Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Practice of Discernment

In both the Old Testament and gospel readings, people were asked to make a decision. In Joshua, the people were asked to choose between worshiping a foreign god or worshiping God. In the gospel, Jesus’ revelation about himself as “the one who has come down from heaven” turns away some, but it also generates Peter’s confession: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”

Making choices is at the core of a moral and ethical life. Now that we have “come to believe and are convinced” that Jesus is the Christ, we must continue to make choices that are consistent with our commitment to follow Christ.

An excellent way to make these choices, or to “discern” what is consistent with our spiritual welfare, is the time-honored approach of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.  Taken from the site developed by the Valparaiso Project from the University of the same name, it is an adjunct to the book Practicing our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. As the website, PracticingOurFaith.org describes: “Both book and website explore twelve time-honored practice shaped by the Christian community over the centuries and still richly relevant to contemporary experience.  These Christian practices are shared activities that address fundamental human needs and that, when woven together, form a way of life that is faithful and has integrity.”

Here is an excerpt from that site meant to guide a Christian in discernment:

Discerning the Spirit as an individual 
Ignatius of Loyola, founder of Jesuits, offered a model that includes these requisites: a passionate commitment to follow God, an attitude of indifference toward all other drives and desires, and a deep sensitivity to the ways and being of God. 

1.     Become aware of as many aspects of the decision as possible.

2.    Consider the negatives, the decision you feel least inclined to choose.

3.    Repeat the process of consideration with the side you feel most inclined to choose.

4.    Take action to see if your decision is resulting in the desired outcome; if it is not, re-evaluate your decision.

One essential addition I’d like to make: All decisions involving your spiritual welfare should be made in dialogue with a spiritually mature friend or mentor. In the Christian life, discernment has a communal element as well.  Needless to say, prayer is part of all the steps of the process.

Fr. Todd

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

"Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him"

This line taken from John's gospel is the core of what Catholics believe about unity. However, this unity of which John speaks is sometimes confused with uniformity by the institutional Church. Case in point: last year’s doctrinal investigation by Rome of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious assessing how well the organization is aligned with Church teaching on matters of "feminist issues"(op. cit. NCR). Specifically, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is concerned that the LCWR is silent in matters of birth control/abortion and marriage norms set by the institutional Church, and that it gives dissenting voices from Church teaching, some of them quite radical (i.e. espousing a post-Church spirituality, post-Jesus, spirituality [op. cit. Bishop Leonard P. Blair]). The name of this investigation is formally called a "doctrinal assessment". The goal is to have the LCWR align what they say (or what they allow their members to say publicly) with official Church teaching; for Rome, having holy people saying different things about what it means to be an ecclesiastical community undermines the Faith for all believers. However, it is this mistaken notion of uniformity for unity that I believe is a threat to the Faith. Pope Benedict wrote

"We cannot keep to ourselves the words of eternal life given to us in our encounter with Jesus Christ: they are meant for everyone, for every man and woman. ... It is our responsibility to pass on what, by God's grace, we ourselves have received."
- Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 2010

This is precisely what the sisters of the LCWR are attempting. In their mission statement, they declare that bringing the Good News, " to further the mission of the Gospel" to the "world today" is the animating nexus of their community. The Good News is often messy, because everyone who has been transformed by this "encounter" with Christ has, as part of her or his story, the uniqueness of the encounter. Different that these encounters may be, we seek community to share our stories and listen to the stories of others from the founding of the Church in the first century down to the present. It should not be surprising, then, that the meanings attached to these personal experiences diverge in many places--good for spiritual health, bad for institutional uniformity.

Jesus said I am the "living bread" because he established a relationship with his disciples that continues as "living bread", a nourishing relationship through the Holy Spirit. The unity, of which the Church speaks so much about, is borne from this living and dynamic relationship, and yields poorly to the box-building structures of institutional rule-making; unity is full of dissent, divergent understandings, and practices, and embraces everyone who claims a relationship with Christ within and without the institutional Church. The keeper of uniformity is doctrine; the keeper of unity is dialog. It takes greater faith to live to work with unity than simply abandoning the responsibility of communion by blind obedience to institutional decrees; one's conscience must be given the ability to speak truth to authority.

Dialogue is communion because it presupposes sharing rather than declaring. That isn't to say that there can be no doctrine or statements of definition, provided they are a product of this dialog, something the Church increasingly is seeing as a threat to its centralized authority. To be a living church is to allow the messiness of relationships and espouse the humility to seek a new direction when the old one no longer speaks Good News to the world. If we seek the eternal in human institutions, we worship a false god.

Jesus' admonition in today's gospel to "stop murmuring among yourselves" because "no one can come to me unless the Father, who sent me-draw[sic] him." He then goes on to cite Isaiah 54 "They shall all be taught by God." Our first and primary teacher in our spiritual journey is not the decrees of church, per se, but God, or more specifically, our living and dynamic relationship with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit that is tested not against a rigid authority, but against a sensus fidelium--honoring the experiences of the faith-filled as a foundation of expressing what we believe and understand to be true. When Church doctrine no longer speaks to the faithful, it becomes bread with bleached flour, void of sustaining nutrition, not the Bread of Life from which one may eat and never go hungry.

—Fr. Todd