Discernment

Summary: A very good introduction to discernment, mostly from the Ignatian perspective. 

This is the second book I have read by Trevor Hudson, and the second that the Renovare Book Club has done. The last book connected Ignatius and Dallas Willard, so I knew that Hudson was familiar with Ignatius and that he was a spiritual director, primarily leading the Spiritual Exercises.

I was happy to read In Search of God’s Will and now have a new book that I will strongly recommend when thinking about discernment. I went back and looked and I have read more than 35 books directly or indirectly about discernment over the past few years so I have some perspective on what discernment is and how it should be discussed. In Search of God’s Will checks most of the boxes of what I want. I still recommend All that is Good as a starting place, but then this is the book I would recommend after that.

One of my complaints about discernment teaching is that it is often reduced to a spiritualized decision making system. Hudson avoids much of both by the way he defines discernment and how all encompassing the discussion is toward the whole of life.

According to Hudson, “Discerning what God wants, therefore, involves paying careful attention to what God is doing and saying and to what we think and feel about the choices we are facing.” That is just a nicely rounded definition. It accounts for it being a spiritual activity, it pays attention to the fact that we need to understand our own desires and needs as part of the discernment process, that feelings are essential, not just some type of abstracted knowledge, and that we have autonomy to make choices, not just be directed in a deterministic method.

Ignatius puts a lot of emphasis on learning to see God’s presence around us as a basis for discernment. Hudson expands on his definition to say, “…discernment involves recognizing God’s active presence and voice so we can respond to what God is doing and saying and bring our lives more into harmony with God’s dream for our world. This can only happen when we are aware of how and where God is calling us in our daily experiences and events.” The paying attention to God is essential, but also Hudson is noting that there is a purpose for the paying attention, to become who God has created us to be. Part of why I think that discernment is so important is that, rightly done, it is an essential part of recognizing our creation and embracing both our limitations as human beings, but also the particular gifting and make up that God as uniquely created within us.

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Summary: Exploration of discernment from a Jesuit.

This was my second reading of Weeds Among the Wheat. I read it the first time as part of my spiritual direction training. I think it is really what started me thinking of spiritual direction as significantly oriented toward developing discernment. That isn’t the only role of spiritual direction, but I think it is a significant part of the role of spiritual direction.

(I remember one person telling me that spiritual direction was really only helping people learn to pray. I know that some spiritual directors have an emphasis and focus and I probably have a tendency to over emphasize discernment, but I think I do that in part to counteract some other spiritual direction trends.)

Thomas Green passed away in 2009. He became a priest in 1963 and spent almost all of the rest of his working in the Philippines. Much of it working at San Jose Seminary. Over his career he wrote nine books. I have only read this one and Friend of the Bridegroom.

Weeds Among the Wheat is not a book I would recommend to introduce discernment. He assumes too much familiarity with both Christianity as a whole and Ignatian discernment to use as an introduction. It is one of those books that I would consider a 301 level book. It is not introductory level, it is more than the 2nd level 201 book. But it is also too introductory to be an upper level book. More than anything else, I think it is helpful because of the metaphors that he uses. Three in particular are what I walk away with.

The first is in the title, Weeds Among the Wheat. This referencing Jesus’ parable in Matt 13. Green explores this as justification for teaching discernment. If the world was only made up of wheat (good people working for God) then there would be no need of discernment. But both the world and the church have tares. We should discern the tares, but we can’t assume that we can remove all the tares because doing so would end up destroying some of the wheat in the process. So there is a dual metaphor here. Not just discerning the difference between the wheat and the tares, but also discerning when the tare should be removed because it is harming the wheat and when removing the tare would harm the wheat.

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Summary: A history of how the concept of ethics (or moral philosophy) has been developed over time in western culture.

In my long term reading project about discernment, I have been gradually moving toward reading about ethics. I do not think that discernment is primarily about ethical action, but at some point, when you think about discernment the idea of what “is right” has to come up.

A couple of years ago, early in this project, I read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which tried to show that virtue and ethics were actually a cultural good and not simply a repressive feature of an older society. After Virtue was originally published in 1981 and I initially assumed that Short History of Ethics was a later book, but it was first published 15 years earlier. It is not a part of the Very Short Introduction series (as I assumed), but written as an introductory textbook for a college level philosophy/ethics class. While it is understandable, it is assumes a working familiarity of philosophy and its history. And as I have said many times before, philosophy is not a strong suit of mine, but I could follow the basic thread.

I picked up A Short History of Ethics as an audiobook because it was on sale, but that was not a great format. As with many book, audio helps me finish, but it is a hard format for deep reading because it is harder to re-read sections to understand the better. This audiobook was even worse because the narrator was Scottish with a strong accent. I have been reluctant to pick this edition up on previous sales because the narrator had awful reviews. I did get used to the narration, but if there were any other option, I would recommend you pick another option.

