It’s not uncommon for me to find myself in a conversation with someone who thinks they must have messed up their discernment. ‘I really thought I was supposed to take this job,’ they’ll sigh. ‘But it turns out – I hate it.’ Or, ‘I really thought he was “the one.” But it didn’t work out so I must have been wrong.’ Or, ‘This seemed like the perfect volunteering opportunity! I was praying for something like this to come up. But I’m actually really bad at it and it doesn’t seem like a good fit after all.’
In each of these situations, the person assumes that their discernment was wrong. They have equated the discernment process with praying intensely and giving something due consideration. But the action of actually testing out what they think is a good path? For some reason, many people fail to include that as part of the process of discernment; yet it’s an absolutely key aspect!
One of the difficulties of being human is our inability to know the future. We (understandably) want to make a decision and know that it will turn out well, if only we make it in a responsible manner. With due consideration for various circumstances and consequences, as well as serious prayer, we try to make what we believe to be a good discernment – and are deeply disappointed when things don’t work out as we thought they should have. We blame ourselves and our discernment process.
Very often, though, that blame is misplaced: we’re operating under a false assumption about the nature of what is knowable. The fact is, for human persons, there is some knowledge that lies only on the other side of experience. In other words, often we can’t know whether or not something is a good fit for us until we actually try it out.
It’s true that prayer and self-reflection are essential to helping us make good decisions (how many teenagers have been asked by flabbergasted parents, ‘Why didn’t you think before you did that stupid thing?!’), but they are not the only elements of good discernment.
Prayer, thoughtful consideration, self-awareness: many times these things help us to make what is essentially a good, educated guess. Very often, we have to try something out in order to know whether we’ve ‘guessed’ correctly.
Trying things out can take all sorts of different forms. Perhaps we might seek out an internship at a company we hope to work for, in order to test out being in that environment and working with those colleagues and completing these particular tasks. Maybe we date someone for several months, getting to know them in different situations and having wide-ranging conversations in order to know if we’d like to spend the rest of our lives with them. And in some cases, it might be possible to simply try doing the very thing we want to discern: we may sign up to volunteer in order to see whether volunteering in this way is a good fit.
Practically speaking, it can be helpful to set some parameters about what a trial period looks like and when we’ll pause for review, so we aren’t constantly over-thinking it the whole time. Internships tend to come with their own timeline, and anyone who’s ever dated someone ‘too long’ knows that feeling, although it can be difficult to articulate. The added benefit of doing something while knowing it’s a test is that we don’t end up associating it ‘not working’ with failure. An experimental mindset – in which we embrace trying things out as part of the discernment process – is freeing because it allows us to gain experiential knowledge without the pressures of needing our ‘best guess’ to be correct.
Of course, there are a few situations in life that we can’t test out directly: there’s no going back from permanent things like final vows, priestly ordination, Baptism, marriage, or having a child. On the one hand, it can be scary to enter into something so weighty without having tested it out first; on the other hand, these situations are not entered into lightly, nor are they entered into alone. Religious life is set up with various stages of commitment: postulancy, novitiate, temporary vows, etc. Priests are not ordained the first day they set foot in seminary, nor are couples married 24 hours after the first date. Baptism involves (especially in the case of an infant) a community of believers who are willing to supply the faith needed for the sacrament. And no child comes into existence on their own. God offers us the graces needed for our state in life, and the Church offers us a community of support: the Body of Christ.
Since we’re embodied creatures who are designed to live in community, discernment doesn’t need to be seen as merely a solo intellectual and/or spiritual endeavour. (Even Carthusian monks live their rather solitary lives together!) Of course it’s good to go away and pray in solitude sometimes, just as Jesus did in the Gospels. But if that’s all we ever do, our decisions won’t be made with experiential knowledge, which is a valuable thing indeed. When we expand the notion of discernment to include embodied action alongside others, we’re expanding our ability to make decisions well, in the way that honours God’s design of the kind of creatures that we are.
