PRAYER & SPIRITUALITY COURSE

Lesson 8: Principles of Discernment

Discernment is the art of the spiritual life in which we understand how God
communicates Himself. In it we experience the free choosing of God.
Through it we avoid deception and learn to read reality in its truth.
Discernment is the art of speaking with God rather than with temptations.
The main character in this journey is the Holy Spirit. Man uses his intelligence
in the most complete way only when his intellect is enlightened by God’s
Holy Spirit.
When we are considering an option that conforms to the hopes of goodness
that God nourishes our lives, He orients our decisions, making our heart
vibrate with positive emotions: peace, joy, deep certainty, and hope to
encourage us. To keep us from entering into situations that make us less
human, on the other hand, he makes our heart vibrate with negative
emotions: discomfort, embarrassment, pain. Who hasn’t had the experience
of being pushed by an internal force to embrace choices despite the
difficulties involved or vice versa: feeling held back by a deep feeling of
discomfort in a path that seemed attractive?
The principle of discernment is simple:
“By their fruits you will recognize them. Do you gather grapes from thorns or
figs from briars? So, every good tree produces good fruits and every bad true
produces bad fruits” (Mt 7:16-17).
The affective impact that the known or unknown consequences of our
actions have on our hearts (peace or discomfort, joy or agitation, a sense of
fulfillment or failure) becomes the discerning criteria for the goodness of the
choice and will consequently indicate if we should follow it or not.
An important principle to affirm is that discernment is never done alone.
Learning to discern requires, first of all, entering into a relationship. It’s clear
that “encounter” must be taken in its authentic sense. It’s not just opening
up to some friend, but to a person who has knowledge of the spiritual life,
who has experience. This person is able to recognize various realities and
look at them through a spiritual lens, recognizing the salvation that works in
us, and how our life is opening to this very salvation in order to communicate
it to others. The fundamental criterion is the Person Jesus, living Word of the
Father. Each spiritual discernment, according to the Spirit and in the Spirit,
necessarily happens inside a personal relationship with Him and following
Him; we can’t hypothesize the Holy Spirit in our existence without Christ and
outside of Christ. In fact, the Spirit of Truth (Jn 14:17; 15:26; 16:13), without
which there is no freedom (Jn 8:32) or journey of discernment, was promised
by the Master to His disciples, not only as a gift of the Father (Jn 14:16,26;
15:26) and as Consoler (Jn 14:16,26; 15: 26; 16:27), but also as a gift of the
same Risen Christ (Jn 15:26; 16:7) as He who “will teach you everything and
remind you of all that I said” (Jn 14:26 ; also cf. Jn 16:13). For this reason,
discernment requires an intense familiarity with Christ, a sense of the
primacy of His Person over the works to do and even the virtues to practice,
esteem for and exercise of evangelical contemplation, and adherence to
Christ’s mission.
How Does God Speak to Man?
Through our thoughts and feelings. It’s therefore of fundamental importance
to know not only thoughts and arguments in themselves, but also to
understand where they come from in order to discern which to follow. The
interaction between thought and feeling is important because it permits us
to verify the effective adherence to God or to realities that take us away
from God. Feelings can betray the effective or apparent adherence to God.
I can have a good thought of gospel content but associate it with a negative
feeling. The question then becomes what is it that resists this thought that is
good in itself?
Behold the importance of an attitude of discernment, not of a single act but
of a constant readiness. This attitude is based on continual attention and
openness to God and to the Holy Spirit. It is existential certainty that God
communicates and reveals Himself.
An attitude of discernment then blocks stubbornness or getting stuck in
one’s own opinion. It’s the expression of a dialogue of communion with the
Father, proper to free and mature persons. Discerning, therefore, is not a
calculation or a technique or an argument or a majority decision.
Discernment is prayer. The feeling that most guarantees discernment is
humility.
