More Rules for Discernment.

How do we decide about whether to participate in a hospital strike, or how to respond to homelessness, or whether to marry Ben, or to enter religious life or ministry? On what basis? By what criteria? In matters like these, in the wide-open space beyond moral minimums, we follow the Spirit. The Spirit guides by consolation, but not by consolation alone. Nor is consolation infallible. (Brackley, 142)

Do you have rules for making important decisions in your life?

I don't necessarily mean that you have them written down or delineated by subset - I imagine most of us don't. But perhaps, in the course of making decisions through different stages of your life, you've learned certain things, and you've tried to remember them, and you've tried to bring them to bear on the decisions you make today.

And then maybe, much to your chagrin, you've discovered that it doesn't always work.

Sometimes we do our best to think through an important decision, remembering everything we've learned and using all of the available data at hand, and yet: The choice we made still seemed to be the wrong one in the end.

In cases like these, the wisdom Ignatius offers us is this:

God our Creator continues to love us first. Christ continues to walk with us. And the Spirit continues to lead us on, further and further into God's project. We are justified by grace, held in the arms of an unfathomable love, even when we fall short.

And then, once we've re-grounded ourselves in that gospel, we might take another look at our "Rules for Discernment" - the things we've learned over time about what leads to wise decisions. We might pull those things out into the open, and take a look at them again. Maybe we'll notice something we missed the last time.

There's always more to notice, after all, in the holy gifts that are our lives.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Life in the Spirit.

From Dean Brackley's The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola (126):

How much time and income should the Harrises devote to the Coalition against Homelessness? Should Carmen marry Ben? What expressions of affection are appropriate at this stage of their relationship? Should Chris enter seminary or novitiate? Should our group practice civil disobedience to protest the war?

Making wise decisions is the most important skill in life. It requires sizing up situations and determining the best course of action. This is discernment, a hallmark of Ignatian spirituality. Over a lifetime, we learn this art well or poorly. According to Ignatius's Foundation, all our thoughts, words, and actions should be directed toward the single goal of God's Reign. In the best of cases, we struggle all our lives to integrate our complex selves into single-minded service. The Spirit transforms us, resolving inner contradictions and sharpening our moral perception. In the end, beyond techniques and criteria, discernment is a matter of character and sensitivity, of becoming the person we should be.

At our Lenten book discussion group last Thursday, we noted how Lutherans have often struggled with the idea of "discipleship." We Lutherans lift up our great heritage of justification by grace through faith - the good news that we are saved by God and not by our own works. This is truly worth celebrating!

But sometimes we Lutherans get stuck there. It isn't that Lutherans don't live lives of faith active in love: On the contrary, Lutherans often show great care for the neighbor in need. It's just that in our theology we historically haven't spent much time thinking through what comes after forgiveness. We have often been so concerned about getting the order wrong - God loves us first and then we justified to live lives of faith active in love - that we haven't spent much time thinking through what a life of faith active in love might look like. "Discernment?" we might think. "Wise decision-making? Isn't that a 'good work'? If so, it won't save me! Best to leave it alone."

Wise decision-making won't save us, it is true. God alone does that. God alone frees us. As Brackley, our Jesuit companion, writes: "We are forgiven before we clean up our act."

But as my Old Testament professor might say, God loves us, yes, but God still has expectations. We are forgiven, yes, but now that we are forgiven we do actually need to get around to cleaning up our act - and not just cleaning up my personal act, but cleaning up our act as a human race.

And in his chapter "Life in the Spirit," Brackley suggests that this "cleaning up our act" is actually far more - and far more fun - than scrubbing away the dirt of our sinfulness. He suggests that - being filled with God's free and freeing love as we are - our post-justification, post-forgiveness, post-Egypt (to borrow the story of the Israelites) lives are to be lives of creative generosity in sharing God's love with the whole world.

Thanks be to God, we are not left to try and figure out these lives of creative generosity on our own. The Spirit, that third person of our Triune God, guides us by fanning the flame of love in our hearts. Thinking through how we might follow that wild Spirit as it fans the flames to and fro will be the subject of our next few chapters.

