Every once in a while, I’ll post one of my favorite quotations from Father Marko Ivan Rupnik’s book, Discernment: Acquiring the Heart of God. I had a little problem with the size, but if you click on the title or image, you can read it more easily. Here is today’s quotation:
Discernment is not just about big decisions. Discernment is a spiritual art, an attitude of seeking God’s will that we can take into our daily life. As our relationship with God deepens and grows, discernment naturally seems to become more and more a part of our daily life, even to our daily decisions. Even the small decisions can have untold influence on the story of our lives or the lives of others.
When I first wondered if I was called to religious life, I thought discernment was a one-time thing I needed to do—to discover my vocation. I believe that God gently led my young self through the steps of discernment, and I entered religious life. I thought I had finished discerning.
But as I traveled further into religious life, I found that, even when I finished my initial discernment regarding my vocation (which lasted several years), I had to continue discerning within my vocation. Especially when I was confronted by large questions, such as being asked to take on a particular assignment, I felt the need to discern God’s will. I wanted to live God’s story for me, so I brought these big questions to prayer and discerned, within the context of my vow of obedience, which apostolic work was God’s will for me.
Gradually, I started to feel the need to discern smaller apostolic choices within the assigned field of my ministry. For example, now every time I write a book, I spend at least several weeks discerning if it’s God’s will that I write that particular book. (Any writer will tell you that choosing one’s next book–which can take from a few months to several years to write–is not a small decision!) Is God calling me to respond to this particular need, to reach out to this particular group of people? How is he calling me to do that? What is it about this topic that God invites me to learn, deepen, and share with others? How will writing this book fulfill the mission that God has given me as a Daughter of Saint Paul? How will writing this book shape how I live my story, and my community?
After discernment became such an important part of my writing, it started to “leak” into my daily life—especially difficult choices. Long ago, I used to just trust common sense, the inspiration of the moment, and the intentions that I placed in my morning offering. But now, I try to bring a spirit of discernment to these daily choices. This allows me to be more mindful about seeking God’s will all the time, not just with big decisions.
But I still have a long way to go before I can claim to truly seek God’s will in everything. That’s my desire, but other things—like selfishness, a desire to please others, or fear of conflict—still get in the way. Making these daily little discernments helps to shape my larger life story, and makes me more receptive to God’s invitations—no matter how big or small, how obvious or subtle.
To Journal and Share
For those in California, I just wanted to let you know I’m visiting on a book promotion tour for the next two weeks. If you can, join me–I love meeting those discerning and readers of my books and blogs! I’m posting up the events below. As you know, Eucharistic adoration is one of the best ways to pray when you are making a discernment!
San Francisco Area:
Los Angeles Area (Culver City):
San Diego:
In light of God’s Storyview (see several previous posts), let’s break down/explore the first key to an authentic discernment, which answers a key discernment question:
What can we discern?
When I first saw the great classic film, The Godfather, I was riveted by the core dramatic question: Was the younger son Michael Corleone going to become the next padrone? The film brilliantly explores moral choice; how one chooses what one will do with one’s life, including the complexity of intentions; the responsibility of those surrounded by an evil that has become systematized; the attractiveness of evil disguised as protecting one’s family; the insidious process of corruption from within. But as brilliant an exploration of good and evil this film is, The Godfather is never about discernment, because becoming part of the mafia is aligning one’s self with evil, and is thus a choice for evil, no matter what a person’s intentions are.
If a choice involves an option that is sinful, it’s not a situation where we need to discern God’s will. Instead, it’s a situation in which we need to pray for the wisdom to make a good moral decision and for the moral strength to resist temptation and respond to God’s grace.
Very often when Catholics hear the word “discern,” they associate it with vocational discernment, e.g., a person seeking to discover whether their vocation is to marriage, single life, consecrated life, or priesthood. (Or in some cases, a combination of two.)
Vocational state is a great example of what to discern because all the states in life are inherently good. Discernment is always between good things. God, who is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, is always going to invite us to truth, goodness, and beauty. God cannot contradict himself; God’s will for us can never be something morally wrong.
One of my favorite movies about discernment is Amazing Grace, the story of two crises (and two discernments) in the life of William Wilberforce, an Englishman who dedicated his life to end slavery in Great Britain. If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to see the film using the “lens” of discernment. Several principles of discernment that we’ll look at here on this blog are well depicted in the movie, which I will highlight and reflect on in a later (soon to come!) “Discernment @ the Movies” guide.
To Journal About:
As we’ve been reflecting in the past few posts, discernment begins—and makes sense—only in the light of God’s point of view: God’s unconditional love for us. From God’s storyview flow the “key principles of discernment” that we will explore in the next few blogposts. In classic or traditional terms, these are essential to authentic discernment:
Between two (or more) good choices. It’s not a good choice vs. a bad choice. God would never want us to choose to do something bad.