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Summary: An exploration of the idea of Christian Realism through Reinhold Niebuhr as it best known proponent.

When I started seminary, the first book that we read in my systematic theology class was Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. I have been meaning to reread that and also read The Nature and Destiny of Man and The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness for the past 30 years and I just haven’t done it. I did read The Irony of American History and a biography of Niebuhr and a short introduction to both brothers. I am not new to Niebuhr, but I am also not a scholar of his work. I think I have read more about Niebuhr through James Cone than I have read Niebuhr directly.

In my ongoing project of exploring Christian Discernment, I picked this up because of a recommendation for further reading after a video about Christian Realism. I got the book via Interlibrary Loan from my local public library and then slowly read it over the past month or so. Also once I started reading, saw that Lovin was a friend of Gary Dorrien and he came up in Dorrien’s memoir that overlapped in my reading with this book. I really do prefer reading on kindle because I mark up books and save highlights in ways that I can’t with library books, so I have notes scattered all over the place.

I have to admit going in, that I am skeptical of the Christian Realism project and I picked this up because I was skeptical. I think Lovin does a good job separating the ideals of Christian Realism from some of the weaknesses of its actual use.

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Summary: An agnostic explores the history and philosophy of Christian mysticism to understand how mystical experience seems to be a part of being human.

This is an odd book. Simon Critchley is an agnostic philosopher writing primarily about Christian mysticism because he wants to explore the ways that mystical experience inform what it means to be human without really grappling with whether God is involved. I am going to start at the end because I think that helps to make sense of the project. Critchley moves to modern art, particularly punk music, as a type of mystical experience that he has felt, that transcends the traditional rational categories of philosophy and experience.

In some ways he is coming at the argument that Dallas Willard makes about the reality of a category of spiritual knowledge in reverse. Willard wants to suggest that divine revelation and experience are trustworthy types of knowledge and experience. I think in both Critchley and Willard’s books, the rough point that the category exists has been made sufficiently to agree. But the next step is harder. Once you agree that there is a category, what do you do with it? Willard is mostly arguing against a type of hyper rationalism that I don’t think carries much weight. And Critchley is arguing that the mystical experience of feeling one with “God” or the world or those around us, while also getting a sense of divine love and belonging that he associates with the mystical experience is part of the human experience and a good that draws us away from hyper individualism and maybe even depression and loneliness.

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Summary: A genre redefining classic.

I have known of Walter Brueggemann for a very long time, but I have never read anything significant by him. I am sure I read an article or a profile at some point. But I don’t remember it. I picked up Prophetic Imagination years ago when it was on sale. But I didn’t start reading it until I heard of his passing and listened to an old podcast on the Bible For Normal People podcast and then a discussion of him on Homebrew Christianity with three people who knew and worked with him.

The original book is nearly 50 years old at this point. The ideas have been widely distributed and I can see a number of books that were sharing them, some with attribution and some without. At some point, ideas move from being in a book, to being in the ether and just known. I think the main idea that prophetic is not really about future telling, but about creating a vision for the world that exposes us to the ways justice is possible and also revealing where we are blind to injustice. In the essay at the end where he responds to the book 40 years later, he clarifies that while generally he thinks it is okay to use prophetic and social justice in a somewhat synonymous way, the biblical era understood prophetic as a adaptation of a earlier time to show imaginatively how God is judging the current era.

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Summary: An introduction to ethics.

I have been on a slow exploration of discernment for several years now and I am at the point where I want to return to ethics as a contribution to how we think about discernment. One of the problems of some understandings of discernment is that it reduces discernment to purely divine intervention of information or understanding. And while I want to retain the divine as component of discernment, I also think that any true development of capacity around discernment also has to include development in areas of decision-making,  ethics, conflict resolution and listening. Those are all human skills that can be developed in addition to the necessary relational/mystical connection go God.

I have dabbled with two other ethics books in the last two years, After Virtue and A Very Short Introduction to Ethics. I thought After Virtue was very helpful to my project and I intend to pick up two other Alasdair MacIntyre books at some point over the next year or so. I thought the Introduction to Ethics was less helpful. Arthur Holmes’ book on Ethics was more helpful than the Very Short Intro edition, but it was still in that similar mode of introducing a very large idea and giving some illustrations and moving on. Introduction books serve a very real purpose but they have limits when you want a more thorough overview.

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Summary: Introduction to Jesuit discenrment. 

