Along with prayer and community, discernment is one of the most important and most demanding of the spiritual disciplines. Discernment is all about coming to know what God wants for us, as individuals, and as communities. This isn’t some arrogant human effort. We can discern God’s Will because God empowers us to.
God has given the concrete model of Jesus’ life as well as the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of love, to be with us and to guide us. Clearly Jesus invested many hours in prayer, in coming to an intimate, deeply personal, familiarity of Abba and Abba’s preferences. Prayer and discernment go hand-in-hand.
As Jesus lived and taught, we are all called to live our lives with a single focus – to become holy. God wants us to be holy. Holiness requires our wholehearted dedication, within the specific circumstances of each of our lives – not in some idealized, detached perfection. And what are we to be so completely dedicated to? Loving!
As disciples of Jesus, he commands us to love one another – as he has loved us – with his whole being – to the end. This is God’s Will, always and in every situation. To come to this depth of loving, we need to put aside any and all manifestations of ego: self-referencing, self-centeredness, self-assurance. Loving demands that we are free enough from our selves to be present, attentive, and available to others as they are; free enough to enter into the need and pain of the other. to care and to give, more and more fully, of what we have been given.