In the context of a vibrant relationship with God. Discernment is more than making a choice or a decision—it’s seeking God’s will. How will we come to know or want what God wants, unless we come to know and love God?
“3D” listening. As we discern, we need to pay attention to our whole being, our loved ones, our circumstances, and the world around us, because the Holy Spirit lives and works within us, around us, and through others. Our thoughts, feelings, situations, others’ needs and concerns, the needs of the world, the insights of others, the voice and needs of the community, the guidance of a mentor or guide–all of these help us to listen to God’s invitations.
Free. Making a free choice is the aspect of discernment that can take the most time, wisdom, reflection, and guidance.
Please Chime In!
Do these points make sense to you? In the next few posts, we’lll explore each of these key principles of discernment, but it’d be great to hear your questions! You can post them here in the comments, or email them directly to me.
As looked at in the last post, we know that the Bible reveals to us God’s basic story premise:
Our all-good God loves us and always wants what is good and best for us.
What does this mean for us? Unpacking God’s story premise gives us a couple more important foundations for our discernment:
1) God is good and always wants what is good. So whatever we are discerning must in itself be good; it must conform to God’s law. Our all-good God would never want us to do something morally wrong. God doesn’t contradict himself. When we are making a choice between good and evil, we are making a moral judgment or moral choice. This is different from discernment in the spiritual sense. God always want us to choose what is good.
2) God loves us as we are. Our Creator God wants what is good and best for us. Having created us in his own image, with intelligence and free will, God invites us to live our full potential, to “become our best selves” by loving fully and freely. While God will never violate our free will, evil in the world around us and our own tendency towards sin condition us to make choices that are not always truly free. This is why God sent his Son into the world. Jesus Christ is God’s “Yes!” to humanity, God’s “Yes” to the question of whether God loves us.
A big part of discernment—and why a good discernment often takes time—is our becoming interiorly free enough to receive God’s love. Receiving God’s love and letting it transform us means letting go of fear, guilt, outside pressures, or anything else that can distract us from God’s invitation and dream for us.
3) God is always, actively, seeking what’s best for us. The Gospel of John reminds us that God is love. For God, love is not a noun but an active verb. Whether we know it or not, whether we see it or not, God takes an active part in our lives. Because God is pure Being, whatever God wants is also what God acts to bring about. God doesn’t just drop us into the world and walk away. Jesus reminded us of this concretely at the Last Supper, when he promised to send the Holy Spirit, and that he would be with us always.
The Holy Spirit is God at work in the world around us and in the people around us, including family, friends, enemies, mentors. This means that: Authentic discernment always takes place within the context of this vibrant relationship with God. The more we seek out a vital connection with God, the better our discernment will be. True discernment means listening for how the Holy Spirit is speaking to us, how the Spirit is inviting us, how the Holy Spirit is acting in our lives. One of the key places where the Holy Spirit speaks to us is in the depths of our own hearts.
Our loving Creator has revealed himself as Father. God has created a world that is exquisitely designed, beautiful, astonishing, powerful, and full of mysteries. This amazing and mysterious universe is where we live our lives, our stories. As we grow, we discover how our universe works—in its physical aspects (such as the rule of gravity), in our human nature, in the spiritual realm, etc. If we want to discover and live God’s story for us, if we truly want to co-author our lives with God, it’s helpful to understand God’s overall design. How can we tell what’s most important to God, and how God views his creation?
By listening to God.
God reveals himself in many ways, but most clearly in Sacred Revelation: the Bible and Sacred Tradition. This is where we can best find God’s view of the world he has created, his overall design for humanity, and the stories that he wants us to live. One simple way to describe God’s “storyview” is this basic premise that describes salvation history:
Our all-good God loves us and always wants what is good and best for us.
The spiritual art of discernment only makes sense in light of these foundational truths: that God is good, that God loves us, and that God always wants what is best for us. These fundamental truths give us important principles with which to shape our stories. In my next few posts, we’ll unpack them.
To Journal About:
It might be helpful to take a moment to take in this profound statement that is the foundation for any good discernment, allowing it to sink in.
Our all-good God loves us and always wants what is good and best for us.
When I read this statement—to myself or aloud—what is my first reaction to it? What do I think? What do I feel? Do I believe it to be true?
Oops! There’s a catch there in my last post when I said I love my plans. The catch is that I don’t just enjoy making plans and rejoicing when they work well. I actually become invested in my plans, to the point that I can make my security revolve around my plans–how well they are working, etc. If you are one of those people that rejoice in saying, “It’s all going according to plan,” then you might also be in danger of absolutizing your plan…or at the very least, making it more important than it was ever meant to be.
Because a plan is a very temporary thing, meant to serve the needs of the moment. It’s not meant to be something that takes over our lives, that becomes more important than its purpose, or the people it involves, even ourselves.
Yet plans can be incredibly helpful and important–in keeping a group on track, in juggling many things at one time, in achieving goals that, without a lot of careful planning, might otherwise be impossible.
