It’s tricky. We want to be seen as “good” (but we often mean nice). We know that we are to speak the truth. But, sometimes, we want the person we are dealing with to know that we know what’s really right and good and true. And other times, we want to avoid dealing with things. Being both caring and honest is a challenge. It takes practice.

Love and Truth go together. One without the other leads to disaster. If a relationship is important to us, we need to risk holding love and truth in the dynamic tension that they generate, and offer them carefully joined, but without fear.

Life is all about relationship. Love presupposes a relationship that fosters mutuality and openness. A loving relationship is nurtured by direct, open, honest communication, through dialogue. Fundamental to love is respect/reverence for our self and for others.

Truth without love is a weapon. We can hammer others with our righteousness. If we care more about being right than about the other, what does this say about this relationship? Of what value is an uncaring relationship?

Love without truth is saccharine sentimentality. It has no depth, no viable future. We often try to avoid difficult, messy or unpleasant situations. We can hide behind excuses: “I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” or “They can’t handle the truth.” There is no respect for the other’s capacity to grow or to change if we can’t be truthful with her/him. Of what value is a dishonest relationship?

One possible way to handle this kind of courageous conversation is: Before speaking, STOP, and consider: How can I communicate my love, care, concern AND clearly, simply say what needs to be said? This requires practice. Maybe we begin with an apology: This is hard for me. I don’t know how to say this well. I care deeply about you, and I feel that there is something important I need to say to you.We have no control over the reaction or response this will evoke, but it’s very important to take a chance on the intimate relationship between Truth and Love.

Our ancestors, who sustained themselves through hunting, often depended upon those in their communities who had a special gift for discovering and following the tracks of the prey which they hunted. These trackers had highly developed senses, and well-honed skills for discerning the slightest signs – a bent stalk of grass, a small stone dislodged, a partial print in some soft earth among rocks, a hair caught in the bark of a tree where their prey had passed. They were frequently responsible for the success of the hunt, and the feeding of the people. Is it possible to track God? What are the signs to be attentive to?

In a world which we experience as defined by death, and many times marked by suffering and sorrow, there are surprises hidden in plain sight: moments of wonder and joy, unexpected gifts of kindness and true concern, a deep level of peace and serenity that comes from acceptance of reality in the face of the agitation and frenzy of so much of our lives. Are we sensitive to these signs of goodness and graciousness?

What we may notice, before anything else, is beauty. We are surrounded by nature that displays its works of art in both grand, majestic scale and in tiny, intricate detail. And there are those among us who are particularly gifted to channel this beauty through works of sight and sound and smell and taste and touch. Did this all not begin with the divine Artist?

Many people, outstanding in our history as a people on this planet, have chosen the narrower way of courageous integrity – true to themselves, their relationships, their values, their commitments. There are so many seductions that  whisper around us to give up, to betray, to compromise, to settle for less than what we are made for. If some things are right and true, does this not point toward One who is completely True?

Then there is the underlying unity and coherence behind the unfolding of creation. How inexplicably amazing is the coming together of innumerable elements to form complex beings, and to engender life in all its various forms! We humans have this innate sense that we are meant to gather, and to all work toward common, good goals and objectives. This asks for, and leads to, communion. Is not God behind this?

It seems to me that the greatest, and rarest, of the signs around and in us is love. Love is what we are made for, yet it requires that we grow beyond selfishness to fully live in love. We need to put aside ego to give ourselves freely, completely, with no conditions, no expectations, no self-referencing. Love is among us. And it flows from absolute love. 

Perhaps we have gotten off track. Perhaps we have convinced ourselves that this hunting is a thing of the past, unnecessary, something we’ve outgrown through our sophistication and science. The signs are still all around us – goodness, graciousness, joy, peace, unity, truth, integrity, wonder, beauty, love. We need to relearn how to read them. It takes practice, and its worth it.

How can we be sure we’ve made the right choice?  Sorry, but we can’t – at least not absolutely. A key moment in the discernment process comes after we’ve chosen what we believe is the better option, when we pray for confirmation. As we live into the consequences of our choice, we seek this gift/grace. We ask the Holy Spirit to bless us with some sense that we have chosen rightly and well.

Praying for confirmation is not asking for a divine guarantee. Such a thing doesn’t exist. As long as we are fallible and easily swayed by forces within and outside of ourselves, we cannot be absolutely certain.

I was finishing my commitment with a L’Arche community, and had made plans to enter a program in a few weeks that would lead to a Certificate in Respiratory Therapy. Having studied philosophy and theology, I was not prepared for any kind of career. I knew that my life was meant to be of service to others, and I had worked in hospitals for a number of years and felt comfortable in that environment.

The community’s leader approached me with a request: Would I be willing to stay on just a bit longer to allow a part-time assistant, who also worked full-time outside of the home, to participate in a large international meeting of L’Arche? This was a first for this person, after a number of years of humble, faithful service. I knew two things to be true, if I chose to stay: The people with disabilities would feel safer and more secure with me than with a patchwork of benevolent caregivers who did not know those I was living with as well as I; and, I would not be able, at that moment, to fulfill my desire of attaining the skills that could lead to the satisfaction of having a concrete and tangible line of work.