Of course, as Brackley point out, in our lives of creative generosity, we will make lots of mistakes. We could let them get us down - but we shouldn't. Listen to how Brackley puts it (128) as he once again echoes Luther's call to "sin boldly":

Infinite needs and demands lead to frustration, guilt trips, Messiah complexes, and crash landings - unless we have internalized the good news that we are forgiven before we clean up our act and that love will someday, somehow, triumph because God is laboring through us and despite us. This good news, this gospel, transforms harsh demands into the sweet yet challenging requirements of love. But though our response will fall short daily, our hope and inner peace are secure thanks to the good news, independent of our performance or measurable success. As Anne Patrick says, we must allow high moral demands 'to play over a ground alto of God's healing and empowering and justice-making love for us all.'

May it ever be so. Amen.

Expanding the Soul.

Today's chapter is just the surprise some of us (myself emphatically included) need to hear.

In "Expanding the Soul," Brackley takes up the notion of an exaggerated humility that binds rather than frees. In fact it is not really humility at all, but fear masquerading as humility, a vice pretending to be a virtue. He writes (110-112):

Many of us clip our own wings, or let others clip them. We remain silent and inactive when bold speech and action are called for. We can end up like T.S. Eliot's Prufrock, measuring out our lives with coffee spoons... Self-doubt prevents many of us from taking up new challenges. We avoid risks for fear of failure...

This drives [us] to anguish and prevents [us] from doing good. While God often inspires good people to undertake bold initiatives, the hypersensitive are subject to paralyzing doubts that keep them from translating their inspirations into action. They spontaneously ask themselves questions like, "Am I really seeking my own glory?" "Will this cause scandal?" "Would it be safer to back off, or at least wait?" "Couldn't x, y, or z go wrong?"

Guilty as charged, your honor.

A different way is needed. And that way, Ignatius suggests is not to throw out the humility of solidarity, but rather to make it a truer humility - a richer and more authentic humility.

Brackley writes (123):

The challenges we confront ought to inspire humility - but the authentic humility that leads to bold, creative action.

A humility that leads not to paralyzing self-doubt but to the bold, creative action of humility-in-practice; a humility that leads not to the hollow belief that is really unbelief but to the bold, creative action that springs from faith in the sure promise of God's project.

Once again, Ignatius does not sound so far from his reforming contemporary, Martin Luther, who wrote:

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.

To "sin boldly" is, I think a characteristic of what Brackley calls the "magnanimous person" (122):

The magnanimous person is, literally, a great-souled individual, an expansive spirit. With appropriate self-esteem and a realistic sense of their talents, great-hearted individuals think big. They refuse to bog down in trivia. Unperturbed by minor grievances, indifferent to the "trinkets" of wealth and status, they are spontaneously generous, even prodigal, the opposite of the stingy, shrunken soul.

Great-hearted communities think this Way, too.

They live a Way of Life that is life abundant, overflowing with expansive spirit, full of boldly creative action, all in the service of God's Project of manna and mercy for all, a Project promised in history and even now breaking into our world. They live the Way of Christ.

And that is something worth living for.

Humility and Solidarity.

Our master was despised; the servant ought not be honored.
The master was poor; the servant ought not be rich.
The master lived by the work of his hands; the servant ought not live off his own rent.
The master walked on foot; the servant ought not ride horseback.
The master surrounded himself with the little ones, the poor, the workers; the servant ought not associate with the great lords.
The master was calumniated; the servant ought not be praised.
The master was poorly dressed, poorly dressed, poorly sheltered; the servant ought not roam about well-dressed, well-fed, and well-established.
The master worked and tired himself; the servant ought not look for repose.
The master wished to appear small; the servant ought not wish to appear great.

- Charles de Foucauld

As Ignatius sees it, our reflections this week have all been preparations for discernment - the practice of making wise decisions, big and small. We contemplate, or think through:

1) God's Project (Reign) for the world, the great banquet where everyone has enough

2) The example of Jesus, through the stories that have been written about him

3) The fact that both of these require Downward Mobility, the freedom to go radically against the flow of way of the world.

Today Ignatius challenges us to not only be free for poverty, but to prefer it - and actually to pray for it, not for its own sake but because it was the way of Christ and it because it is the best soil for resisting the currents that flow against God's Project.

Once again the road Ignatius sets before us is rocky and fraught with danger. Are we to romanticize poverty?

I hope not.

It is true that some are called to make a vow of poverty: many Christian saints - beatified by Rome or not - made vows of poverty in practice in the service of some greater call. Not all of us are called to such radical lives as theirs - though, Ignatius wants to impress upon us, some of us are, and all of us should be ready for such a call, should it come. This is heavy stuff, and not easily digested.