Whether you are a pantser or a planner, whether you love plans or hate them, or whether you are somewhere in-between–loving the organization that plans bring, but longing for more spontaneity–you probably aren’t neutral to plans.
The problem with any plan is that it isn’t perfect. No matter how many contingencies we anticipate, it’s likely that something will come up that we couldn’t foresee. And then the plan must be adjusted or replaced with another.
The good news is that the most important plan for you is perfect: perfect for you wherever you are, and flexible when your situation changes, or when you want to shift directions. What plan is that, you wonder? God’s plan.
* * *
For all of us, the future is unknowable. As a religious with the vow of obedience, I don’t have the stability of creating my own plan, of knowing where I’m going to live, or the work that I’m going to be doing. While others can take this stability and this sense of control for granted, they are not part of my life. Often, I have no clue of what’s coming next. I cannot count the times when I’ve needed to change plans for the mission that I’m carrying out midstream. And I honestly never know for sure where I will be or what I will be doing a year from now. Although this might sound difficult to live, the security I have in living the vow of obedience is worth it:
Living well the vow of obedience offers me the certainty that I am doing God’s will, however unexpected it may be.
My vow of obedience demands that I trust in a larger plan that is not my own: in God’s plan for me, as mediated through my superiors. Though at times I may struggle in the moment (or the first weeks or months) to accept God’s plan for me, the truth is that every time I’ve been able to step back and look at my life, it’s clear that God’s love guides the story of my life. God’s plan has proven over and over again to be the best for me.
*For those who are discerning their vocations, I’ll occasionally offer an insight from the various states in life. Naturally, since I’m a religious sister, my personal insights will most often be about religious life. But I’ll try to find others to offer spiritual insights into the vocation to marriage, priesthood, and the single life too.
They say that all writers come in two flavors only: planners and pantsers.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a “pantser” is a writer who writes from the “seat of his or her pants.” In other words, they go into a writing project or writing session without a plan, and they just see what comes out, what happens on the page. A planner, of course, is a writer who outlines what they write before they start writing. Some writers write detailed plans–a summary of every scene that may even include lines of dialogue; others write a simple outline of what needs to happen chapter by chapter. Others might simply have a general outline of the major plot twists of the story. On the other extreme, “discovery writers” have no idea where their story is going until they’ve written it.
Like many other writers, I fall somewhere in the middle, but I definitely start all my writing projects with some sort of direction. Planning out the stories I write makes them stronger and heightens their drama, and also results in less rewriting. But I also find it important to be present to whatever I’m writing in the moment, because only then do I imagine or “live” the details of what I write. These specifics of an emotion or concrete details of an event are what makes the story more compelling, more resonant with people.
With regard to much of the rest of my life, I’m a huge planner. Making a plan may be challenging, tiring, or exhilarating, but I always find it wonderfully freeing to have a plan. It frees me because it gives me something to hang my uncertainty on. At the same time, my plans give me control. When it’s my plan, I can deviate from it as much as I want. Sometimes I feel that planning gives me the ultimate control: I can stick rigidly to the plan if I can’t think of anything better, I can use it as a general guide, follow tiny pieces of it, or throw it away all together so that I can live in the moment. I love my plans, because plans make the story of my future real, hopeful, and positive.
But then, something unexpected will happen and all my plans will be disrupted and become completely useless. While this can be challenging, even upsetting, when this happens I often experience an unexpected but welcome sense of being connected with the present moment. Instead of being focused on future plans, I’m simply living the gift of the present.
How do you feel about plans?
* * *
To Journal About:
Sister Helena Raphael Burns, FSP, a sister in my community, recently published the story of her discernment titling it: What It’s Really Like To Be Married To Jesus. It’s a fun read, but also offers some very helpful insights for those who are discerning their vocations, especially to religious life.
My favorite line from Sr. Helena’s story:
This is what you’re [everyone is] supposed to think when you see a nun: “Yup! God is the Spouse of every soul, the Spouse of my soul.
When we live our vocations with authenticity–marriage, priesthood, religious life, single life–they complement and strengthen each other. Enjoy her story!
A couple weeks ago, I put out a call for questions about discernment, thinking that maybe Friday’s post could be a Q & A. Although a number of readers emailed me, only a couple of questions came up about discernment, mostly about discerning religious life, or what it’s like entering a religious community. I’ll be answering those questions shortly, but I just want to remind you that I’m happy to answer questions–and provide a forum where we can explore discernment together. For now, the best way to send me questions is to “comment” on one of my posts or send me an email. Questions sent to me on Twitter will probably reach me if you use @SisterMPaul, but questions on Facebook won’t reach me for now. (I haven’t been able to set up Facebook’s notifications so that I’m not inundated by all kinds of information that takes too much time to sort through. Hopefully I’ll figure out the settings some day soon!)
I look forward to hearing from you and continuing on our discernment journeys together!
Co-Author Your Life with God 
