too.
Ignatius’s ideas about discernment (and much more) are found in the Spiritual Exercises. In the Spiritual Exercises we meet Christ inviting each of us to find our place in his work of saving and healing the world. Ignatius would have us ask three questions: “What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What ought I do for Christ?” Discernment has a very important role in our answers to these questions. Finding the work we’re meant to do requires discernment—the attentiveness to the inner life where we can find God’s leading.
Ignatius’s ideas about discernment are distilled into twenty-two “rules for the discernment of spirits” that he appended to the end of the Spiritual Exercises. We will go through these rules in some detail in this book, but we will also look at some of the other ideas in the Spiritual Exercises that put discernment in the right context and provide the foundation for it.
First—a few words about the Spiritual Exercises. The Spiritual Exercises is not a book that you would pick up for inspiring spiritual reading. The book the Spiritual Exercises is the outline for an intensive retreat-prayer experience, also known as the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius wrote the book for spiritual directors who lead people through this retreat. In Ignatius’s day, the usual form of the Spiritual Exercises was an intensive thirty-day retreat. Today the Exercises are usually given over the course of many months in a format that allows people to continue with their normal activities.
Ignatius designed the Exercises to bring about a deep conversion to Christ and his work. “Design” isn’t quite the right word for what Ignatius did. The Spiritual Exercises (and the rules for discernment) are the fruit of years of patient observation and trial and error as Ignatius worked to help people grow closer to God. He didn’t design a program as much as he discovered spiritual truths and principles of human psychology that have always been true. His great accomplishment was to assemble these truths into a coherent package, which became the basis for a powerful program of conversion.
The empirical origins of Ignatian spirituality is one reason for its practicality. It’s not burdened with theory, and it doesn’t call on people to scale rarified spiritual heights. It is centered on the person of Jesus. Its aim is to help us join Christ’s work in the world and thereby come to know and love him more deeply. One of the mottos of Ignatian spirituality is “finding God in all things.” This implies that the good is plural. There are many ways to God.
Ignatian discernment is practical too. Some complain that the discernment they are familiar with is vague and subjective. Ignatian discernment is neither. It is a skill and a methodology. The skill part is about acquiring habits of prayerful attentiveness and learning how to interpret spiritual senses and inner movements of the heart. The methodology is applying these skills (and other tools) to the choices and decisions we face in real life. Discernment is hard to define, but here’s a stab at it: Discernment is the wisdom that enables us to distinguish between feelings, ideas, and motives that are from the Holy Spirit and those that aren’t. It shows us the choices that lead to God and those that don’t.
Why Our Choices Matter
Let’s begin with a fundamental question—the question that philosophy and theology begin with. Why are we here? Ignatius gave his answer in a short passage at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises called The First Principle and Foundation. The first sentence answers the question “Why are we here?” “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” This tells us what we’re on earth to do, but it tells us other things too. It tells us that we are created to do this. That is, the deepest, truest truth about us is that God created us to praise, reverence, and serve him. This is what we really want. This is what God really wants too. The seeds of the answer to the eternal question “What is God’s will?” lie in that sentence. We will know what God wants when we know what we really want.
What it means to love God varies from time to time and place to place and person to person. We live in a world of vast complexity. The First Principle and Foundation continues:
The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created. Hence, man is to make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him.
This is how we are to love and serve God. The way to God is through the “things on the face of the earth.” God is not “up there.” He is here—in the work we do, our friends and family, our responsibilities, our ambitions and hopes and disappointments, the opportunities and misfortunes that come our way, the way we interact with the institutions of society. Nothing is so small, so fleeting, so distasteful, or so awful that it’s excluded from God’s love. All of it is meaningful. All of it has the potential to take us to God.
It follows that the choices we make about these things are just about the most important things we do. Here is the great challenge of life: to choose the good (“make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end”) and avoid the bad (“rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him”). This is why our choices matter, and this is where discernment comes in. It points the way toward the choices that will bring us closer to the end for which we were created.
Choosing the Good
Ignatius assumes—and we assume here too—that people interested in discernment have committed themselves to pursuing the good. He says that those who want to do the Exercises should “enter upon them with magnanimity and generosity” toward God. Discernment is not for people who are deceiving others, entangled in crime, engaged in malicious behavior, or are otherwise walking on the dark side. It’s irrelevant for people who aren’t sure whether they want the good at all. This doesn’t mean that we have to attain a high level of holiness in order to discern well. It does mean that our lives need to be fundamentally oriented toward God.
It also means that Ignatian discernment is about making choices between two or more good alternatives. Tomorrow morning, when you ask yourself “What should I do?” the options for the day do not include misleading your boss, retaliating for a slight, or hiding something from your spouse. You might not be full of magnanimity and generosity all the time, but your intention is to do the right thing, which means that you want what God wants for the day.
It follows that discernment won’t steer us in directions that are unpleasant and alienating. It’s not uncommon for Christians to think that the most difficult, challenging, and grimmest option is the one that God wants: I need to spend my lunch break trying to be nice to that guy I can’t stand. I should volunteer to give a talk even though I hate speaking in front of groups. I should quit my job and work in a soup kitchen. This way of thinking has its roots in a certain kind of severe spirituality that greatly values austerity and sacrifice. A kind of heroic virtue can be seen as the ideal, giving rise to the feeling that to follow a path that is pleasing and satisfying to us is to settle for second best.
If we want more of God, he will point us in a direction that is consistent with our deepest desires. Our deepest desires are his deepest desires. Discernment leads to choices that make us more and more into the person we are meant to be. Our journey with God may take us to surprising places, but these will not be places that are repugnant to us or that alienate us from ourselves.
Another misconception is that discernment involves decoding secret messages. “God’s will” is seen as a deep enigma shrouded in mystery. God scatters a bunch of hints and clues; discernment is about figuring out what they mean. Admittedly, discernment is often uncertain, but God doesn’t enjoy hiding things from us and making decisions difficult. The hard work of discernment is sifting through our illusions and conflicting desires to find the way that truly satisfies us.
Discernment
