Greetings in the Name of the Lord!
Discernment is one of those life skills that can be challenging to acquire. A lot of us make decisions with our gut, based on the information that is right in front of us, others collect data and try to analyze which option would be best, others create pro/con lists, others chat with friends or a therapist. More often than any of us would probably like to admit, we breeze right through a lot of the decisions we make in a day without really thinking too much about them, reacting to situations instead of thinking through them, or relying on patterns we have grown accustomed to over our lifetime, or patterns that we may very well have inherited from our families of origin.
As a church, when we are presented with challenges and choices, the hope is that we are intentionally discerning where God wants us to be through prayer and practice. But how often does a mainline protestant church talk about ways to prayerfully discern God's desire for either ourselves or our congregation?
Luckily, there are actually a lot of resources for prayerful spiritual discernment. Most are intended for individuals, but they can be applied in a congregational setting if we are all engaging in these practices before we engage in dialogue with each other about what choices we can make. They can also help guide the way we talk about decisions for the church.
So, I want to offer two concrete prayerful spiritual discernment practices that you can put into use immediately in your own life, and that can also be useful for community discernment..I will offer up one this week, and then another next week, so here we go!
The practice for this week is modification of an Ignatian practice. It is a way of looking at a question and getting to the deepest part of what is driving the question in the first place. Here is an outline of steps to guide this particular process, but remember, this is a guide, not a set of rules, it is important to do what we can, while letting go of all the shoulds. In other words, try to embrace the intended goal without getting lost in specific "how tos".
1. Find a quiet and comfortable place to sit. Take a few moments to focus on your breath, just observing the breath as it goes in and out of us. Use this to calm your mind and find some grounding and a center.
2. Offer a brief prayer asking for God's guidance in this moment and seeking to be open to any movement the Spirit may make within you.
3. State the question that is before you, and sit with it for a little bit, what does the question feel like as you ask it? If there are feelings there, when are other times you have felt the same way? Try to observe yourself as you ask the question and what reactions it brings up, without any effort to try and answer the question, just ask it without any expectation of response, be in the question.
4. Ask yourself why this question is important to you. What about it is causing you to have a hard time deciding which direction to take.
5. As you come up with answers to those questions, iask why of those answers and why of the answers to those answers and so forth until you get to something that feels foundational or a root. For example, let's say the question at hand is about a job choice, and you determine that the reason this feels so important is because it will affect your life in big ways. You could ask, how will it affect my life, as a follow up. From there maybe you come to realize that money is a way it will affect you. You could ask a follow up question like, why does money matter? The idea is to keep going deeper, until you get to something like a fundamental desire, a root desire.
6. Once you get to a root desire, or as deep as you can go in the moment, allow that to lead your prayer going forward. For example, in the career question, let's say you get to a point where you realize your deepest desire is to Love and care for your family. If that were the case, allow your prayer to be about asking God to guide you towards the most meaningful ways to show and share Love with your family.
7. After you have determined a prayer topic, revisit that prayer topic for at least a week or so, daily if you can, and seek to be open to whatever comes from that prayer (and it should be noted, God rarely answers prayers in the way we want God to, so being humbly open to God's movement is important). It can be helpful to journal about your prayer topics as you get to them.
8. Revisit this process from step one (could be the next day or the next week), as many times as you like, chances are you will find a new line of questioning each time. Once you have gone through this process a few times. Revisit the question itself and check to see if any clarity has emerged as a result of the process of questioning the question and getting to the root of the question.
Next week I will offer some practices that can help whenever you get back to the question itself.
I can not stress enough that these steps are a suggested guide. If you are struggling with them at any point, feel free to reach out to me for advice and spiritual direction. I find that although steps like this are helpful, everyone is different and I can be helpful in offering adjustments that will work for you.
In Peace,
Mike