I had an immediate and clear sense of what appeared to be the “right thing to do” – to continue a little while longer with these wonderful, vulnerable people who had taught me so much. Yet, in the back of my mind, there was this creeping sense that I was “throwing away” my first real opportunity for stable work. After all, respiratory therapy was a relatively new and much needed area of healthcare. I would be helping plenty of people.

I stayed on in the community. The community leader and the other assistant went off to the big meeting. The extra time passed by, and I savored each day. I became filled with peace and the sense: this is the right thing to do. Yes, I did miss the date to enter the training program, but it was okay. 

I hadn’t formally prayed for the grace of confirmation, but it was given, and I recognized it as a gift from God. We can feel the grace of confirmation. We are at peace, even though the decision was difficult and may have seemed illogical. There is an inner sense of rightness. We can feel joy, new energy; we may feel freer and more alive. Choose carefully, and then ask for confirmation, before you finalize your life-plans or major decisions.

We all have likes, and some of these are strong, compelling, almost non-negotiable. We have favorite foods, colors, sports teams, things to do when we are not directly engaged with our responsibilities… The combination of our individual preferences make up a profile of our characteristic style. They are so familiar, so comfortable, and yet, they are not who we truly are.

One of the major barriers to making free and loving choices is what Ignatius of Loyola called disordered attachments – those people, things, activities, substances that we value more than our relationship with God. Whatever deviates our mind and/or our heart and/or our life-path away from what we know is right and good, away from God’s call, away from God’s loving desires for us and for others; these are disordered attachments. When it comes time for us to make an important decision, we are pre-conditioned by our attachments to choose according to whatever we are attached to. This can severely impair our discernment of God’s Will for us.

Ignatius has a simple antidote for disordered attachments – indifference (or detachment). To choose well, we need to be indifferent, detached. Ignatius was a passionate Basque. He was not talking about developing apathy as some backward kind of virtue. Indifference doesn’t mean that we don’t care. As fully alive human beings, we need to be in touch with, and have access to, all our feelings, no matter how fierce or deep. But when we choose, we need to be free from the domination of our feelings.

Once again, a huge help to dealing well with disordered attachments is awareness. We need to know ourselves inside and out. What claims us? What tugs at our heart? What siren’s song sings more loudly and more seductively to us, drowning out the voice of God? What, in our life, is more important to us than doing what is loving and just? Whatever pulls us away from God and God’s ways is a disordered attachment. It means more to us than is healthy and good for us. Knowing the answer to these questions allows us to choose more freely.

Because we do care, very much, we try to discover how our caring, or our passion, clouds our vision and moves us in one direction or another. Does it help or hinder our listening to/for God’s direction for our life? We may want something with all our heart. We may be totally convinced that what we want to do has to be the right way, the only way. We are attached. We need to back off and try to see our life and the choice in front of us from God’s perspective.

The gift of freedom we have been given offers us the opportunity to participate in God’s ongoing work of creation and to continue the mission of Jesus: to call all people, by our lives, to fundamentally change their way of seeing and acting; to believe in, and to build up God’s Kingdom now, where we are. Our freedom is awesome and, at the same time, so restricted. Our choices have vital significance, and are starkly limited – to the point where some people claim that because there is so much constantly shaping and conditioning us, we have no freedom at all. We can choose to focus on the awesome and do what we can, or get lost in the littleness of the impact of our decisions and choices, and court frustration and despair. 

Discernment requires that we have the fullest measure of interior freedom as is humanly possible. In order to recognize and choose according to God’s loving preferences and desires, we need to remove distractions (physical, sensory, mental, emotional, as well as spiritual). Distractions are whatever pulls us away from being freely present in this moment.

There are conditions that make it next to impossible to make a free and loving decision: ignorance, attachments, passions, deep wounding, intense pain, brainwashing, addictions, physical or psychological threats, being reduced to basic survival, social and familial conditioning… Brainwashing can either be a psychological weapon wielded by an expert, or the creation of a dependency on a powerful or charismatic personality who serves as one’s auxiliary mind, conscience and will – a substitute god, or a divine parent. 

Most of us, thank God, are not dealing with such heavy duty constraints. For us, the impediments to our freedom are usually simple, common and pervasive. I tend to lump them together as fear, ego, and expectations. If we are in fear, and to the extent we are afraid, we are not free to make good decisions. If we, because of some illusion of self-preservation, have set ourselves as the sole reference for orienting our life, ego rules – and ego is less concerned with freedom than with preserving its imaginary control over reality. Expectations are like a smiling giant with a cudgel, leaning down to us and suggesting what has to be right and good for us, and inviting us: “Now choose.” How free is that?

Since, I believe, we all are struggling with these challenges to making good, loving choices and decisions, how can we ever choose freely and well? The biggest factor is awareness – awareness of the influences that tend to restrict and inhibit our freedom to choose. If we know and can name these persuasive voices, they have less power over us. The secret is to know and name as many of these familiar “advisors”  as possible and to see how they are bending our will. This is choosing with our eyes open. We can say, “Yes.” We can say, “No.”