Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

choose the action that meets our goal most effectively. Discernment, on the other hand, is about listening and responding to that place within us where our deepest desires align with God’s desire.

The unity of life among us is even deeper and stronger than the diversity between

There is no virtue that is not called sin somewhere, and no particular sin that is not called virtue somewhere else.

Discernment is faithful living and listening to God’s love and direction so that we can fulfill our individual calling and shared mission.

Most important is how we read—not to understand or control God, but to be understood and formed by God. It

Our desire to be successful, well liked, and influential becomes increasingly less important as we come closer to God’s heart.

Discernment is not about judging other people’s motives. It’s about distinguishing good guidance from harmful messages, and the Holy Spirit from evil spirits. This essential sorting, known as discernment of spirits, is intended for our protection and not for our judgment.

There always remains a choice to be made between the creative power of love and life and the destructive power of hatred and death. I, too, must make that choice myself, again and again. Nobody else, not even God, will make that choice for me.

wonder if the greatest temptation is self-rejection. Could it be that beneath all the lures to greed, lust, and success rests a great fear of never being enough or not being lovable?

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us God’s beloved. Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.2

Humility has nothing to do with self-rejection. You can only be humble if you have a deep self-respect.

It has always fascinated me that some people—so-called saints or holy people—never really leave us when they die. Their deaths somehow free them from the constraints of earthly existence and bring them closer to more people than they could ever have known on earth. God continues to speak to us through their lives, deaths, and memory so as to draw us close.

as Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Marthe Robin,

The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson, and Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley.

Huxley, to his surprise, also transformed Merton’s understanding of asceticism (self-denial). “If we want to live differently from wild beasts, we must free the spirit by means of prayer and asceticism,” Huxley concluded.

According to the desert fathers of the fourth century, we say no to certain thoughts and actions in order to say yes to the God who is beyond all thought and action.

While it is true that God is a hidden presence, we have only to let nature speak to us about the God who is everywhere. —Henri Nouwen in “The Genesee Diary”

If I am to follow Jesus, then I, too, must remain close to the soil.

Nature is not the background to our lives; it is a living gift that teaches us about the ways and will of the Creator.

“The rain is a sign of God’s blessing,” said Abbot John Eudes

Nature desires for us to discern the great story of God’s love to which it points. The plants and animals with whom we live teach us about birth, growth, maturation, and death, about the need for gentle care, and especially about the importance of patience and hope. And even more profoundly, the properties of water, oil, bread, and wine all point beyond themselves to the great story of our re-creation. Food and drink, mountains and rivers, oceans and skies—all become transparent when nature discloses itself to those with eyes to see and ears to hear what the Great Spirit of God is saying to us.

The closer we come to nature, the more we touch the spirit of life.

Getting answers to my questions is not the goal of the spiritual life. Living in the presence of God is the greater call.

“Why can we not think of our biological parents as created beings who refract for us some of the divine fatherhood and motherhood, instead of God as a creation of our minds which compensates for our parents’ imperfection?”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Duns Scotus (1266–1308), two of the great theologian-philosophers of the late Middle Ages.

God speaks regularly to us through people who talk to us about the things of God.

Time becomes a burden unless we convert it into God’s time.

Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s good work in us.

Patience is the attitude that says we cannot force life but have to let it grow in its own time. Patience lets us see the people we meet, the events of the day, and the unfolding history of our times as all part of that slow process of development and final liberation.

The resurrection of Jesus is God’s sign breaking through every form of human fatalism and despair.

The more we reflect on this, the clearer it becomes that we cannot really understand God’s providential work in us.

I am scared to take a proprietary interest in anything, for fear that my love of what I own may be killing somebody somewhere.3

Thomas Merton

My Argument with the Gestapo:

Yes, I am afraid, because I forget that I am nothing.

Thomas Merton

If you claim nothing as your own, including your own life, you can expose the illusion of control and the false basis of war and violence by refusing any compromise with evil.

So I began to pray: “Lord Jesus, let me know where you want me to go, and I will follow you. But please be clear about it.”

All is grace. Light and water, shelter and food, work and free time, children, parents, and grandparents, birth and death—it is all given to us.

You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? —Thomas Merton

The Stature of Waiting by W. H. Vanstone. The author writes about Jesus’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and his way to the cross, and it helped my friend and me to understand better what it means to move from action to passion.