THOUGHTS OF A NUN

Discernment

October 23, 2005  

“What have you to do with us?” so spoke the demon to Christ. How often this same thought with a different twist comes up in our own lives. WHAT does God desire of me? What does God desire of ME? What does GOD desire of me? The emphasis on each noun is different at varying stages in our life.

Last spring while looking out one of our windows on the second floor, I noticed that a house sparrow had made a nest on an outdoor light we rarely use next to the window. There were three or four little eggs in it, one a little different than the others. In time one of the eggs hatched and then another. This time I was amazed at the size difference of the chicks. The next time I noticed a third egg had hatched, a tiny one again. Having watched one of the parents fly off I realized one baby’s body was almost the size of the adult. I remembered hearing that a lot of songbirds were dying out because cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, frequently songbirds. The other birds feed the nestling that generally is bigger and gets all the food so that their own babies die. Here I seemed to have that happening right before my eyes. I was tempted to open the window and pull the intruder out so that the smaller ones had a chance. Perhaps it was the saying, “Don’t interfere with nature” that stopped me. Eventually only the big guy was left.

The importance of this particular decision was rather minute yet in pondering the will of God it is similar to the complexity of so many other decisions we have to make (over seemingly much larger matters.)

So, how do we go about discerning what God desires of us? Recently I read about one person’s attempts to discern God’s will. He observed that in our struggle to understand the will of God, we make decisions about what we can and what we cannot expect from God,  our communities and ourselves.

Discerners, (people of Israel,) prophets, sages, disciples are not terms used to describe mere receivers of God’s grace. These terms describe those who understand themselves to be representatives of a way of being that requires seeing beyond their own interest. Not being so much ‘me-persons’ as God-persons, if I may use that expression.  In order to discern what pleases God, God-persons engage both Tradition and life experience. Tradition, understood as the accumulated experience of a community committed to a life lived reflectively, is to live life as if God matters. Life experience, at its best and most valuable, is a life lived prayerfully and reflectively. The reflection presumes “listening”.

 A pitfall that we humans seem to make is to only hear half of any idea or message coming our way. There are many reasons we hear only half. Perhaps the pace of our lives is so fast that we have no time to do any reflecting or hearing. Or we hear the easier half, the one we want to hear and turn a deaf ear to the more difficult harder truths. Maybe we have already heard more than what we are prepared to do anything about so we do not listen any more.

Perhaps the cowbird is like the demon that Christ cast out. Or if I look into the nest of my own heart, do I have a cowbird taking away the messages I’m being sent? Let us all be careful to listen to the message, and take time to frequently reflect, “What does God desire of me?”
Christ is in our midst!