Should I take the job that pays more? Or the one that gives me more time for family? Is it better to move closer to our parents or our children’s school? Which charity should we donate our money to? Most people face ordinary decisions like these throughout their lives, and many feel stumped about how to actually make those decisions.
Unfortunately, many well-meaning Catholics tend to think that aside from encouraging us to pray about such things, the Church has very little to offer us in the way of guidance about such specific choices. In one sense, they are right: Mother Church does not offer Catholics in each city a list of exclusively approved schools or houses or charities. But she does have a tradition of helping individuals discern, and this discernment, contrary to popular belief, is not strictly limited to a Catholic’s One Big Question: what is my vocation?
Even those who are familiar with the tradition of discernment can experience it in quite a limited way. “Discernment retreats” offered by religious communities tend to focus on the benefits of joining that particular community. Earnest young adults at Catholic universities whisper, ‘are you two discerning marriage?’ And any young man alone at daily Mass will be sure to face queries about whether he’s discerning a vocation to the priesthood.
But I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice to limit the idea of discernment to one often looming question.
The root of the word “discernment” comes from the Latin “to separate out”: discernment is a process of sifting. When faced with a significant decision, we need to sift what’s helpful and unhelpful, necessary and unnecessary, timely and untimely. It’s more than just simple decision making; it encompasses the whole process around it. For the Christian, discernment involves decision making with God.
“With” is the key word here. Too often, we are tempted by one extreme or another: making a decision without consulting God at all, or expecting God to make the decision on our behalf. Discernment is neither an entirely pelagian endeavour nor a kind of spiritual guessing game in prayer.
John Paul II explained the nature of discernment well in his 1985 address to young people. He notes that those who want to understand God’s will for their lives simultaneously enter both “into themselves” and into “conversation with Christ in prayer.” They recognise that “the task assigned to them by God is left completely to their own freedom,” while also being “determined by various circumstances.” A person both “constructs his or her plan of life” and “recognises this plan as the vocation to which God is calling” them.
That our life’s path can be both a gift and a task, a result of God’s call and my own construction, is not a contradiction. It’s both and, a theological principle that Catholics are very comfortable with: God is three and one; Jesus is God and man; Mary is Virgin and mother.
Discernment, then, involves both our own freedom and God’s call. It includes both interior and exterior circumstances of our personal lives. We both construct a life path and recognise God’s plan in it. And that life path? It involves more than a particular vowed state in life. In fact, no state of life is exempt from discernment.
Many people get married and find themselves at a loss for how to make decisions in faith. They’re plagued by those tricky questions of everyday life: what job or jobs to pursue, where to live, how to educate their children well.
Then there are those who want to get married but haven’t met anyone. They have a hopeful sense that when they finally enter the vocation of marriage, things will get easier. And of course, in some sense that’s true, because marriage comes with its own ends, the union of spouses and the procreation and education of children, according to the Catechism. But in the meantime, these unwillingly single folk fail to really discern their actual lives: how to spend their time well, how to be generous with their material goods, how to use the gifts God has given them for the building up of the Kingdom of Heaven. In fact, many of the same questions they’ll need to answer after marriage as well.
Those entering religious life may hope that discernment really does end with a vow of obedience. After all, what discernment is needed when your superior gives an order? Only, my friends in religious communities tell me it’s not quite so simple. There are orders who operate with a more democratic model, voting on things like whether or not to accept a novice; there are communities who tend to rotate leadership positions on a regular basis in order to avoid becoming stagnant; and there are plenty of monasteries who wrestle with the quotidian questions of how to earn enough money to stay afloat, repair old buildings, or open a new chapter somewhere else. Parish priests face much of the same. One shared recently that he had never faced so much outcry as when he changed the type of coffee served after Mass.
For anyone in any state of life, there is the discernment of how to live like a true Christian. We know, for example, that we’re called to exercise the virtue of charity when someone is driving us batty. But what form does charity take in each particular case? Should Father simply smile and nod when yet another parishioner moans about the after Mass café? Or should he offer a kind but firm word?
The importance of the spiritual art and practical skill of discernment extends far beyond the weighty question of a vocation. Each of us, regardless of state in life, would do well to cultivate it.