The Fundamental Rule of Discernment
This rule is based on the experience of interior peace. Certainly, a sign of a
well-done discernment is the presence of interior peace. This however must
be distinct from a “passing joy.” It is not therefore a joy that presents itself in
a strong way, with intense emotions, somewhat noisy and short-lived, a joy
that is very tied up with the senses. This is totally different from a silent and
humble joy. No one knows where this comes from, but all of a sudden you
find yourself surrounded by it. We don’t notice much how it developed, but
we know that it’s there. At times it’s difficult to tie it to something outside
because it’s obvious that it doesn’t depend at all on the “outside” but it flows
from within.
To better understand this fundamental rule, it’s necessary to know the
anthropological framework underneath. Human beings have two primary
components: reason and emotions, or the mind and the heart, or again
brains and feelings. The first rule of discernment acts at the psychological
level: here we experience the peace when the rational component and the
sentimental one are oriented toward the same object. On the other hand,
when someone is oriented with the feelings to one thing and with the mind
to another, he experiences distress, desolation, anguish, and frustration.
Discernment is extremely important because it’s not always instantly obvious
to determine toward what objects our feelings and our reason are directed.
It’s not only a question of seeing what exists but also of understanding where
it comes from and where it’s going and which type of thoughts come with it.
Two Phases of Discernment
1. Recognize God as the center of my life
2. Live constantly in God
In the first phase of discernment there are primarily two objects: me and
God. So, we ask ourselves: which type of thought or feeling directs me most
toward God, toward a more mature openness, toward a more realistic love?
What, instead, makes me close up in my own little world toward a realization
of my will over everything else?
There are four agents that interact in the process of discernment:
1. Myself
2. God
3. God’s Spirit
4. The Enemy’s spirit
How the enemy’s spirit acts on the person oriented toward himself
Because the goal of the enemy is to separate man from God, when the
person is oriented toward him/herself, the enemy will try to keep reason and
feeling united. Why? So that the person feels a certain peace and continues
to go ahead on the wrong road. In this case, the tempter acts especially on
our feelings with sensuality, consolations, and sensual pleasures. Above all,
the objective will be that of assuring the person about the fact that there are
not obstacles or difficulties and that therefore the person can “be fine.”
What does the enemy do to the reason? He finds every excuse for confirming
that we are on the right road. He tries to confirm the truth of our feelings
and gives basic reasons for an attachment to ourselves. These reasons are
often difficult to dismantle because we can have 10,000 reasons for justifying
our attitudes. In this way the person continues to be oriented toward and
him/herself and thus away from God.
How the Holy Spirit Acts on the Person Oriented toward Himself
What instead does the Holy Spirit do when a person is self-centered? He will
try to separate reason and feeling, provoking unrest and negativity. Why? So
that the subject stops, reflects, and changes directions. An inspiration can
com e from God and, despite that, can cause us great turmoil. But this
turmoil is not caused by the inspiration that, in itself, is sweet and peaceful
like all that comes from God; this turmoil grows from our resistance to the
inspiration. Instead when we welcome it, or cease resisting it, our heart finds
itself in profound peace. The Holy Spirit works above all on our reason,
proposing arguments that direct us ever more toward God. This is why the
person begins to feel bad, because feeling and reason are no longer oriented
toward the same object.
Here negative feelings are a benefit to spiritual progress. When the person is
so oriented toward him/herself, the Holy Spirit can’t act on his/her feelings
which are totally taken by sensual pleasures.
Behold then, that the only possibility for God, is that of suggesting reflections
that allow the person to realize how he/she is only directed toward him
/herself. If reason is presented with the logic and thought of the Gospel, it
could be tempted to listen. As soon as reason begins to listen to the inspired
thought of the Gospel, it is lit up by brief flashes of amazing clarity and light:
here is the real path to life while the one it’s on now is false!
This dynamic permits reason to guide only for a brief instant. Feeling suffers.
When this happens, reason can easily turn away from its fatigue and emotion
can turn back to itself.
The Holy Spirit will continue to launch its attacks, continuing to generate that
healthy disturbance, almost chewing on the conscience so as to conquer that
soul. If this ill feeling becomes a more continued moment, then the feelings
can also be turned toward the Gospel that reason has begun to consider.
Behold then the unfolding of a new situation in which, even if only for a few
seconds, reason and feeling are again going in the same direction, toward
God!
