Faith Alive
'How' to know God's will for us
Every 'yes' also involves many 'nos' and the surrendering of other options
Trying to discern and generously respond to God's many calls to us throughout our lives makes life a much more exciting adventure than if we try to stay in control by calling all of our own shots.
The constant prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola was for the grace to discover God's will and have the strength to follow it. Ignatius experienced God actively and personally in his life and professed God to be similarly involved in every person's life, speaking to us directly in our hearts, minds and souls--through our thoughts, feelings, desires and inner inclinations.
But not all of our inner thoughts, movements and desires come from God.
Therefore we have to discern which are from God and which are not. God is engaged in a lifelong dialogue with us. Our role in the dialogue is to pay attention, listen and try to respond.
If the question is, "Can we know God's will for us in making our personal life choices?" the answer is, "Yes"--if we believe, as Ignatius did, that God communicates personally to each of us in the interior of our hearts and souls.
And if the question is, "How do we find out God's will for us in our personal life choices?" the answer is that we need to listen to God's voice in the interior of our hearts.
To hear God we must pay attention to our inner desires, longings and aspirations. To do this we need to pray--really pray. I'm not talking about prayers by rote or praying "on the go," but about setting aside daily, quality time to become calm, put ourselves in God's presence and listen to our hearts.
It is also very helpful to have a spiritual director to talk with about our prayer and inner movements-- the things we fear and resist, as well as our desires and aspirations. As with any good decision-making process, we need to gather data for our vocational decision.
Over and above practical considerations, discovering how God is calling us requires that we also weigh the intangibles. What attracts us? What gives us life, joy, energy and a sense of rightness? Eventually we get a feel for which options most deeply attract us--which choices feel right and present the best opportunities for using our gifts in the service of God's people.
Experiencing inner ambivalence is for most of us an integral part of this process, and it must be faced. When we are adolescents we experience almost infinite possibilities and options. We initiate adulthood by choosing from among our major vocational options and following a more focused path.
But overcoming ambivalence can be difficult. Since significant choices usually entail sacrifice, we also are likely to feel some uncertainty in many of our subsequent life decisions. Every "yes" involves a lot of "nos" and the surrendering of other options.
But if we are patient, open and generous, God will eventually reveal his will to us. If we prayerfully listen to God's voice speaking through our deepest desires and pay attention to what gives us joy, life, passion, peace, a sense of rightness, and the best way for us to love and use our gifts in service, we will know what God is calling us to do.
'Spiritual Exercises' provide good guides
St. Ignatius Loyola, the 16th-century founder of the Jesuits, thought that God sometimes rather forcefully reveals the divine will to us. In his "Spiritual Exercises," Ignatius pondered at extraordinary depth what is involved in discerning the divine will.
In his conversion experience, St. Paul experienced God's forceful revelation of the divine will. Mary Magdalene, when she received the command to communicate the good news of the resurrection, had a similar experience.
At other times our minds enjoy a clarity about God's will that removes our doubts. For example, the Ten Commandments offer us a list of imperatives, most of which we generally have no ambiguities about. Or, when faced with a choice between good and evil, we know that good can be our only choice. And we can pretty well trust that both the "book of nature" (our traditional natural law) and the "book of revelation" provide us with sufficiently clear guidelines for discerning between good and clear cases of evil.
But Ignatius went on to consider some of the other times when, well, the divine will just does not seem so clear, at least in its particularities.
Sure, the overall direction remains clear: Follow the commandments, especially the great commandment to love. But what this means more precisely in a concrete case may not be so clear. For example, it may not be immediately clear to us that a specific vocation or state of life is God's precise will for us.
And there are other important decisions that we face about our friendships, for example, or about some of the more contentious ethical choices we sometimes face.
The "Spiritual Exercises," among other important documents from St. Ignatius, provide us important guides for making difficult ethical choices.
First, they are exercises, something we "do." We can overlook this, but it is important: Learning to make good decisions is often a matter of practice and habit. Fine musicians may never have seen a particular score, but years of mastering other scores have prepared them for this new one.
So, too, years of practicing the faith, of living the Gospel stories (meditations upon which form the backbone of Ignatius' book), become the rich launching pad that moves us in the right ethical direction.
Ignatius then goes on to recommend something of a dialogue between the Gospel stories and our own felt experience and affective reactions to the choices confronting us now.
What is the feel and tone of this interaction? Which choices bring about a congenial resonance between what Scripture reveals and what our own experience tells us?
The Gospel stories are also stories of the church community responding to Jesus. It seems clear that Ignatius was suggesting that we should heed the voices of experience within the church community, past and present, and perhaps even seek out some notable individuals for their guidance.
How do we resonate with their suggestions?
All of these voices, when in consonance, would seem to make up a rich harmony. Ignatius, then, seems to be recommending that we pursue the harmonic choice. In a way, what the saint seems to be doing is developing a very old tradition in the church, namely, going to the "book of revelation" and to the "book of nature" for guidance about making right decisions and, accordingly, discerning God's will.
Ignatius heeded the insights of Scripture and saw in it paradigms of how to make choices. This was and remains a beautiful manner of personalizing divine revelation.
The saint thought of the other book, that of nature, not so much in terms of the physical world around us, although that was not missing and it deserves more attention by us today. But he was thinking of us and other humans. We are human nature in action.
Ignatius possessed a vivid sense of human nature -- its actions and its rich dimensions, especially our relationships, our feelings and our choices, in addition to our minds.
The saint's genius and charism was to suggest that we heed the potential resonance between all of these as the road to follow.
We seem to instinctively return to St. Ignatius Loyola's guidance when we think about discerning God's will. This reminds us that as we strive to "sentire cum ecclesia" (feel with the church), we should keep in mind the special insights of the saints, such as Ignatius, whose experience has been tried and tested, and who can be counted upon to keep us moving in the right direction.
I can't help but think that Ignatius, of Basque ancestry himself, knew the old Basque adage that "people know much if they know how to live." His "Spiritual Exercises" are, in a way, suggesting that if we live well, in the ethical sense, we will know, or at least we will have the basis upon which we can know, what the divine will is for us.
Faith in the Marketplace
This Week's Discussion Point:
Tell of an occasion when you felt God's will for you was clear.
Selected Responses From Readers:
"My husband was in the military. He was in Desert Storm. When he returned, we discussed whether or not he should re-enlist. Ultimately, we decided that it was time to leave, and the decision was crystal clear to us."--Denise Messier, St. Albans, Vt.
"When I left my public school principal's position in 1983 to take this job as principal of St. Andrew Catholic School, I knew that it was the right thing to do, and I have been happy here ever since."-- Phil Bellini, Rock Falls, Ill.
Lend Us Your Voice:
An upcoming edition asks: Give one reason why the Catholic-Jewish dialogue might matter to you.
If you would like to respond for possible publication, please write: Faith Alive! 3211 Fourth St. N.E., Washington, D.C. 20017-1100.