Over the Christmas holidays I found myself in conversation with several different college students, all of whom face significant decisions in life. They are wrestling with questions about substantial, often decades’ worth of, debt; years-long commitments to paying off that debt; moral quandaries they may face in future jobs; the possibility of beginning their own businesses; whether and whom to marry; and how to discern all these weighty questions without access to sufficient information or life experience.
It is one thing to take out student loans. It is another to face the reality of ten per cent interest that has been compounding from the moment you set foot on campus. It is one thing to agree to work for a company. It is another to find yourself contracted to engage in morally dubious actions. It is one thing to plan a wedding. It is another to enter marriage with little or extremely poor communication skills learned from your family of origin. What struck me was just how difficult a position these young adults were in, needing to make potentially life-altering decisions with very little preparation.
We would never think of sending someone to Olympic competitions without years of practice and learning to exercise grace under pressure. We would consider it wildly improbable for a brand new writer to produce Pulitzer Prize-winning work. We would counsel a beginning farmer to expect a minimal harvest in the first year of sowing. And yet modern culture seems to be especially bad at preparing us to face decisions well. Very few young people are given the skills, practice, or opportunity to learn how to discern well. They are simply expected to navigate tremendous decisions wisely when they have never had to do so before.
Navigating significant decisions through the process of discernment is both a spiritual art and a practical skill. The bad news is that many people never take the time even to think about discernment before they are faced with a weighty decision. The good news is that the sooner we begin to cultivate a habit of discernment, the more prepared we can be for the many significant decisions we will face in life.
Unfortunately, many Catholics, if asked about discernment, would probably equate it with simply praying hard about whether or not to be married or to become a priest or nun. Some might link it to spiritual direction, and a very few to the traditional thought of St Ignatius of Loyola. But most would not associate it with a habit. And yet that is exactly what it is, or rather, what it can be.
I like to describe discernment as a three-legged stool. It requires prayer, reflection, and action in order to offer a steady position from which to make a decision.
When facing a difficult or weighty decision, we want to invite God’s guidance. We are designed as creatures who thrive in relationship with Him, and our best decisions will be made hand in hand with the God who is our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. How familiar are we with the ways that God has already spoken to us, in the person of the Word, Jesus Christ? Are we familiar with Scripture and tradition? Do we frequent the sacraments? Is our prayer life regular? Would we know how to listen to God if He did speak? What assumptions influence how we listen? Are we expecting a St Paul-like experience, in which God’s voice comes to us audibly? What would we do if we did not receive that kind of voice?
We also need to reflect on the many aspects of the decision in front of us. Is it permanent? Is it reversible? What consequences may it hold? How does it relate to our faith? Are all of our options moral ones? Are there alternative options? Is it possible to gather more information? What circumstances surround the decision? Do we have larger priorities and goals with which it interacts? Have we done our due diligence to understand how this decision affects the people entrusted to us?
Our reflection must consider ourselves as well. How well do we know the person who is actually going to make the decision? What type of person are we? What gifts and talents, challenges and faults, and morally neutral personality traits or tendencies do we bring to the situation? An extrovert discerning a role requiring all-day conversation with people is coming from a different place than an introvert discerning the same role, for example. Are we the kind of person who always wants to make the best decision in every possible scenario, and is therefore prone to paralysis or inaction? Or are we the kind of person who tends to rush into things without much thought, and could therefore benefit from more reflection? What can we learn from how we have made decisions in the past?
Helping people to develop the habit of discernment is a highly individual endeavour. Generic advice is rarely useful. The young woman who is energetic, intellectually capable, and unafraid of risk is likely to make a different decision from one who is more phlegmatic, gentle, and content with the quieter aspects of life. Neither is wrong, but someone engaging in discernment as if she were the other will likely end up deeply unhappy.
This is why taking action is the third key aspect of the habit of discernment. There are many things we do not, or even cannot, know about ourselves, about a decision, about its consequences, or even about our relationship with God without actually trying it out.
Sometimes we only realise our own tendency towards extroversion once we have sat in silence or small groups for months on end. Sometimes we do not realise that a dream job comes with a terrible boss until we have worked at the company for several weeks. Sometimes we do not realise that our spirituality and ways of connecting with God in prayer involve a great deal of silence until we have been part of a group in which everyone else loves singing hymns. Intellectual or predictive knowledge and experiential knowledge do not always align, nor can they, as we are limited creatures by nature.
The sooner we begin to practise the habit of discernment in our own lives, and help young people to cultivate it in theirs, the better prepared we will be for the significant decisions that all of us must face at one time or another.