Here is a totally different experience of peace. Here we can understand the
difference between a peace produced by m an and one that com es from
God. This difference can be explained but it can never be understood unless
it’s experienced. The person can truly begin to discern only when he has had
this profound experience and knows how to distinguish a superficial
happiness from an outside source from this deep interior peace.
The feeling that begins to taste the consolation of true love from this
completely new flavor is able to now know the reality of God. All this allows
the relationship with God to go much deeper. With this, the adherence to
God risks being m ere ideology and not relational.
The Action of the Holy Spirit on the Person Oriented toward God
The Spirit of God will always try to maintain reason and feeling oriented
toward God. For this reason, the Spirit will try to make the believer’s level of
adherence to Christ not only ideal, highly structured, and deep, but also
tasteless and detached from the feelings of the heart. When a person is
seriously oriented toward God, the Holy Spirit nourishes his feelings with
spiritual consolations. Unlike sensual consolation, this comes directly from
God and is His gift, not produced by human efforts or strategies.
At the center of this consolation is not the self but God, the presence of an
Other. In this context every weakness and even sin is perceived in harmony
with God and recalls even more radically the need for salvation. God’ s Spirit
acts here on the reason, nourishing it with God’s knowledge and the
experience of the Saints, drawing on the rich tradition of the Church. In this
way God acts by reinforcing the mind and stabilizing it in God’s thought.
The Enemy’s Activity on the Person Oriented toward God
Obviously contrary to the Spirit of God, the evil spirit will try to separate
reason and feeling in a way that the person’s balance is broken, feeling
remains oriented toward that which is instinctive, and reason directs itself
elsewhere so that there is a new destabilizing disturbance. On the reason,
the enemy acts through false arguments, creating and increasing the
roadblocks and obstacles.
How can we recognize a false argument? In itself, it’s very easy. The false
argument has as its primary concern the self, i.e. what will I do? The
meditation can even be on spiritual matters, but if the primary worry is
centered on the subject, then it’s not a real reflection or meditation that
helps to grow in relationship with God. The strategy of the enemy is that of
attracting the reason, offering new points of reflection different from those
before. The enemy tries to make it so that the person worries about all these
other concerns and so the reason is again separated from feeling and the
person is divided. The enemy has succeeded in bringing about a certain
disturbance. Normally the false argument is uncovered by the fears that it
sows in the soul, fears again centered on the self. The enemy acts, going still
deeper, scaring the person even more and at times taking away the taste f or
some things. He does this with the goal of having the person experience
certain emptiness. Behold then that the enemy can newly try to fill the
person up but he does it in a very superficial and sensual way, not real or
long lasting. Because the person feels bad, his/her thoughts go down even
further into totally unstable terrain and without real consolation. The person
will continue to seek his/her balance and consolations, closing him/herself up
by becoming self-focused once again.
The First Conclusion
If an inspiration truly com es from God and if we follow it with all our heart,
we will be endlessly inundated with peace. The Holy Spirit, in fact, cannot
NOT give this peace to whoever lets himself be guided by Him. At times this
peace can reside only in the most delicate point of our soul and even when
on the human and psychological level questions and worries remain, it is
there and it is recognizable.
If instead an inspiration com es from the devil or f rom that which is evil in us
(our ambitions, our egoism, our exaggerated needs to be recognized, etc.),
and if we follow it, our heart will never find a total and profound peace. This
peace will only be superficial and will fill little because it disappears, leaving
turmoil in its place. We can remove this turmoil from ourselves and suppress
it in the depths of our conscience, but it is always there, ready to reemerge
when the hour of truth comes.
We can, therefore, draw an important conclusion: a divine inspiration can
disturb us in the first moment, but if we do not refuse it and open ourselves
to it, accepting it, little by little it will fill us with peace. It is a fundamental
law that is valid in normal situations of the spiritual life for those who are
sincerely disposed to do the will of God in everything.
The spiritual life and the inter action between spiritual and psychological
parts are complex realities; at times we can therefore be in moments of trial,
which make the practical application of this criterion difficult. However, this
remains fundamental and we find it repeatedly in all the Church’s tradition.
