The Aim of Discernment
The discernment process seeks to answer the question: what is the most honest and caring response for you to make in view of your personal history and the Call of God presently experienced.
What Discernment Means?
The discernment process is a process of sifting and sorting. Deriving from the desire in prayer for a better union with God.
Stages of Discernment
To understand yourself and to recognize the experience of God in your life will involve a three-stage process: the gathering of relevant facts, the activity of prayer and the confirmation of the Spirit.
- Gathering Data. It will be necessary for you to reflect on yourself and your life with a belief in the presence of God working within. Relevant facts will become apparent: from deep feelings, from events in your life (recent and long past) from God-given strengths and gifts, from your weakness and limitations, from people in your life, from the Gospel, from caring friends and from the voice of authority.
- Prayer. Prayer is essential to open your hearts beyond the limits of your personal needs, so as to hear the voice of others, of the world, of God. Prayer will develop: regularity (you will pray despite your moods of the moment), indifference (to accept God’s will even when it differs from yours), surrender (as you are ready to give up desires that do not accord to God’s purposes), and reality (desires of the heart are admitted and God’s influence of sanctification permitted), freedom (prayer from obligation stems from pride and surrender permits it to be love-response) and contemplative of Jesus in the Gospel.
- Confirmation in the Spirit. There is a personal assurance that comes with permitting God’s will to occur: there is a deep interior conviction that God’s Spirit is with you, there is a recognition of experiences in the past when your life accorded with God’s designs, there is a harmony in your affective life, at the profoundest depths a feeling of rightness, there is an experience of a Call beyond your limits to the presence of God, there is external confirmation – from others, from feelings of courage, success and blessing, and from confirmation of scripture.
A belief in God has got to change and touch every decision you make, and Jesus gave you a vision of human possibility together with the evidence of the personal care of God. The presence of Jesus continues as you approach Him in prayer to deepen your understanding and guide your call.
