Something to think about | Discernment presupposes an ability to reflect on the ordinary events of one’s life, a habit of personal prayer, self-knowledge, knowledge of one’s deepest desires and openness to God’s direction and guidance. Discernment is a prayerful “pondering” or “mulling over” the choices a person wishes to consider. In his discernment, the person’s focus should be on a quiet attentiveness to God and sensing rather than thinking. His goal is to understand the choices in his heart: to see them, as it were, as God might see them. In one sense, there is no limit to how long he might wish to continue in this. Discernment is a repetitive process, yet as the person continues, some choices should of their own accord fall by the wayside while others should gain clarity and focus. It is a process that should move inexorably toward a decision.

Charles Jackson, SJ

Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist, 1513-16, Louvre

This week we are republishing some of the most popular posts from dotMagis.

The word “God” is a pronoun whose antecedent we do not know.

When we are struck by beauty, when it lays claim to our attention and nearly takes our breath away, or when beholding the beautiful makes us for a moment deeply aware that there is much more in the world than we can possibly understand, even if we should read all the books and gather all the data–then we are beholding God.

When we allow ourselves to fall in love–to release ourselves to love, to be overpowered by love such that we cannot control the cascading of emotions (heartsickness, profound desire, anguish, overwhelming joy), we are allowing ourselves an experience of God.

When we act in faith–that is, orient our lives toward something we can only partially understand right now, like who we’ll be when we grow up, or how we’ll make our way in the world, or how our talents might unfold in the future–we are breathing the breath (Lat. spiritus, Heb. ruah, Gk. pneuma) of God.

These and other experiences remain only experiences until the point at which we begin to reflect on who God is.

God is, as Augustine says, “more intimate to me than I am to myself.” But just as I may be unaware of the most interior parts of myself, I may be unaware of God. If I am of a discerning mind and heart, I will come to acknowledge God, but I will never come to know him. Only God can reveal himself to me.

We cannot name the experience of God, lest we limit it and thereby lose its full meaning. We cannot explain it to another, even with the cleverest of parables or allegories. The best we can do is point others to how they too might name their experiences of God. In the ancient days, the prophets reminded Israel that God was at the heart of who they were as a people. God revealed himself as the giver of the law, the principle of right action for the individual and the community.

John the Baptist, another prophet, said that the one who is to come will show us God. He reminded us that sin gets in the way, and that repentance is a clearing of obstacles to knowing God.

Jesus taught in parables in order that we might turn from sin toward God. Jesus showed us the way to the Father. He is the supreme parable, icon, sacrament of God.

Following him, what remains is the life of deepening friendship with God, whereby we gain our freedom. We deepen the life of God in us and move ever closer to God.

This week we are republishing some of the most popular posts from dot Magis.

Today’s jolt arrived mid-afternoon when I hauled out a (paper!) calendar to jot something down. The square for September 1st remained unadorned by red heart and sparkling star stickers.

Nowhere on my calendar had I written “anniversary!!!” in big purple letters with a trinity of exclamation points; neither on the Month At A Glance nor on the Week At a Glance pages. The only thing scrawled onto the day itself was an acupuncture appointment. Wild.

For the first time in well over a decade I’d forgotten to remember one of the most blessed events in my life: the day I committed myself to Twelve Step Recovery. This, by the way, would end up leading me to Christ Jesus and the Roman Catholic church, but that’s another story.

I don’t think this was an instance of what folks in “the program” characterize as “purposeful forgetting.” After all, I’m surrounded by reminders.

The first thing I see each morning — beyond cat ears — are the most famous verses of the Serenity Prayer carefully cross-stitched, lovingly-framed, and hard won during an auction where my crazy-ass bidding made me a likely candidate for Gamblers Anonymous.

You don’t have to search very hard to find the Big Book and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions amid the Bibles, breviaries, and catechisms near my desk. And I’m only partly kidding whenever I say I’d never [fill in the blank] again because my book about recovery is the only one paying royalties.

So how could I forget to remember this anniversary?

Is forgetting my anniversary a sign that being clean and sober has finally become a core feature of body, mind, and spirit? I certainly like that interpretation…but it probably means I should get my butt to a meeting.

Saint Augustine Portrait by Botticelli

The last straw which led to Saint Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was the voice of a child, playing a game in which he chanted “take and read, take and read.” The voice led Augustine to pick up the Bible and read a passage from Romans which made him look upon himself and the world in a new way.  And he was set free.

How many are the moments in which we can be Christ for others! Now is the moment: do not delay. The bridegroom is coming. Trim the wicks of your lamps. Perhaps next to you, perhaps now reading your e-mail, perhaps sleeping next to you, perhaps in the cubicle next to yours, perhaps on the other end of the classroom, perhaps on the playing field, is someone whom Christ must touch right now. And perhaps yours are the only hands, the only voice, the only smile, the only embrace, the only look that he can use to touch his beloved. Be alert! The moment will never come again. Trust yourself to God, and he will act.

No kid stuff to plaster all over my refrigerator with fruit magnets, just stuff that has captured my attention. Mostly images, snippets of scripture, prayers.