Discernment ends when we let ourselves be taken in by Him, throwing
ourselves into his loving embrace, when in our heart gushes forth a sincere
prayer and desire: Jesus Christ, my Lord and my Savior, do with me as you
will. Abbà Father! It is so liberating and at the same time slightly daunting
with responsibility, to feel that God has history in His hands, but that to act in
history He wants to work in us. Us, despite ourselves, when our good
projects don’t match up with His hopes. Us, but remaining free to act as God,
inserting into history something impossible for man. In this history of
salvation made by man but moved by God, discernment is spiritual action not
when it is born of reflection, but from the contemplation of the progressive
incarnation of Christ in our life, guided by the Holy Spirit, along the lines of
the dream of love that the Father puts together day by day in the world that
He has created.
Second Phase: Discerning as Living in God
Unlike the first phase in which the enemy’s Spirit presents himself as he is
now, before a person who has grown in his relationship with God, the enemy
knows that he can’t conquer it through that which is obviously evil. In fact,
after being reached by Christ and having adhered to Him, it is only the enemy
who disturbs and bothers.
What will make us quickly and easily recognize the divine movements in
order to respond to them is the development within us of a type of spiritual
sense, nonexistent or almost so at the beginning of our life, but that one can
refine with experience especially by resolutely and faithfully following the
path of our Lord. This spiritual hearing is the ability to recognize, among the
many and discordant voices that we hear in us, the unique and unmistakable
voice of Jesus. This sense is like a loving instinct that always lets us
distinguish the voice of the Spouse more easily, in concert with all the sounds
that present themselves to our ears.
The Spirit speaks to each one with a tone of voice, a timbre that is indeed its
own, a sweetness and a strength, a purity and particular clarity that, when
we have attuned ourselves to hear it, we know how to recognize it almost
without fail. The devil, obviously, ape of God, sometimes can imitate the
voice of the Spouse. But if we are attuned to this goal, thanks to a loving
familiarity and a pure and constant search for the divine will, we will easily
distinguish his voice that, in a certain sense, will sound out of tune to us and
that is therefore not the voice of Jesus.
Jesus, in the Gospel of John, promised that this spiritual sense would
progressively be given to us by the Spirit. Speaking of Himself as the good
shepherd, He says: The sheep follow him because they know his voice. A
stranger instead they will not follow, but they will run away from him,
because they do not know the voice of the stranger (10:4-5).
If everything ended here, however, the enemy would never be able to
conquer the person.
Behold then that the enemy dresses up as an angel of light (2 Cor 11: 14)
with the goal of infiltrating into the interior of the spiritual person. The
strategy is exact: he tries to penetrate into the soul through thoughts that
seem spiritual and then slowly deviate, disconnecting it from its relationship
with God and orienting it again towards itself. In this second phase, these
thoughts from the enemy attempt in every possible way to enter into the
soul, into the heart, in the same way in which the thoughts and feelings of
the Holy Spirit get in. The art of the truly spiritual person will now be that of
discovering the deceptions of the enemy in order to g row in the spiritual life
in a mature and responsible way.
The temptations are intended to get the soul to abandon the road taken or
get it to turn back to how it was before. Because what happened in the first
phase is the beginning of a real and profound relationship with God, the
enemy will try to slowly concentrate the person not on Christ, but on his/ her
thoughts about Christ. Here He is no longer the Living One, the Lord and
Savior but is substituted by a bunch of thoughts about Christ.
In a subtle and hardly perceptible way, a terribly real disconnection will take
place. The person is left by the enemy within a certain religious box, with
aspirations of holiness and perfection but with a sinful mentality as if the
encounter with Christ never happened. He/she is unplugged from love.
Behold then the passage from reality to illusion, from love to isolation. If the
work of the enemy succeeds, the result is scary: devout people without God,
without that real encounter with transforming love that renews us and
sustains us. The main goal of the tempter in the spiritual person is not to
offend God but to attack the love of God, detaching the person from this real
and profound spiritual habitat. A break will take place between God’s
revelation and its content. Compromises are made when we lower our
thoughts to the level of our actions. The faith becomes an idealistic theory.
