Discernment Before Utopia
Photo by Alesia Kazantceva on Unsplash
I remember talking to a wise priest about a decision that left me anxious. I then raised a question about whether criteria existed for discerning the will of God in one’s life. The priest lowered his very substantial eyebrows, and this is when I knew wisdom was to follow. He told me to ask myself if things have fallen into place in such a way that the only thing left to do was to take a leap of faith.
This advice has stayed with me. It helped me make the decision I needed to make, and it is criteria that I turn to often. However, simply applying this criteria would not yield a clear answer, every time, in every single circumstance. This is because discerning the will of God cannot be boiled down to a formula.
In going through the contingencies of life, discerning God’s will is always hard to do. The challenge becomes particularly acute when we realise that discernment is almost always mixed with our desires and the frustrations of those desires by the slings and arrows of fortune.
If we are creatures of the heart, as James KA Smith noted in his Desiring the Kingdom, it would be impossible to eliminate the restlessness that desire instils in us and the eagerness or anxiety that will find its way in the discernment process.
We can glean some reasons for our eagerness when we take a moment to considers how desire operates in the context of what Graham Ward calls a “subject position” in his book Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice. Ward suggests in that book that desire does not allow us to keep still within our subject position, which is always made up of a whole range of social and cultural factors.
Rather, our desires put us onto what Ward calls “projects” which, as the word suggests, projects us forward, pressing us against the confines posed by the factors that make up our subject position. In many respects, our eagerness inevitably will drive us to want to break many of these confines, and urge us to strain towards “where we want to be”. This “where we want to be” forms what Ward calls in his book “utopic horizons”.
However, our eagerness is often met with frustration because, as the name “utopia” suggests, our desires very often push us towards places other than where we are now. We believe that where we are now is but an obstacle to our discernment and to the fulfilling of our vocation. We want to escape where we are and what we are doing, so that God’s will can finally be done.
This desire to escape our circumstances is understandable, but it must be juxtaposed with observations by Rabbi Edward Feld and Fr. Luigi Giussani. In an essay on the 23rd Psalm, Feld noted that, though the journey in the psalm is marked by many changes and much buffeting by the circumstances of life, the sheep are nevertheless still “on the right path”.
Giussani put it more succinctly, saying once that it is precisely in the circumstances that one seeks to escape where one’s vocation, one’s call resides. Discernment thus is not dependent on an escaping of those circumstances, but by pressing against them and feeling their texture press back upon us. This struggle with our circumstances can feel like a confinement of our desires, especially as they strain towards utopia. However, Giussani indicates that these occasions can lead to the refinement and purification of our desires as we go through the process of discernment. It is not that we are called to desire less, but our being purified by our circumstances can shape the way in which we desire more.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
