be resisting that leading and to discover the growth to which God is calling me tomorrow and that this deepest desire can be increasingly fulfilled.”³

Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuits, was so convinced of the importance of the examen that he counseled Jesuits never to abandon it, no matter how urgent the ministry. He recognized that, practiced over time, it elicited self-knowledge, knowledge of God, humility, courage, and generosity for ministry.

Like our ancestors, we too might be tempted to slip into self-examination, forgetting that God is the point of this spiritual practice. Spiritual director George Murphy, SJ, suggests some simple advice to make this practice both personal and immediate and, at the same time, to avoid falling into unhelpful self-analysis. If his version helps you pray your awareness examination better than the version at the head of the chapter, by all means use it.

—Ask God to look at your day with you.

—What does God show you about your day?

—What was important to God from your day?

—Talk to God about your day.⁴

I strongly encourage you build the Awareness Examen into your daily life. The important thing is to begin an awareness practice and then keep at it because its fruits appear over time. Eventually, you will reap generous rewards not only for your practice of discernment, but for your growth in the life of the Spirit as a whole. Indeed it is not too strong to say that the Awareness Examen is itself a kind of intensive practice of discerning, not about a specific decision, but of God’s presence in your day-to-day living.

DISCERNMENT IN REAL LIFE

Will discernment really make a difference in your daily life? Is it only for big moments, or will it matter in your day-to-day choices?

Kelley—not her real name—ponders the crossroad she and her husband face. She has long wanted to begin a PhD program, and now that her husband is settled in his profession, it seems to both of them that the time is right. But Kelley’s biological clock is also ticking, and she wonders with increasing urgency if she should put off childbearing for the seven years that statistics suggest it will take her to finish her dissertation. And immediately following those years will come more equally grueling years of finding a position and teaching new courses while simultaneously publishing substantial and original scholarly works in order not to get bumped off the tenure track. How does motherhood fit into this picture? Or does it?

Tom, a widower with grown children, retired a few months ago from his job as an estimator for an international plumbing and steam-fitting business. He appreciates that he no longer feels as exhausted as in the past five years, and he certainly does not miss the drivenness of his former lifestyle. Yet he is beginning to find his days stretching before him with little to occupy his time and energy. He realizes that he must find something worthwhile to fill his time, but what?

Terrie and Jake have been dating seriously for almost a year. They are very much in love. Both in their early twenties, they expect to graduate from college in a year in Jake’s case and two in Terrie’s. Jake’s major, history, does not lead directly into the job market, and Terrie’s, human services, virtually guarantees long hours and low pay. They think, however, that they can live simply enough to make the economics work—at least until there are children. But looking at all the transitions they will face in the near future, they wonder if now is the time for marriage, or indeed if they are each personally mature enough for marriage.

Tim and Wendy have just returned from their church’s annual mission trip, where they fell in love with a little Guatemalan orphan, Isabelita, age seven. Their own children, seventeen and twenty, will soon be on their own. They begin discussing adopting, trying to weigh their own desires against Isabelita’s needs. Is it better to assist Isabelita from afar so that she remains in her own culture, or to bring her to the United States and raise her here?

Eighty-five-year-old Gladys ponders if now is the time to move out of the home where she raised her family: “I know I need more help, but a nursing home seems so final. Is this the right step? The right time? I don’t want to fall someday and have the decision made for me.”

Decision making is part of human existence. We have all heard such comments as “If I had chosen another school, I would never have met Jim,” and “The decision to travel to Africa has had a huge impact. That trip opened up for me how empty my life is—and I never saw that before.” Yet often our lives go on, day after day, and we scarcely attend to what brings greater life or dampens down the fullness that God calls us to. A young preschool teacher may not notice, for example, that she has become quite adept at encouraging self-discipline in a room full of four-year-olds. Or the busy executive may be completely unaware that the one drink before dinner has now become an alcohol-blurred evening. Through our decisions we quite literally become who we are.

We all face momentous decisions at key turning points in our lives. At those moments, we recognize that we are at a crossroad and ponder carefully which direction would be better for all concerned. In contrast, most decisions are about more mundane matters; we frequently make these less sweeping decisions without realizing that they are cumulatively shaping our lives. Yet, if we had to pay focused attention to every decision, we would sink exhausted into bed each evening. As discernment becomes a habitual part of your spiritual life, you will be able to process the small and large decisions with the attention and energy each one deserves.

The Christian tradition has long recognized the importance of decision making. Because our identity is formed in part through our decisions, the making of decisions is actually a privileged moment for growing in discipleship. Through our choices, we can become the person God is calling us to be.

Because our decisions are so central to our identity as persons and as Christians, we can look to the Christian tradition for help in the process of decision making. That help is called discernment. The Latin root of the verb “to discern” means to discriminate. Thus, in the Christian spiritual tradition, discernment refers to the process of sifting out what is of God, discriminating between that which expresses God’s call and anything that runs counter to it.⁵ Christians have been discerning from biblical times to the present, seeking to respond to God’s call within their personal prayer and the worship of the faith community, their moral choices, or simply in the ebb and flow of ordinary life. Whenever we seek to answer such questions as “How is God present here?” or “How can I know what God is calling me to do?” or “Is this just me, or is this really God?” or “Is God calling us to go forward with our plan?” we are engaging in discernment.

