I’ve recently been thinking about this confusing thing so many of us call discernment. It is a question that everyone deals with to one extent or another, whether it is the secular worker pondering which job opportunity to take, the college graduate who wonders what direction to set the course of their life, or especially the person of faith, who yearns to follow whatever path God asks of them, but who may be uncertain if such a path even exists.
I won’t delve too much further into every aspect of this form of reflection, but for those who know me and my fellow House of Brigid members, discernment features heavily in our thoughts and prayers during our time in Ireland. Since for many of us this is a time where we hope to find some clarity or inclination as to how and where we should live our lives, and ideally finding such a path that offers us the best place to grow in our relationship with God. Yet, when one feels lost along this journey, falling deeper into confusion about the ‘right’ decision or over-worrying about falling behind in the race of life, it becomes easy to despair about the whole process.
For me personally (and I hope that what feels ‘personal’ for me might also feel relatable for others), I sometimes fear that until I find that ‘one true path’ of a properly discerned life, that all of the decisions I am making in the meantime could send me hurtling in the wrong direction, all because I chose the ‘wrong’ program, talked to the ‘wrong’ people, or delayed in making a serious decision. While some of these fears have roots in reality, such as being careful not to be too indecisive, to over-exaggerate them puts an unsustainable weight upon each and every decision made. But it was only recently, after expressing this fear out loud, that I came to see how this was also a foolish (or at least over-simplified) way of seeing the interaction of God with our world.
To understand why this was foolish though, it helped me to get out of my head a bit and try to imagine how this idea would look if it were to exist in our world. For example, when I consider the story of salvation history from the Fall of humanity to the coming of the Christ, the chain of lives and decisions that arc from the Original moment of weakness to the final moment of redemption must have felt like anything but a series of perfect decisions. Yet, the path of human history arrives at its beautiful and consolidating destination for a people that has sought God earnestly, though imperfectly.
In much simpler terms, I thought about the story of a particular figure in this long chain of believers, King David. Here was someone who from a young age stood out among God’s people as he was chosen to serve the Lord in the specific role of king and was thus asked to conform his life to God’s Will. Yet, even though David begins his rule as a faithful follower, as he gets older his desires begin to conflict, and he commits the great sin of sending Uriah to his death so that he may take Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. In response, the first son which Bathsheba bore to David is doomed to die, and with his death the path of David’s previously ‘well-discerned’ life now appears all but doomed to despair. But even here, after dwelling in sin and deceit, David’s earnest repentance allows the now crooked path of his life to be made into something good and beautiful again. God’s grace is allowed to work: David is granted a second child, Solomon, who goes on to carry the torch for his people and their beliefs.
What I received from these examples was an insight into the deeper complexity of God’s Providence in our lives. Not only was humanity’s relationship with God not wholly lost on the day of the Fall, but thousands of years of human frailty, misdirection, and pride failed to disrupt God’s loving commitment to his Creation. If the coming of Christ had depended on all of our biblical heroes discerning perfectly then we would almost certainly be doomed. But instead, their crooked lives are made whole and contribute toward the day of His coming because these people still yearned, though circuitously, toward union with God and allowed His grace to work within their imperfect situations.
The title of ‘A Life Well-Discerned’ should not only belong to those who have achieved lives of perfection and discretion (not to mention that this life seems to be most likely impossible, if it exists outside of Mary at all). Instead, ‘A Life Well-Discerned’ is one that operates within the fog of Grace, and finds its way forward at the junction of Surprise and Redemption. For there is great beauty in the fact that though the paths of our lives zig-zag and double-back on themselves in jagged and crooked lines, still we are moved forward toward a future that is made Beautiful, and usually in a way that we could have never foreseen. All that is asked of us is to try to head in that direction and to allow God’s grace to surprise us with opportunities to love.
This past year I have been trying to trust that even my greatest moment of stupidity and indecision cannot outsmart the King of Back-Up Plans. Again, it seems to me that the beauty of our discernments is found in the way that the crooked lines of our earnest decisions are somehow made straight at the end of all things. By most estimations, the way one wanders through the woods can only be made sense of once it is viewed in hindsight, but that does not mean that taking another direction would have been a mere shadow of a journey just because the path differed. So long as you aimed to make it straight through the forest, you still allowed the end goal to guide your decisions and save you from falling by the wayside.
God seems to ask for a bit of our own input into this life, and I feel that it is only with this raw material that something beautiful may be made and redeemed. O felix culpa.
