Spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton shares how the Ignatian practice of discernment helps us to recognize God’s guidance in our lives:
The habit of discernment is a quality of attentiveness to God that is so intimate that over time we develop an intuitive sense of God’s heart and purpose in any given moment. We become familiar with God’s voice—the tone, quality and content—just as we become familiar with the voice of a human being we know well. We are able to grasp the answers to several key questions: Who is God for me in the moment? Where is God at work, continuing to unfold [God’s] love and redemption? Who am I most authentically in response? It is a way of looking at all of life with a view to sensing the movement of God’s Spirit and abandoning ourselves to it….
For many of us, though, knowledge of God’s will is a subject fraught with doubt and difficulty. Is it really possible to know the will of God? we wonder. Do I really trust [God] to do what’s best for me? How do I know whether I have “discerned” God’s will or if it is just a good way to justify what I want? How do I make sense of those times when I thought I understood the will of God but it ended up being a mess? It was hard enough to trust God the first time. How can I trust God again?
Barton writes that an authentic discernment process identifies love as our primary calling:
For the Christian person, the choices we make are always about love and which choice enables us to keep following God into love. There may be other factors to consider, but the deepest question for us as Christian people is, What does love call for in this situation? What would love do?
Why is it that we so rarely ask this question relative to the choices we face? What distracts us from love in various situations in which we are trying to discern God’s will? I don’t know your answers to this question, but I can tell you a few of mine. For one thing, love is a major inconvenience at times. It is rarely efficient…. Furthermore, love challenges my self-centeredness, and sometimes it requires me to give more of myself than I want to give. Sometimes love hurts, or at least it makes me vulnerable. All the time, love is risky, and there are no guarantees.
And yet love is the deepest calling of the Christian life, the standard by which everything about our lives is measured…. Any decision-making process that fails to ask the love question misses the point of the Christian practice of discernment. Discernment is intended to take us deeper and deeper into the heart of God’s will: that we would follow God passionately into love—even if it takes us all the way to the cross.
Reference:
Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006), 111, 116, 117–118.
Image credit and inspiration: Kuo-Chiao Lin, After Work (detail), 2017, photo, Taiwan, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. When we are listening we stop, be still and quiet, because we don’t want to miss the voice that is speaking.
Story from Our Community:
Having taught choral music for more than thirty years, I have often witnessed profoundly sacred moments that bring me to tears. The blend of harmonies and spirits evokes a larger presence in the room that can only be known as Christ. At the end of the piece, we often pause in a silent moment of awe. I find myself speechless, having heard the voice of God within all the voices in the room.
—Marvin Z.