Discernment, then, is the process of intentionally becoming aware of how God is present, active, and calling us as individuals and communities so that we can respond with increasingly greater faithfulness. Those moments in which we make decisions are privileged times in which discernment can make a big difference: in decision making, self-determination comes together with God’s call.

Approaching decision making through spiritual discernment relies on awakening and honing the ability to recognize God’s desires in each moment. It relies on actively seeking God’s call in the very process of making these decisions. Furthermore, if consciously attended to in a faith context, discerned decision making itself can become a significant path for growing in the Christian life. Our practice of the Awareness Examen provides one of the best tutors for such awakening and sensitizing our hearts to the movement of God’s Spirit as it moves in our daily lives.

WHAT ARE THEY SAYING ABOUT DISCERNMENT?

Because discernment deals with the mystery of God, it resists being confined to a single definition, escaping attempts to pin it down once and for all. Discernment has a long history in the Christian tradition, and it has not meant the same thing at every juncture and in every context. Each definition reveals as much about the perspective, context, and values of the one doing the defining as it does about the nature of discernment. If we examine and then combine a number of contemporary understandings, we can come to a better understanding of what it means for today.

1. Discernment is a gift. Paul lists discernment of spirits among the gifts of the Spirit in his first letter to the Corinthians (12:4–10). Discernment, then, arises from God’s gracious initiative. We do not discern except that God works the work within us.

2. Discernment is simultaneously a habit of faith.⁶ Although all is grace, there is also, in the mysterious economy of God’s plan, a crucial role for human action. We choose to notice where God is at work, to believe in a larger plan than we can grasp in the moment, to hope in the goodness of the future promised by God, and to align ourselves with God’s preferred future as it becomes clear to us. And we must do all this with sufficient consistency that it becomes habitual.

3. Discernment is the desire to follow the Spirit of Jesus, who is present within (daily life.⁷ For Christians, Jesus Christ is the author and finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2). We have a model, Jesus, who lived and died at a particular point in history, and whose life as recorded in the Scriptures suggests the parameters within which we live. But Jesus is not limited to that time and place long ago; through the Holy Spirit, the risen Christ is still present with us today. We can rely, then, on the Holy Spirit to bring to mind that which we need to live out our Christian life today (John 14:26; 16:13).

4. We grow in this gift of discernment through fidelity to a discerning lifestyle, which demands trust, includes failure, and matures through self-reflection and prayer.⁸ Nothing is wasted—neither success nor failure, happiness nor grief, faith nor doubt. All can contribute to our discernment because God is present in all.

5. Discernment grounds the capacity to live a fully and truly human life.⁹ Through discernment we grow in the capacity to live in reality as God perceives it (the tradition calls the ability to see reality as God sees it “contemplation”), to act in ways that are as free as we can make them from inner and outer compulsions and that are closely attuned to God’s purposes in the world. In discernment, we are constantly choosing life over death that we may live in the love of Yahweh our God (Deut. 30:15–20). In discernment, then, we move beyond avoiding evil. We seek, among good options, that which better aligns us with God’s creative purpose.

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.¹⁰ We live differently because of discernment.

7. Discernment is a process. We gradually “put on the mind of Christ” (Phil. 2:5; 1 Cor. 2:14) every time we search out and choose that which better aligns us with the Jesus of the Gospels, the Christ of faith. A discerning life, then, is composed of repeated discerning moments; likewise, each major discernment rests on many small moments of listening for God in the midst of everyday life. Our intention is that all our decisions will enhance this putting on the mind of Christ. To the degree that they do, we are fulfilling the purpose for which we have been created. In this fulfillment, we simultaneously experience our deepest spiritual freedom.

8. Even though discernment is concrete, particular, and ultimately personal, Christian discernment is always set within the larger community of faith. This community carries our faith when we are weak, preserves the long tradition of listening for God, provides a collective interpretation of the Scriptures, and calls us to actions that are good for us and the larger community of living things. Cut off from its communitarian roots, the power and veracity of Christian discernment can easily stray into viewing our own idiosyncratic interpretations—and even downright evil—as God’s call.

9. Discernment is a framework that enables us to join in partnership with God.¹¹ It is not magic and does not yield complete certainty, but discernment provides us a privileged way to sort through the ambiguities embedded in our personal lives and in the signs of the times.

To summarize: Discernment means making a discriminating choice between two or more good options, seeking the best for this moment. These choices, while personal and conditional, are set within the community of faith and honor our previous well-made decisions. Discernment does not bring us absolute certainty, but rather operates in a climate of faith. Seeking to follow God’s call moves us toward that which is better for us individually and for our world, and assures us that God will accompany us into the unknown.¹²

BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS OF DISCERNMENT

Although we have already begun to locate the practice of discernment within Scripture, discernment rarely appears under that name in the Bible. Yet the practice, if not the name, undergirds the community’s consistent search to ground its life within its growing understanding of God and godly living.

The Old Testament presents a long series of situations wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Practices
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: An Invitation to Christian Discernment
• Part 2: The Practice of Discernment in Decision Making
• Notes
• Index of Scripture Citations