But there is a call I think all of us might consider: the call to humility, and specifically humility-in-practice, which Brackley calls solidarity. He writes (106):

Humility flowers into solidarity, identifying with others to the point of sharing their suffering... This is the logic of love. Our heart goes out to those who suffer - the way Jesus was moved by the leper, the crowds, and the widow of Nain - and we long to join them. Comfort and respectability are good things. But it is preferable to walk with the poor than without them.

I find it especially interesting that we are still in the section called Something Worth Living For. This invitation to radical solidarity is not intended to be gloomy. It is not bad news. It is not the Law. It is the Gospel! It is the good news! God invites us out of self-centered individualism, out of endless striving for accomplishments that never fully satisfy, out of the ways of the dominant culture. God invites us into a world of community with more than enough for all, and with boundaries far beyond those we normally imagine. We are invited to be "downwardly mobile" because that is where the vast expanses of the global community are in the present age.

Good news... but not easy news!

Downward Mobility.

Upward mobility can mean economic security for refugees and their children; and escaping poverty is good. But it can turn into an escape from the poor themselves. Which is it? Which will it be in the long run? (Brackley, p. 92)

This is one of the most exciting chapters in the book - and one of the most challenging to understand.

Brackley uses the term "downward mobility" as a way of challenging the notion of "upward mobility" so celebrated in our culture. It's a provocative phrase, and worth thinking about.

But we should be careful not to be flip about upward mobility. There are reasons, after all, why it has been celebrated in our culture. For the last several generations, parents have hoped for bigger and better things for their children - and America has been a place where these bigger and better things can happen. (One need only note the migrants still risking their lives to cross our borders to see that the possibilities of America are still taken seriously.) Is this so wrong?

It's important to note the core of Brackley's argument. It is not that achievement and accomplishment and financial growth are bad in themselves (they are not, and Brackley mentions how they might serve real purpose). And it isn't even that achievement and accomplishment and financial growth can lead to some kind of individual sin, like pride or greed, though this could happen as well.

Rather, the problem is that as we move "up" we can find ourselves moving away from the people we leave behind. On a global level, this means leaving behind the majority of the world's population - the "Two-Thirds" world who are on the bottom level of the global economic pyramid we've constructed.

So what is the solution Brackley proposes?

The [way] of Christ today is "downward mobility." That means entering the world of the poor, assuming their cause, and to some degree, their condition. (100)

Again, without equivocating or softening Brackley's position, we need to be clear about what he's proposing. Brackley argues that the way of Christ is "downward mobility" but not because there is some inherent good about a downward direction or some inherent good about poverty.

Rather, he argues for movement in this direction because it is the direction toward being in community with the majority of the world's population. He calls this solidarity.

Living in solidarity - which Brackley identifies as a primary aspect of the Way of Christ - leaves plenty for our middle-class tribe to do. Listen to how Brackley puts it:

More than anything else, we need "new human beings" who identify with the poor majority of the planet (sometimes called the Two-Thirds World) - including people in rich countries to who know about trade, finance, and human rights law and can help address the complex causes of misery. (103)

Now here is something worth living for! The gifts that God has given to us, put to work in the service of the global community - in the service of God's project.

I'm privileged to see this happening all around me. St John United is hosting a fundraising brunch for Haiti this Sunday: the congregation's gifts of cooking and creativity in publicity are being put to work in the service of God's project. SJU's Sunday School students are raising money for schools in the Middle East through the Pennies for Peace project - the second time this year that SJU kids have put their talents to work in the service of solidarity with the global community. It's exciting to see God's Reign breaking in, even today, even among us!

What will our next steps be? How will we continue this work that has already begun? How will Christ lead us even further into God's project?

I can't wait to find out.

The Two Standards.

When I was in college, I used to listen to pre-seminary students endlessly debate the "theology of glory" vs. the "theology of the cross." Enough already, I thought. It all seemed like too much religious jargon.

Only later did I begin to discover what could be powerfully relevant about a "theology of the cross," a Lutheran emphasis that insists God meets us not primarily in our accomplishments but rather in our weakness, in our brokenness, in our pain - not in what we have but in what we lack.

