Cura Personalis: Discernment
By: Dr. Jonathan Lawrence, Contributing Writer
Have you ever struggled to make a decision because you can’t choose between your options? Maybe you’ve made a pros and cons list, but that just makes it harder to decide. Maybe you worry that you’ve thought so much about the decision and now you’re trying to rationalize a bad decision because it's something you want, not necessarily something you should do. Or maybe you find the decision difficult because each option closes off other possibilities — some of which could be good things on their own.
Maybe you haven’t experienced these, but I know I have. Making decisions can be difficult, whether it’s picking courses for next semester, choosing a career or asking someone out. We can’t avoid making decisions, but maybe there are some ideas for how to make decisions.
When I started college, I had a detailed plan for the rest of my life. I was going to major in chemistry or biology, go to med school and become a medical missionary providing medical care somewhere far away. It was a good plan and could have been a meaningful way to spend my life until it all fell apart.
In my sophomore year, I was taking my second semester of organic chemistry, and our professor was making the exams so hard that even the senior chemistry majors couldn’t pass them. The class average was a 38, and I was excited about my grade of 35, except I had no idea whether or not I’d even pass the class. Then one afternoon, in chem lab, I was in a hurry and accidentally set fire to the mixture I’d been synthesizing for three weeks. To make matters worse, I tried blowing on my test tube full of flaming acetone and spread burning liquid across the desk! There was no permanent damage to anything except my ego, but I had to write a lab report explaining that I had no results because I had been an idiot.
When I tell this as my professor origin story, I say that this was the moment I realized my medical career had literally gone up in flames. To be honest though, I had already been realizing that I might need to choose a new direction, but I had no idea what to do. What would you do if everything you had planned had suddenly fallen apart?
Fortunately for me, I had some friends around me who kept me going, and I still had to finish the semester, so I didn’t have to make any sudden decisions. I was enjoying my english classes, so I decided to try out an english major and then see what came next.
Later that year, I attended an open house at a Baptist seminary in Philadelphia, Pa. and decided that maybe, just maybe, going to seminary might be an option to consider. I was not, I repeat not, going to be a minister like my father, but that’s another story entirely. If this were a movie, the narrator would interrupt to say that I did in fact become a minister like my father, but we’ll save that for another day.
In the end, I graduated as an english major, went to Jerusalem for a year — which helped me start thinking about a career in teaching — went to seminary and grad school and ended up teaching here. Instead of trying to figure out the whole plan right away, I focused on figuring out one step at a time — or the “Next Right Thing” as Anna from “Frozen 2” sings. I have certainly had some adventures along the way and many of them would not have been part of any plan I would have made.
In his Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius offers suggestions for “discernment of spirits,” an approach to reflecting on the choices we face. This process of discernment can help when choosing between two things that both seem good. He suggests considering our feelings when we think about our options and contrasts feelings of “consolation” and “desolation.” This is more than just whether something makes us happy or sad.
Consolation means thoughts that give us peace and joy and make us want to serve God and others while desolation promotes anxiety and leads us away from God and focuses just on ourselves, not others. For most of us these are new ways of thinking about our choices, but many people have found that thinking about our choices in this way becomes easier and brings us closer to God. Even if you don’t consider yourself religious, becoming more sensitive to how your choices make you feel can make you more aware of the implications of your choices.
I’ll talk more about these ideas in future, but for now, here are some resources to learn more about discernment.
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