In March 2019 around sixty people, including both academics and practitioners, gathered at St Beuno’s Jesuit Spirituality Centre in north Wales for a conference entitled Towards a Discerning Church. This was seen as one response to Pope Francis’s insistence that ‘today the Church needs to grow in discernment, in the ability to discern’. The papers from this conference form the core of this special issue of The Way. One concern that repeatedly emerged at the conference was the need for discernment in dealing with the current environmental challenges facing the whole of humanity; another was its importance to young people as they find their way in the world.
Nicholas Austin, ‘Discernment as a Work of the Church’, 7–16
The spiritual pathway that traces its origins to St Ignatius of Loyola has sometimes been presented as if it had a monopoly on discernment. Yet, as Pope Francis repeatedly stresses, discernment is a gift of the Spirit to the whole Church. Here moral theologian Nicholas Austin considers what happens when discernment ‘goes live’ in this setting.
Celia Deane-Drummond, ‘Ecology Evolutionary Anthropology and Discernment in Deep Time’, 17–31
In recent years Christians have become increasingly aware that their faith needs to address the environmental challenges facing the whole of humanity. However, it is not clear how this can be done most effectively. Celia Deane-Drummond, Director of the new Laudato si’ Research Institute in Oxford, suggests that looking back towards early human history is one useful response.
Edward Howells, ‘Understanding the Experience of God with St Augustine’, 33–42
St Augustine argued that God is ‘more inward to me than my innermost self’, and several of his writings explore the implications of this idea. Edward Howells considers what this means for our attempts to understand more fully our own experience of God, concluding that this experience is by no means simply an intellectual matter.
Adrian Porter, ‘Decision or Discernment?’, 43–58
For centuries, Jesuit schools have been the largest single, coherent international education system in the world. It takes constant renewal to maintain this position, and here Adrian Porter, the British Provincial’s Delegate for Education, describes how a renewed emphasis on discernment is influencing the current generation of teachers and pupils in these institutions.
Walter Ceyssens, ‘Ten Rules for Ecological Discernment’, 59–69
In the course of his Spiritual Exercises St Ignatius offers a number of sets of rules or guidelines to help retreatants continue to live out what they have experienced in prayer after the retreat. Taking inspiration from these, Walter Ceyssens suggests ten such practical rules that could be of use to those wanting to respond to present-day ecological concerns.
Patrick Goujon, ‘Toward a Greater Sense of Reality: Ignatian Discernment between Spiritual Life and Mission’, 70–80
Patrick Goujon seeks here ‘to sketch out the three actions involved in discernment: to feel; to pray and to decide; to act’. He insists, however, that this process can only be understood from within the movement of everyday life, and shows how the Jesuit Constitutions provide worked examples of how this can operate.
Ruth Holgate, ‘A Workshop on Vocational Discernment’, 81–84
As well as its main papers collected here, the conference at St Beuno’s that provided material for this special issue of The Way had a number of practical workshops. In the one described here, Ruth Holgate invited participants to consider how people (especially young adults) working to discern their basic vocation in life can best be helped, with the assistance of trained guides.
David Cabrera, ‘Accompanying the Young in their Development’, 85–97
David Cabrera has long experience of offering psychological and spiritual accompaniment to young people. In this article he considers what is distinctive about this, recognising dialogue and companionship as key elements. This also has implications, traced here, for anyone who would seek to provide such accompaniment.
Mark Rotsaert, ‘Spiritual Discernment: The Horizon That Is God’, 99–110
Far from being a rarefied, esoteric experience, Mark Rotsaert suggests, discernment is a process that is as old, and now as universal, as humanity itself, a fundamental capacity that we all draw upon. It always takes place within the context of ‘the horizon that is God’, with consequences that are investigated in this essay.
Cécile Renouard, ‘Discerning with Others (Christian or Not) for an Integral Ecology in Action’, 111–127
Most people today live in highly complex societies facing large-scale, seeming intractable, challenges. For discernment to be of use here it needs to move beyond being regarded as simply individual, and has to develop a collective dimension. In doing this, the virtue of detachment comes to the fore, as Cécile Renouard demonstrates here.