alone. This is the promise that discernment holds out: We can live in the Spirit. We can hear God. We can find what will give us greatest joy. We can attain what we really want.
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What Is “God’s Will”?
The purpose of discernment is to find “God’s will.” Ignatius himself said as much. What we’re after, he wrote, is to “seek and find the divine will.” But what does that mean? Does God have everything mapped out for us—a blueprint for our lives that we need to discover and conform to? Does God have one “correct” choice in mind for every important decision? In small decisions does he have a precise idea of how we should live every day? “God has a plan for you”: It’s a pretty common idea. God’s will is something external to us; we have to figure out the plan and follow it.
But this is unlikely to be the case. For starters, logically, where do you stop? If God has one right answer for every question, you can’t draw any line with God’s plan on one side and our personal choice on the other. God must know which project you should work on tomorrow morning, what you should cook for dinner tonight, which errands to run, and which route you should take as you do them. He must know the music you should listen to and the best television programs to watch. The “one answer” principle quickly becomes untenable. It’s also incompatible with the free will that God has given us. God gives us wide latitude and much room for discretion. He wishes us to freely choose to love. He doesn’t coerce or limit us.
Another point: Most Christians, including most of the saints, don’t get God’s certain answer to the questions they ask. Sometimes they do. Christ appears to Paul in a blinding vision. God speaks to Augustine through a Scripture passage that the future saint reads at random. But these cases are the exceptions—presented as miracles—to God’s intervention in the usual course of events. Far more common is uncertainty, even wandering in the darkness for a while. If discernment means finding the one right answer to every question, why is it so rare?
In fact, many things are good. The good is plural. God is abundant, not limiting. Most of our choices are among good, better, and best—not right and wrong.
What is God Like?
Our notions of what “God’s will” means is rooted in what we think God is like. The totality of God is beyond our knowing. What we have are images of God—pictures in our minds that capture part of God’s essence. These images are powerful, and they influence the way we think about choices. Growing up, most of us learned a simple image of God as the Boss who is in charge of everything (except when, mysteriously, he seemed not to be). There are variations on the Boss. Some bosses are stern judges enforcing the rules with punishments. Some are hard taskmasters, demanding much and upholding high standards. Some are benevolent, tolerating just about everything with a kindly smile.
As we go on in life other images of God usually appear, but the image of God-as-Boss is a powerful one, and some features of it can persist. We can continue to see God as somewhat separate from creation—overseeing the world from the corner office or the penthouse. We can see him as primarily the solver of problems. This causes us to see discernment as essentially a matter of solving a puzzle, with the lingering fear of making a mistake.
Ignatius’s image of God was very different, and it shaped his whole understanding of the process of discerning God’s “will.” He developed this image in some detail at the end of the Spiritual Exercises in a series of meditations known as the Contemplation to Obtain the Love of God. It’s actually several images of God.
Here’s the first image:
This is to reflect how God dwells in creatures: in the elements giving them existence, in the plants giving them life, in the animals conferring upon them sensation, in man bestowing understanding. So He dwells in me and gives me being, life, sensation, intelligence; and makes a temple of me, since I am created in the likeness and image of the Divine Majesty.
If you’re looking for the heart of Ignatian spirituality, here it is. “God dwells in creatures,” and “creatures” has the widest possible definition. God is present in all things. This is Paul’s image of God: “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom 11:36). Ignatius said that his friends “should practice the seeking of God’s presence in all things, in their conversations, their walks, in all that they see, taste, hear, understand, in all their actions, since His Divine Majesty is truly in all things.” The Jesuit theologian St. Robert Bellarmine went even further. “What various powers lie hidden in plants! What strange powers are found in stones,” he said.
Some Christians are acutely sensitive to God’s absence from the world. Ignatian spirituality emphasizes his presence. This brings God down to earth; “Christ is found in ten thousand places,” said the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It elevates earth to God; Hopkins also wrote, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” “Nothing human is merely human,” writes the theologian Ronald Modras. “No common labor is merely common. Classrooms, hospitals, and artists’ studios are sacred spaces. No secular pursuit of science is merely secular.” Everything that deepens our humanity deepens our knowledge of God.
The Ignatian God doesn’t dwell in lonely splendor in the highest heavens. He doesn’t even sit in the corner office. He’s here.
The Contemplation continues:
Consider how God works and labors for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth, that is, He conducts Himself as one who labors. Thus, in the heavens, the elements, the plants, the fruits, the cattle, etc., He gives being, conserves them, confers life and sensation.
Here Ignatius sees God as the worker—“one who labors.” God the king, the judge, the merciful forgiver, the gift-giver, the unfathomable Other is also the creative power sustaining, healing, and perfecting the world. In the Ignatian view, something is always happening.
The creator God of Genesis is a worker. He doesn’t create out of nothing; he brings order to chaos. Before he set to work, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gn 1:2). Out of this unpromising raw material came the sun, the moon, and the stars; day and night; the land teeming with plants and animals; and, eventually, us. This is Ignatius’s God—a God who never stops creating. He’s at work now bringing order out of the chaos of our world. The Holy Spirit of God moves through this seething mass of passion, energy, conflict, and desire giving us culture, religion, art, science, and all the other elements of our familiar world.
This is why discernment is important. We have a role to play in this creative work. Most of it isn’t glamorous work. “Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins. “To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, gives him glory too.”
The Contemplation ends with a final vision of God as the infinitely generous, inexhaustible giver of gifts:
To see how all that is good and every gift descends from on high. Thus, my limited power descends from the supreme and infinite power above—and similarly with justice, goodness, pity, mercy, etc.—as rays descend from the sun and waters from a fountain.
God dwells in all things; he works in all things; he makes us a gift of all things. He’s like the sun, and his gifts are like the sunshine. The sun is sunshine. God is gift, and the sun always shines.
“What does it matter, all is grace,” are the dying words of the lonely, forgotten, anonymous priest in the novel The Diary of a Country