Behold then that we experience a break between faith and life. The
knowledge of God, if it is real, is transforming; it changes the person because
it is a relationship in which the Holy Spirit acts in the person and with the
person. God relates to us and it is a relationship of salvation.

Some “Tips” To Discern If an Inspiration Comes from God

External criteria:
1. God does not contradict himself
2. Consistency with the Sacred Scriptures and with the teachings of the
Church
3. Consistency with the demands of our vocation
Internal criteria:
1. One knows a tree by its fruit
 2. Formation of experience
3. Discernment of the spirit
4. Complementary signs: constancy and humility
In conclusion, we can s ay that the divine inspirations are recognized by the
following characteristics: they fill us with peace, they do not change, and
they impress in us a sense of humility.
We will now make the complementary observations on how to discern the
will of God.
Is the Will of God Always the Thing That Costs Us the Most?
The will of God and the inspirations of grace often go contrary to our
immediate tendencies, when these are desires of egoistical comfort, ease,
laziness, etc.
St. John of the Cross tells us in one of his famous passages: “The soul must be
inclined not to the easiest, but to the most difficult; not to the most savory
but to the most disgusting.” It is not wrong to say this in the context in which
he speaks. But we should not approach decision-making in discernment of
the divine will with the belief that God will always ask the most difficult thing
from us. This would make us fall in to an exaggerated ascetic voluntarism
that does not have anything to do with the freedom of the Holy Spirit. This
idea that God always and constantly asks us for the thing that costs us the
most is typically the type of thought that the devil begins in us to discourage
us and take us far from God.
God is a Father; God does not want to complicate our life; instead he wants
to simplify it.
Docility frees us and opens our heart. It is for this reason that Jesus invites us
to renounce ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Hi m. He also says to us:
My yoke is sweet and my burden is light (Mt 11:30). Even if at times doing
the will of God costs us, especially at the beginning, fulfilling it with love ends
with our being filled with joy, and one can say that it is a true pleasure to
fulfill the good that God inspires us to do.
The more we walk in docility to the Spirit, the less our attachment to divine
will is painful and forced, the more it becomes free and spontaneous. “Direct
me on the path of your commandments, because in that is my joy,” says the
Psalm (119:35).
We have enumerated some conditions that permit the manifestation of
divine inspirations, even the multiplication of them in a way that you can
always be guided and moved by the Holy Spirit. We would not fulfill our task
if we forgot to say one thing as we conclude.
It is a question of a filial love for the Virgin Mary. Among all creatures, Mary
is she who most lived in the shadow of the Spirit. For all her life, Mary
perfectly followed every action of the Spirit in her, letting Him arouse an
always more ardent and elevated love.
Mary is our mother in the order of grace, in as much as she communicates to
us the fullness of grace that belongs to her. Among the gifts that Mary gives
those that are recognized as her children and that receive her in their house,
like the beloved disciple of the Lord, the most precious is that work of
allowing us to take part in her total availability to her grace, in her ability to
let the Holy Spirit act in her without offering any resistance.
Mary communicates her humility to us, her trust in God, her total obedience
to the divine will, her silence, and her interior listening to the Spirit…
One of the surest means for becoming gradually able to put all these
suggestions into practice is that of entrusting all our spiritual life to the
Virgin. Mary will teach us that which she has put into practice so well:
recognizing with assurance, welcoming with complete trust, and putting into
practice with total faith all those solicitations of grace through which God will
work the miracle of love in our life, as He has done in that of His humble
servant.

Some Passages for Meditation:

• Mk 1: 18-22 (the call of Simon and Andrew and then of James and John)
• Mk 10: 17 (the rich young man)
• Acts 9: 3-11 (the conversion of St. Paul)
• 1 Cor 7: 29-38 (the best thing)
• Lk 20: 34-36 and Mt. 22: 30
• Mt 19: 10-1 2 (eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven) ---“If this is so, it’s
better to not get married!”
• Lk 18: 28-30 (whoever gives up his house…)
• Mt 22: 30 (At the resurrection in fact you take neither husband nor
wife, but you are like the angels in heaven)
• Jn 15: 16 (“You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.”)
• 1 Sam 3: 1-21 (the call of Samuel)