I picked up two audio courses by Joseph Tetlow on discenment during a recent audible sale. Tetlow is now 95 years old. He mentions in this audio course, that he was 79 when it was recorded, so this course it about 16 years old. (Audible release date is 2017, so that isn’t accurate.) I read one book on discerment and spiritual direction by Tetlow in my spiritual direction training and it was Tetlow’s edition of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises that was used in our program.

One of the useful parts of this course is that Tetlow distiguishes between conscious and discernment. He thinks we should work to develop a consious and that a conscious shaped by the Holy Spirit is part of discernment. But he also thinks that without reflection on our actions and our conscious, in conversation with the Holy Spirit, we are not doing discernment. For him, all three parts are required. I think that is helpful corrective to what I have been thinking of as two seperate parts.

In my conception of discernment up until this point, I have thought about the preconscious discernment that is shaped by becoming more Christlike. And then the conscious discerment which is ore shaped by a process of reflection and practices of decision making and prayer. When I starting paying attntion to the preconscious aspects, I was reacting against the movement that thought of discenrment simply as a set of decision making tools. I didn’t want to remove all aspects of decision making and seeking after God’s will from discerment, but I wanted reemphasize the ascpets of character that I think are essential to good discernment. I think post-Tetlow, I am going to be more balanced and I think his three parts is one good method of discussing that balance.

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Summary: A dated, but at times quite helpful book on the movement toward modernism.

I decided to read The Technological Society because of my reading project on Christian Discernment. One of the reasons why there is some resistance to discernment is that some view discernment as a type of spiritual knowledge, not unlike magic, where you seek to negotiate with God or invoke God in your own plans in an inappropriate way. I want to say that yes, I agree that there is a type of discernment that reduces it to magic or an incantation. Ellul, in his exploration of where the idea of technique developed, specifically suggests premodern people’s use of magic was a type of technique. But Ellul, earlier in the book, suggests that the modern idea of technique was developed in parallel to the development of machines. So, while Ellul thought that magic was a type of technique, it was intentionally hidden knowledge so that others would not see the technique in action. With the rise of the machine, the technique was visible and public in a way that magic was not.

The Technological Society was initially published in French 70 years ago this year. It is both eerily prescient and quite dated. When he speaks about early electronic calculators, computer punch cards, or communism, you can see the age of the book. There are many areas where you can see how his comments apply to issues that arose after the book was released. Self Help books and how that technique is applied to the individual is part of his discussion, but I think if he were writing today, it would be an even larger part of the book.

Hannah Anderson has a piece in Christianity Today about self-help and the problems of applying it as an individual. One of the points that she is pointing out is that the problem is not the intention of self-improvement but the method of self-improvement that has moved from opportunity to obligation. Self-improvement as a technique in Ellul’s sense means that we have an obligation to adopt universal ideas and methods, whether they work for us or not, and whether they are a denial of our created limitations or not. Christians are just as susceptible to this denial of limitation when we emphasize how much we can do for God and how extreme we can take our obedience or commitment. Seth Hahne has a thread on twitter about people speeding up audiobooks to consume more instead of enjoying the art of the narration at the intended speed. Which I think is exactly this type of technique for self improvement that is a denial of our humanity and limitation. The discussion that prompted the thread was about pushing listening to the limit of comprehension as a means of consuming to the edge our intelligibility.

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Summary: A historical look at how Christian mystics understood mysticism and how that has changed. 

Anyone reading along with my reviews is probably aware that I am about 18 months into a reading project on the idea of Christian discernment. And while I have not ended that exploration of discernment, I am at the point of a deep dive where I need to explore the connected ideas to discernment so that I can better understand how to proceed.

A number of years ago I was exploring the trinity and I realized that in exploring the trinity I needed to better understand the concept of hermeneutics and I think I ended up reading more books about hermeneutics than I did about the trinity. That exploration of the trinity comes up because one of the most helpful books for me in exploring the trinity was The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Early Church by Franz Dunzl. What made it so helpful was that it traced the early doctrine of the trinity but in doing so, Dunzl showed that part of the development of the language around the trinity was linguistic (there was a shift from Greek to Latin as the lingua franca) and part of the development of the langauge around the trinity was about shifts in philosophy and the language of philosophy.

If you have traced Christian doctrine over time, the way that cultural issues shift the way that we think of theology is common. Part of what mattered in the reformation was that thee was a shift in how we think of the state and how we think of legal realities and this corresponded to the increasing use of legal language in regard to the doctrines of salvation. In a more modern example, the shifts in understanding about gender and gender roles have shifted the language that some are using in regard to trinitarian theology with regard to the rise of supporters of the The Eternal Subordination of the Son or the The Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son and in a different area some of the changes in language and meaning of the economic trinity or social trinitarian theology.

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