Some stuff, like the laminated Sacred Heart of Jesus card from a funeral back in 1996 has been posted on at least three different refrigerators since then.  The chart with Shabbat candle lighting times for Baltimore, Maryland is about to be replaced when 5772 blows in on September 29.

One recent addition is a Heloise Hint about using isopropyl rubbing alcohol to clean laminate flooring. Even if I stop seeing what I’m looking at every time I’m in front of the cold food box, I’m comforted by knowing a St. Jude medal and prayer is there.

Actually, I’ve pretty much stopped looking and seeing. Everything on my refrigerator has pretty much faded into wallpaper — except during those times when everything springs back into more-than-full-focus. Veni Sancte Spiritus!

This morning was one of those times.

The much-loved prayer attributed to Fr. Arrupe, SJ has been on my refrigerator for ages upon ages. But this morning I suddenly noticed how the well-known first line, “Nothing is more practical than finding God” is wonderfully framed by a magnet declaring, “Her whole life is simcha.”

Simcha (Hebrew: gladness or joy or celebration)

Lisa Kelly says that consolation is sometimes painful:

On the surface, we fun-seeking humans will do lots of things that are not of God to avoid feeling bad, to avoid the aches of the heart. We shop. We eat. We yell. We procrastinate. We deny the reality before us. But while each of those may provide temporary satisfaction, are they really leading us closer to God? Closer to where and who we are called to be? Ignatius calls us to constantly go deeper, to be reflective and aware of the emptiness of those surface solutions. Where is it you don’t want to go? That’s likely exactly where Ignatius would take you.

Read the whole thing.

How can we distinguish God’s voice from the other “voices” that buzz in our heads? Becky Eldredge has some thoughts.  A sample:

St. Ignatius teaches us to be aware of our emotions:  to be aware of the moments where we give and receive love AND to be aware of the moments where we do not give AND receive love.   By reflecting on these, I am often able to see where I am experiencing God’s presence and where I am not.

Please keep the pilgrims at World Youth Day (WYD) in your prayers. I am at the Jesuit-run Colegio Nuestra Señora del Recuerdo with hundreds of young people who went on the Magis Program in advance of WYD, and they are bursting with stories of how they have been transformed by experiences of pilgrimage, service, vigil, prayer, and liturgy. They have faced long hikes, blistering heat, injuries, sickness, exhaustion, and homesickness, and yet they are still exhilarated by the opportunity to be in the presence of so many others who bring great holy desires to their lives. It is moving to be among them.

My main prayer is that the experience will help them to understand the First Principle and Foundation, that all their experiences might be used for God’s greater glory. One of our number has been ill, and yet he has used his illness to elicit compassion and care from others. One has found it difficult to relate to a certain wounded soul, and yet has expressed gratefulness at the opportunity to learn how to love someone she does not particularly like. These are peak experiences, but my prayer is that they might hold onto the wisdom that God has incited in their hearts, in order to return to their lives with greater love.

I am in China with my family on a heritage tour, a pilgrimage of sorts.  Those familiar with my book Longing to Love know that my daughters are Chinese, so we have returned here in order to see their orphanages and learn more about this land and these people.

This has been holy time.  I mean that not in an overly pious way, but rather to suggest that in carving out space in our lives to focus so wholly on our daughters’ origins, we have reoriented our daily existence around the great desire to practice love as a family, and thereby live out our vocations.

In preparing for the trip, we all agreed that there would be highs and lows, times of exhilaration and times of stress.  All of these times, good and bad, would knit our family relationships, so that even the most insignificant or most difficult experiences might yield some fruit.  Yesterday, for example, we met some of the earliest caregivers of one daughter.  The experience ranks as one of my life’s high points, seeing the love and tenderness that one ayi (“auntie”) in particular showed for her, now ten years removed from my daughter’s life there.  Today, a comparatively slow day, was no less blessed, though, because of the two hours of charades that we four played in the hotel room while the weather was bad.

So now I ask myself: why don’t we live like this every day?  Why can’t we bring the same attentiveness to highs and lows, with an eye to the big picture, the unfolding life for which God has created us?  Is not every day a part of the life of pilgrimage?  Cannot all our life’s moments, from the most mundane to the most sublime, be part of that life of grace?  Surely the answer is yes, and surely in our prayer we allow God to remind us of that grace.

Photo of the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth courtesy of giopuo under Creative Commons license.

Fr. Adolfo Nicolás, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, spoke to Belgian Jesuits in September 2010 about a “globalization of superficiality,” a result of a surfeit of information (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

I am mindful of Eliot’s lines from “Choruses from the rock”:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Nicholas Carr suggests in a provocative book that the internet is rewiring our brains and that we are losing the ability to think deeply.

The Examen is a meditative practice of not only reviewing one’s day, but also reviewing one’s knowledge: what one chooses to give over one’s attention to. It may be seen as the practice of avoiding superficiality by bringing before God that which merits our attention, our knowledge, our love. We are not human search engines churning mindless information: we are human beings capable of loving the way Christ loved, of giving our attentiveness and our intellectual powers to those places in the Kingdom where Christ calls us to work.

Stop surfing for two minutes: sit in silence and pray.