SHOWING THE WAY TO GOD
By Micheál Loughnane, Giver of the Spiritual Exercises
and an Ignatian Spiritual Director with JISA Campion.
“Discernment means to think through our decisions and actions, not just by rational calculation but by listening for His Spirit, recognising in prayer God’s motives, invitations and will. There is a principle worth remembering in these times: ideas are debated, but reality is discerned.” (Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future.)
“Those who truly learn to see, draw close to what is unseen.” (Paul Celan, quoted in Pope Francis’ “The Role of Literature in Formation”.)
The phrase “reality is discerned” is so important, especially at a time when reality itself is challenged by misinformation, disinformation and fakery. If ever there was a time to bring to our collective awareness the forces that are creating and shaping our consciousness, it is now. This of course means that we must learn to make the unconscious conscious, for, as Carl Jung wisely remarked, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.
One of the many beautiful gifts Pope Francis brings to our Church is his aptitude for helping us collectively to make the unconscious conscious. In almost all his writings, he refers at some point to the importance of discernment. In this sense he is a true progeny of Ignatius Loyola. Should you wish to swim a little deeper into the Pope’s reflections on discernment, I would suggest you read Let Us Dream. It amounts to an extended reflection on Ignatian discernment in a contemporary context.
I choose to focus on two concepts or ways of thinking about discernment that Pope Francis raises in this text. The first is the concept of “overflow”, and the second is the idea of “unfinished thinking”.
According to Pope Francis, “when we face choices and contradictions, asking what God’s will is, opens us to unexpected possibilities”. He describes these new possibilities as “overflow,” because they often burst the banks of our thinking. Overflow happens when we humbly set before God the challenge we face and ask for help.
This is “discernment of spirits”, because it involves learning what is of God and what is seeking to frustrate God’s will. When we enter into discernment we need to “resist the urge to seek the apparent relief of an immediate decision, and instead be willing to hold different options before the Lord, waiting on that overflow”.
While we weigh the options, we know that Jesus is working with us. Over time, a solution arrives. Many struggle with this need for patience, even though it is a core aspect of discernment. Others who may face an uphill task are “those who are allergic to uncertainty and want to reduce everything to black and white. And it is quite impossible for ideologues, fundamentalists and anyone else who is held back by a rigid mindset”. But this radical openness to the overflow of unexpected possibilities is vital to good discernment in Pope Francis’s view.
The second concept is “unfinished thinking”. The Pope reveals that he takes this idea of el pensamiento incompleto from the late Catholic priest Romano Guardini. When discerning, he invites us to allow space for contemplation. A fruitful thought “should always be unfinished” in order to allocate space for subsequent development and refinement, and it creates room for us to encounter the good, the true and the beautiful. In this way, we learn to navigate conflicts without being trapped in them.
This way of thinking, he says, “opens us to the Spirit and to the discernment of spirits. If you don’t open up, you can’t discern”. This is precisely why he has an “allergy to moralisms and other -isms that try to resolve all problems with prescriptions, equations, and rules”. Pope Francis, like John Henry Newman, whom he declared a saint in October 2019, sees the truth lying outside us, always beyond us, but beckoning to us through our consciences. It is like a “kindly light” that we reach not normally through reason but – as Newman explained in the 1870 work A Grammar of Assent – “through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description.”
Ignatian discernment is a potent antidote to all fatalistic and simplistic thinking; it is profoundly intentional, and at the same time open to the “God of surprises”. It is, in Pope Francis’s context, unfinished thinking. This is how he always stretches our thinking and expands our horizons. One senses this “overflow” and “unfinished thinking” in almost everything he writes.
An example of this overflow and unfinished thinking for me is the Pope’s recent letter on The Role of Literature in Formation. For those who have been attentive to his papal journey, it comes as no surprise that he does not just view the study of literature as an add-on to the formation of those in every ministry in the Church. Instead, in his view, it is absolutely essential to the formation of genuinely empathic human beings, and its absence “can lead to serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment”.
He sees literature as a telescope that focuses the readers’ attention on a situation previously unknown to them, thereby opening their perception to “the totality of human experience.” Good literature helps us to never lose sight of the flesh of Jesus Christ: “that flesh made of passions, emotions and feelings, words that challenge and console, hands that touch and heal, looks that liberate and encourage, flesh made of hospitality, forgiveness, indignation, courage, fearlessness; in a word, love”.
For Pope Francis, the beauty of literature is that it helps us to listen to another person’s voice. This is exactly what we do in spiritual direction. We listen to the other person’s unique voice; we develop imaginative empathy and become sensitive to their experience. Reading is also an act of discernment, enabling us to become instruments of communion between creation and the power to shed light on every dimension of our human condition.
Micheál Loughnane is a sessional lecturer at ACU and the Coordinator of the Australian Jesuit Province’s Arrupe Program for forming givers of the Spiritual Exercises.
Banner image by silviarita, Canva.