coming to us endlessly from God, who is Love itself.
A Personal God
Ignatius emphasized one other aspect of God’s character that’s important for discernment. God is personal. He is very close to us. Ignatius imagines God looking on the world in all its splendor and suffering: “the happy and the sad, so many people aimless, despairing, hateful, and killing, so many undernourished, sick and dying, so many struggling with life and blind to any meaning. With God I can hear people laughing and cursing, some shouting and screaming, some praying, others cursing.” God’s answer to this spectacle is to say, “Let us work the redemption of the whole human race.” The remedy is Jesus, who enters into it all. God enters into our suffering by sharing it. Jesus comes to heal and redeem. Jesus “does all this for me,” Ignatius writes.
Friendship is a term often used in the Ignatian tradition to describe our relationship with God. Ignatius frequently urges us to speak to God intimately, “as one friend to another, making known his affairs to him, and seeking advice in them.” Pope Francis often talks about Christ as our friend. “He is close to each one of you as a companion,” the pope said. He is “a friend who knows how to help and understand you, who encourages you in difficult times and never abandons you. In prayer, in conversation with him, and in reading the Bible, you will discover that he is truly close. You will also learn to read God’s signs in your life. He always speaks to us, also through the events of our time and our daily life.”
The Jesuit spiritual director William A. Barry says that friendship is the purpose of creation. “God desires humans into existence for the sake of friendship,” he writes. He says that developing a relationship with God is “analogous to the kind of friendship that develops over a long time between two people.” He draws out the contrast between this friendship and conventional images of God. God our friend is not God the majestic, all-powerful, and distant ruler. It’s not God as lawgiver and judge. As Father Barry’s Irish mother put it, “God is better than he’s made out to be.”
A God who wants friendship with us, who’s present in all things, who labors ceaselessly to save and heal the world, who pours out blessings like an endlessly flowing fountain—a God like this isn’t an Engineer-in-Chief laying out a blueprint for everyone’s life. Our job isn’t to follow a set of divine instructions but rather to grow closer to a God who loves us and desires to be our friend. As we love him more, we will discern the right path. “Let the risen Jesus enter your life—welcome him as a friend,” says Pope Francis. “Trust him, be confident that he is close to you, he is with you, and he will give you the peace you are looking for and the strength to live as he would have you do.”
What Do You Really Want?
This brings discernment into clearer focus. Discernment is about loving and following God, not struggling to make the “right” decision. Our end is union with this God who loves us and who desires the best for us. Our decisions are the means to this end. As Ignatius put it, “I ought to do whatever I do, that it may help me for the end for which I am created.” The Gospel story of Martha and Mary is about this very thing. When Jesus came to visit, Martha busied herself with the chores of hospitality while Mary sat with Jesus and listened to him. Jesus chided the busy Martha: “You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part” (Lk 10:41-42). The main thing in discernment—the one necessary thing—is to love God first.
If we love God first, it doesn’t matter if the path we follow in life is circuitous, with frequent loops, retreats, and cul-de-sacs. It matters little if the decisions we make turn out very differently than expected. No one knew this better than St. Ignatius. He called himself “the pilgrim.” In the tradition of pilgrimage, the journey itself is at least as important as the goal. His path in life was a meandering one, but Ignatius deeply believed that we can confidently walk along that path, finding the course that pleases God and brings us the deepest joy.
Notice the positive view of human nature that underlies this attitude. Ignatius was no Freudian. He knew nothing of libidos and ids and Oedipus complexes, and would have rejected the claim that they drive our behavior. He was no Calvinist; he didn’t think that the human soul was so irreparably damaged by sin that it is incapable of knowing the good. He didn’t view desires with suspicion as many religious people do. Ignatius loved desires. In the Spiritual Exercises, he continually says, “Pray for what I want.” He believed that our deepest desires—what he called the “great desires”—are for loving union with God and others.
Thus we arrive at perhaps Ignatius’s greatest insight in the matter of discernment. God placed these great desires in our hearts. Finding God’s “will” means discovering what they are. This is what we really want. Ignatius believed that when we find what we really want, we find what God wants too.
Ignatius came upon this insight through his own experience of conversion. Through a process of reflection and discernment he came to understand that his deepest desire was to surrender himself completely to Christ and to go wherever Christ sent him. This desire had always been there. He had been restless and unhappy in his life as a military man and court official. When he recognized his deepest desires—when he discovered what he really wanted—he found peace and joy.
You might say that of course God wanted Ignatius to walk the difficult and demanding path of celibacy and poverty. That God wants everyone to do the hardest thing. But God doesn’t work that way. Ignatius found the way of life best suited for him. If he had been a different person, it’s entirely possible that a career of service to the king would have given him more happiness than a life as a priest. In fact, that must have been God’s desire for any number of young men in sixteenth-century Spain. But it wasn’t his desire for Ignatius, and it wasn’t Ignatius’s deepest desire for himself.
Finding what you really want doesn’t mean “follow your bliss” or “do the work that makes you happy.” The problem is that we don’t know what will make us happy. Following our bliss frequently makes us miserable. We want many things, contradictory things—money and a balanced life; relationships and excitement; the esteem of others and the satisfactions of humble service. The hard work of discernment involves sorting through these desires and wants and passions and needs and discovering the kernel of authentic desire that God placed within us.
“Love God and Do What You Will”
“God’s will” isn’t something external. It’s internal. It’s implanted in our hearts. Doing God’s will isn’t a matter of finding out some undiscovered item of “God’s plan” and putting it into effect; it’s more a matter of growing into the kind of person we’re meant to be. It’s the expression of the deepest truths of ourselves within the setting of a day-to-day relationship with God. The question to ask is, Is this action consistent with who I am and want to become?
We can answer this question with confidence if we sincerely love God and seek to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Here’s the solution to the paradox of discernment. On the one hand, God cares about us and knows us intimately. We’re supposed to follow him in everything, large and small. On the other hand, God has given us free will and reason. We’re free to do what we want. These two principles seem to pull in opposite directions—but they are really two sides of one thing. If we love God, then what we most deeply want and what God wants are the same thing. Augustine made this point in his famous saying, “Love God and do what you will.” If you truly love God, doing what you want will be doing what God wants.
It’s simple—but not easy. The question “What do you really want?” is difficult to answer. We want many things. Many of them aren’t worth having. Many will make us miserable instead of happy. Ignatius knew this very well. He developed an approach to discernment that helps us sift through our competing desires. It’s an approach based on learning to listen to what our