Today Ignatius lifts up what Brackley calls "the Two Standards," by which he means something like "the two flags" of armies heading into battle. I'm not sure this kind of language is the most helpful, but the stark division between two options for a way of life may, as Brackley puts it, "throw a bright light over the rocky moral terrain" of our world.

"To be placed with the Son is to be placed where he said he would be found: among the hungry, the naked, the sick, and imprisoned (Matt 25:31-46). It is to opt with the poor. Only in this way will "thy Kingdom come," the Kingdom of life in abundance, new social relations, with no more poverty, hunger, or tears (cf. Luke 6:20-26)."

Ignatius challenges us to think about what this might mean.

Then he goes one step further: He challenges us to actually ask Christ to place us with him: among the hungry, the naked, the sick, and imprisoned - and not in some abstract way, but quite literally.

This is so far from the Call or Invitation of contemporary culture - the call toward wealth and social status - that the idea of "two battle flags" actually starts to make some sense. Are there actually two calls pulling us in two different directions?

I think Luther, shaped as he was by a theology of the cross, might say yes. If it is true that Christ meets us in the crosses and crucifixions of our world - anywhere there is poverty and persecution - then it seems that we must be prepared to head in that direction if we are to continue journeying with Jesus.

So, here's my question for you: Can we begin to practice this idea today?

Maybe there are ways in which we might choose the Way of Christ by living in solidarity with the poor today. Maybe there ways we already do this. Maybe there are ways we might take the next steps along the Way.

Spending some time thinking about what this might look like is the Spiritual Exercise to which Ignatius invites us today.

Contemplation of Christ.

If we wish to take part in this Advent and Christmas event,
then we cannot simply be bystanders or onlookers,
as if we were at the theater,
enjoying all the cheerful images.
No, we ourselves are swept up into the action there,
into this conversion of all things.
We have to play our part too on this stage.
For the spectator
is already an actor.
He cannot withdraw.
…we cannot approach his manger
as if it were the cradle of any other child.
Those who wish to come to his manger
find that something is
happening within them.



- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from The Mystery of Holy Night

An inspired work of art - a painting or a poem - reaches out to us and into us, to question, enlighten, and inspire. A great story draws us into itself and discloses the deeper drama of life. Stories shape us when we recognize part of our own story in them. (Brackley, p. 73)

In the next steps of our journey we turn to consider Jesus, the One who calls us.

But how can we know Jesus? He walked the earth two thousand years ago. Some in our contemporary culture speak of having a "personal relationship with Jesus," but this makes many of us uncomfortable. How do we even begin to have a relationship with this Jesus - let alone walk alongside him as a friend?

One way that Ignatius suggests we might do this is by taking one of the Gospel stories and imagining ourselves inside of it. Find a few quiet moments sometime in your day - like with the Examen from last week. Then, instead of sifting through your thoughts and feelings, enter into the Gospel story and see what you find there.

The Ignatian method suggests several steps to guide this exercise.

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Pause in silence before beginning the prayer. Remember that you are loved by God. Imagine this love as the warmth of the sun upon your back.

Ask that God would lead you in the way that God would have you go, that your whole prayer be directed toward the service of God's project.

Imagine the story slowly. Allow it to unfold in your imagination. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? In your mind's eye, look around, and take it all in. As the events of the story unfold, pay special attention to the people. What are they saying? What are they doing? Pause wherever you need to.

Speak to Jesus about what's going on inside you as you watch this scene unfold. What are you doing in the scene? Are you a bystander? Do you relate especially to any of the people or any of the groups of people? Express this all to Jesus. Listen for his response.

Ask Jesus for what you want: to know him better. Remember that the goal of the exercise is not to obtain "answers," but to grow in relationship with Christ.

Close with a prayer of thanksgiving.

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There are other ways to think about this kind of prayer if you don't find this language helpful - other examples can be found here or on this site where someone has written out his prayers for you to see them.

Finally, must close by confessing that when I first tried this kind of prayer, it frankly didn't work. I felt nothing at all, and had real trouble entering fully into the story. Even today, I often find myself more confused by Jesus than anything else!

If you share some of these feelings, that's okay. Be honest with God and with yourself. Wait a day or two, and try it again. The important thing is not execute exercises perfectly. The important thing is not even to hear the Invitation perfectly clearly.

The important thing is simply to grow in relationship with Inviter. The important thing is to, like Bonhoeffer, approach the manger and see where it leads us.

And so we pray: Lead us on, Lord, lead us on.