When Scott and I were first married, we had a friend named Glenn who worked with Scott at Barnett Bank in Florida. Glenn told us one evening about watching a teller at the bank flipping through a large stack of bills… She touched each bill for a fraction of a second and maybe once in the stack she would pull a bill out and put it to the side. These were the bills that she suspected were counterfeit. Actually more than suspecting, she just KNEW – knew from the slight variations of the texture of the paper and ink under the edge of her thumb.
What does that story have to do with discernment? Discernment is not like that. We very seldom ‘just know.’ Over a person’s lifetime, they make millions of decisions of all shapes and sizes. Over a person’s lifetime, maybe for one of those decisions, they “just know.”
The traditional practice of discernment – faithful decision making – as spiritual discipline owes much to the Catholic Ignatian tradition and to Quaker practices. There’s a history there and much ancient wisdom… but that’s not today’s blog.
Discernment is a practice suited well to the times in which we live. So let’s take a minute to talk about how we might understand these times. So many of us have a gut feeling that there’s something special different unique going on in our churches and institutions. Is it just our imagination or are things truly changing more quickly and more profoundly than in times past? Church historian Phyllis Tickle writes about this idea: that every 500 years or so, the church has a “great rummage sale” in which ideas and notions of the role of the church get all shifty (The Great Emergence, Baker Books 2012). The Protestant Reformation was the most recent of these great transitions (Luther’s theses were posted on Halloween in 1517 – early Renaissance social media LOL). The Reformation was a time in which the authority of the church shifted in a profound way – from the Pope and the hierarchy of the church to the scriptures.
1517… hmmm. Well… TICK TOCK Y’ALL. We’re due for another great rummage sale, and it’s happening all around us. Tickle’s thesis is that the transition in which we’re living now is another change in our source of authority: from the Bible to the Spirit.
Assuming that she’s right*, it behooves us to learn the best ways to hear the voice of Spirit. And that’s what discernment is all about. Spiritual direction is a great setting in which to dive into personal and vocational discernment. I think of direction as a container in which discernment can unfold.
In that container (or in whatever setting we are discerning), there’s an atmosphere of trust.
- We trust the deep desires of our heart. When we ask discernment questions, we trust that our hearts are already leaning the right way. We trust that God somehow has placed those desires in our hearts.
- We trust the goodness of Life at a basic level. In this way, we are able to hold our decision lightly… to remain open and receptive to the Spirit’s movement, letting go of our own agenda even if just for a time.
- We trust our imagination and intuition. We allow our emotions and physical sensations to inform our decision making. My spiritual direction mentor and supervisor Rev Teresa Blythe has this go-to question: ‘where do you feel this decision in your body?’ It took me a while sitting with this question to grasp what it means.
- Finally, we trust our community. We lean on one another’s wisdom.
Discernment is entwined with the Cs of our faith journey– commandment, commission, and commitment – and interacts with those concepts around the question of HOW. Discernment is all about the HOW.
- How do we respond to the commandment of love? What does our call to love look like on the ground, in real life?
- How do we live into the task before us – our commission to embrace this life and embody grace and peace? What part of this work is ours to do? What tasks have my name on them?
- How do we sustain the commitment that’s required to build the house of Wisdom?
These are the questions of discernment continually lying before us: as a faithful community, as individuals, as a culture, as a species. May we make decisions that are life-giving. Amen.
*☺ I’m not at all qualified to argue with Phyllis Tickle! Her ideas are given the briefest summary/mangle here. The Great Emergence is a fab overview of church history for lay persons.