the demands of conscience, God forbid. It is a question of how we work out, faithfully, attentively, obediently, what we need to do and say in order to remain within sight and sound of each other in the fellowship to which Christ has called us. It has never been easy and it isn’t now. But it is the call that matters, and that sustains us together in the task.12
“How we work out, faithfully, attentively, obediently, what we need to do and say . . .”—this is an instruction in learning discretion. Williams does not use these words casually; they arise from a lifetime’s study of classical and Christian tradition. All three adverbs point to a discretion that arises from a matrix of silence.
“Faithfully” means releasing our tightly held prejudices and opinions concerning the way the world should work; such opinions can reflect only a small and blinkered aspect of truth. Faith is the acknowledgment that there is a larger vision than we can ask or imagine, and the willingness to be taken into it.
“Attentively” means not only listening but listening at a level of receptive responsiveness, allowing the words of the other to reach deeply into our hearts so that we may behold, however obliquely, the vast mystery toward which they gesture, the mystery of the human person, which is as deep as the mystery of the God whose nature each of us shares.
“Obediently,” in its root sense, is the attentive listening of the heart that Christ teaches (Phil 2:5–11). In other words, “putting on the mind of Christ” is the refusal to grasp or claim our prejudices, an attempt at possession that gives us an illusory sense of our own omnipotence and creates interior noise that impedes listening. Instead, obedience entails a continually expanding self-knowledge, a heart that knows there is nothing good or evil of which it is not capable, a heart that longs for conversion from the conviction of its own judgment tο being filled with the spacious perspective of the mind of a merciful God.
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Discretion cannot be taught; it is supremely mimetic; it is learned by example. This mimesis is especially clear in the desert tradition. The seeker divides his or her time, more or less, half in the cell and half taking counsel with the elders, who are exemplars of discretion. One learns from such people not so much by baring one’s thoughts, although this practice is often mentioned, but far more by absorbing the elders’ example through a kind of spiritual osmosis.
When one visits an elder, perhaps the light of charism is lit, perhaps it is not. Often the disciple lacks the discernment to recognize the light, even less the discretion to receive it. His mind is too full of his own ideas. The abba or amma may offer food or not, may allow the seeker to stay or not, most probably will not speak. On the other hand, the disciple may receive a word to do the best she can, tο eat when she is hungry, and sleep when she is sleepy, and pray as she is able. On rare occasions, the disciple might be allowed to stay and imitate in silence what the elder does.
Discretion is not always what our genteel sensibilities might expect. Abba Abraham left the desert to go to the brothel where his niece had immured herself after being raped. He paid the brothel keeper for her time, ostensibly for sex but in reality to persuade his niece of her continuing worth as a human person, no matter what she had suffered, and of God’s loving welcome, and his.13
The desert tradition reveals that discretion is not simply a skill; it is more like an art, the creation of an atmosphere where new connections can be made. We learn this art by repeated immersion in the resurrection to be found in the silence of receptive waiting, in the spaciousness of God, which is the true wellspring of our lives and our truth.
We have forgotten that the school of discretion has always been found in fidelity tο our own core silence. Silence has become so alien tο institutional practice that the Archbishop’s discretion, described earlier, was not recognized as such even by most of his fellow clerics. Indeed, religion today is not, generally speaking, a place where one would look for discretion. For the most part, religion has become indistinguishable from the culture, polarized between “extreme” (fundamentalism) on the one hand and “whatever” (vague, fuzzy, warm feelings) on the other. The cultivation of a pressure-free space where faith can grow without distortion appears to be a notion almost entirely foreign to contemporary religious hustle and bustle.
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The present state of affairs is not unique. For example, the author of the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, a master of discretion, writes to a reluctant disciple:
I say all this to let you see how far you still are from knowing truly your own interior dispositions; and second to give you warning not to surrender tο nor follow too quickly in inexperience, the unusual movements of your heart, for fear of illusion. I say all this to explain to you what my opinion is of you and your stirrings, as you have asked me. For I feel that you are over inclined and too eagerly disposed toward these sudden impulses for extraordinary practices, and very swift to seize upon them when they come. And that is very dangerous.14
How far this mentality is from the twenty-first century attitude, “If it feels good, do it,” that often passes for discernment; from narcissistic self-regard, or fatuous, overconfident claims of biblical inerrancy and literalism; from thundering condemnations of other human beings for the way God happens to have made them—all such indiscreet activities masking, of course, agendas of power and self-promotion.
[The Devil]15 will sometimes change his likeness into that of an angel of light, in order that, under the colour of virtue, he may do more mischief. . . . He persuades very many to embrace a special type of holiness above the common law and custom of their state of life. The signs of it are . . . devout observances and forms of behaviour, and openly reproving the faults of other men when they have no authority for it. He leads them on . . . always under the pretext of devotion and charity; not because he takes any delight in works of devotion or of charity, but because he loves dissension and scandal.16
The Cloud-author shows us the source of destructive religious dissension in our own day. It is a mentality that arises from the sloth of yielding to distraction (medieval people would use the word fornication, for from the beginning of the Christian era to the high Middle Ages, distraction was considered a greater sin than sexual infidelity), of indiscretion, and the idolatry of experience. He is perhaps glossing Matthew 12:34–35: “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person brings good things out of a good treasure, and the evil person brings evil things out of an evil treasure.” In every age, religious demagogues—and, in ours, atheistic ones as well—are quick to censure people and situations they not only do not understand but also refuse to understand. This deliberate closing of the mind is not only culpable; it exposes bitter, narrow hearts that lust for power. This kind of judgmentalism is at the root of much of the evil abroad in today’s world.
If we are to recover discretion in our lives and in our world before our heedlessness makes our planet uninhabitable at any level—physical, moral, or spiritual—we must start by choosing silent, receptive awareness, “the hidden love offered in purity of spirit,” which is God’s working in us.17 But we face a Herculean task. To merely begin even to attempt to alter our knee-jerk response of anesthetizing our sin and pain to make room for this working in us requires extreme cultural ascesis.
To make space for God means examining every daily pressure to which we are exposed, both the pressures from within ourselves, and those we receive from others, allowing each to fall away unexercised. It is in this pressure-free space that discretion is born. This space is not “my space,” but a space in which the mystery of the other and of ourselves takes on a far greater significance: a space where God’s working may perhaps find a way of sorting things out beyond human limitation; a space where we may learn the discretion of doing “only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”
If . . . grace is ever to be won, it must be taught from within, of God, when you
