Calling

Catherine Brunell

Boston College Campus Ministry; Boston College Inter-Religious Study on Ethical Identity

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March 06, 2009

Discernment: Integrating God-gifted Desire with Everyday Life

“I’m coming to a place in my life where things are no longer happening to me. I’m part of making them happen.” This was an insight that a senior came to in my office. I responded to the caution in her voice as she recognized the impact of the choices and decisions in her life but, inwardly, I smiled because I knew that she was wonderfully close to developing discernment as a spiritual practice.

When I served as a lay Catholic minister at Boston College, I was privileged frequently with hearing the students’ experiences of relationships and transitions that engaged the central questions of their lives. In this role, my essential ministry was the practice of introducing, coaching and affirming a practice of discernment with them.

I am convinced that the habit of discernment is essential to living one’s life fully and care-fully. Ignatian spirituality has been especially effective in developing this practice and has greatly affected my own faith. St. Ignatius of Loyola arranged his tools for decision making in his work, The Spiritual Exercises. The Exercises are based, in part, on his experience of people who came to him for spiritual conversation and direction. He noticed that individuals had distinctly varying patterns in their experiences when they felt close to God and when they felt distant. These concepts are known, respectively, as consolation and desolation. Ignatius offered methods of intentional reflection to move one through the discovery of these patterns and, as called for, toward making a sound election or decision. This process suggests that Christ-centered decisions bear the fruit of our deepest desires and therefore freedom. It is a way toward living God’s profound love for us within our everyday lives. A key question in my ministry is: as minister/mentor/guide how do I best name, teach and encourage this process?

In my work with 20-somethings, I find they frequently need permission to think through and pray about a decision. Naming and explaining the term “discernment” suddenly frees them from the weight of the outcome. Before they acknowledge the process, many of them feel an artificial time crunch that is paralyzing. While they are in “discernment,” however, the process engages them enough to remove them from the “I want it now” syndrome so common to our culture.

Once the process is named and legitimized, my mentoring role might best be defined as coach. This helps me stay out of the way of specific decisions in the making. For the greater part, I have no idea what someone else should or should not do with their life, which is why God is principle to the discernment process. My role is to point out the techniques and skills that will move the person towards making a sound election.

The challenge is in knowing what particular skills are needed per each person and situation. As a coach, I do my best to understand the whole person in front of me and his or her context. Because we are made in God’s image, we frequently “make” or understand God in the images in our lives. By understanding a person’s context, my goal is to understand key images that might be influencing or dominating the person’s experience and therefore theology. As I repeat what I hear, the student is challenged to evaluate the images influencing their decision. Together, we find the area(s) that are most relevant. These experiences lead one to important spiritual skills inherent to discernment.

While there are a multitude of spiritual skills for discernment that I might suggest, there are a few that most frequently surface. One is an ability to admit God’s presence and genuinely allow God into the decision at hand. This also assumes that one can trust that the outcome, whatever it may be, will lead one to deeper freedom because it is of God. Ignatius speaks of it as putting oneself in the middle of the election—like the pointer on a balance—while becoming absolutely detached from outcomes. This requires a radical openness and, for most in discernment, this is where much of the work takes place.

During a series of direction meetings with one student I realized how our anxiety around “What if…” slowly replaces God in the process. He was anxious about approaching any closure to his decision because of what might come next. As he played out every possible scenario in his mind, it was clear that he assumed there was a “right” and “wrong” from which he was choosing, that perhaps God had nothing to do with it or, at most, was waiting to see if he would “pick the right curtain.” A desire for perfection was impeding his ability to experience a call, something that is distinctly not defined in our common experience of “right and wrong.” I simply asked him to describe an image he knows of God. My assumption is that our ability to trust in God’s benevolent involvement is linked closely to our image of God. By focusing on this image and helping it to develop in a way that most accurately reflects God’s best desires for our lives, we move closer to allowing God in and to trusting God’s involvement in the outcome. This student observed quickly that he did not really trust, did not know how to trust, that God was involved. He realized that his work in this process was to let go of the actual decision at hand and instead focus on his experience of God’s movement in his life. This is one of the most powerful things I have witnessed in ministry: to see a person stop wanting to control the outcome and instead become aware of God being in his or her life. Suddenly, the ability to make the decision is possible because of a new awareness of an old relationship.

Another skill is listening or connecting the decision at hand with God’s deepest desire for one’s life. The particular need here is how to listen and to whom to listen. Frequently prayer is as pop-up filled as our computer screens, with our minds regurgitating thoughts and comments from so many sources other than the divine. After a month of direction with one student, she pondered, “Am I hearing my father’s voice as God?” All of us, to a degree, have internalized these outside voices. They are especially talkative in the midst of a decision: parental voices, peers, social constructs and personal expectations popping up, it seems, everywhere. Some may be important to consider, yet a quieting and a distancing is the key to finding God in the midst of one’s prayer. This distancing allows voices that might be initially deafening to fall away. I describe listening as “getting quiet and, then, getting really quiet.” The subtle shift required in becoming quiet internally is achievable when one can see that listening to the God with-in is essential. We begin to hear the possibilities that God has for our lives.

The skills that I have mentioned briefly here are a few pieces in the puzzle for many of us and they foreshadow the final phase of my role as minister and mentor in another’s discernment: it is to encourage the process as ongoing, as a way of living one’s life. I do this by inviting the directee to look back upon the experience of making the decision. Where did they find freedom and joy? Where did they find growth? Where is God leading them in their development? One student laughed and said, “You want me to reflect upon my reflection?” Redundant as it may seem, this last phase retraces the connection they have experienced with God. It illustrates that discernment is larger than the decision at hand and, if practiced, is a tether holding us accountable to our most free selves.

My hope is that, through this practice, each of us sees our lives as unique creations of God. We are gift and have been given as a story to unfold and develop. When done with intention, we discern our best selves, we elect towards our most true freedom, we become grace because we are God’s and we learn to pay attention to that.

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Related

"Discernment: It's About More Than Your Vocation" with Catherine Brunell (via Boston College)