You bring God into the world through prayer - that was the simple yet profound pearl of wisdom my SD offered me last Friday when I visited him.
We were catching up on life as usual, and I was sharing on how I facilitated a session on allowing God to guide us to the neophytes and parishioners during a recent retreat at Blessed Sacrament Church.
Discernment has been something I have been preoccupied with ever since I experienced conversion twenty-two years ago and I have experimented with all forms of prayer, going through seasons of richness and dryness along the way. One thing, however, has remained constant in my life, and that is the desire to do His will in all things.
Prayer is the only way, really. Not that the Spirit doesn’t guide us when we are on the move and in the midst of life’s busyness. The moment we say to Him my life is yours, I want to do Your will, then He honours it by guiding and protecting us, every waking moment (and even as we sleep).
Of course this fiat must come with a certain disposition of heart, that we remain open and obedient, and that we lead lives nourished spiritually by the Word of God, the sacraments and the traditions of the Church DAILY. We must be pure in mind and heart, avoiding sin at every turn.
This is the first part of bringing God into the world through prayer, where we first allow ourselves to be transformed through our worship. The second part involves our active participation, where we live and breathe the holiness of the Trinity in our words and actions.
This latter part is where the rubber meets the road, and we must make every effort to ensure we are on the right track (pardon the pun) - to be holy, as Jesus was, to be fully engaged in the lives of others, bringing healing peace and joy.
My talk took inspiration from Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha course, as well as Peter Kreeft’s article on discernment. What I found most useful was this from Kreeft*:
All God's signs should line up, by a kind of trigonometry. There are at least seven such signs: (1) Scripture, (2) church teaching, (3) human reason (which God created), (4) the appropriate situation, or circumstances (which he controls by his providence), (5) conscience, our innate sense of right and wrong, (6) our individual personal bent or desire or instincts, and (7) prayer. Test your choice by holding it up before God's face. If one of these seven voices says no, don't do it. If none say no, do it.
This cocktail of spiritual and conventional wisdom, stirred by the Holy Spirit through prayer and right Christian living helps bring clarity and sound action. Kreeft’s pragmatic approach really speaks to me. Know what God wants, know what Jesus would do, then do what I want (taking into consideration who I am and where I am currently), guided firmly by the Holy Spirit.
Certainly we will make mistakes along the way, and we may not always attain the desired level of clarity, or worse, we may be finding it hard going along a previously discerned path and get disheartened, and yet, in all this, if God is our True North, then He will always bring us back onto the “right” route.
I must say I am always amazed by God’s ingenuity at problem-solving, and I am always grateful for how He provides so abundantly through the people He has put into my life, and how He responds so tenderly to me and my needs, big and small.
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