Recently at a funeral I attended the first reading was the well known passage from Ecclesiastes about there being a time for everything. As I attended to the reading, suddenly I realized that this passage was about discernment. If the poet had simply been pointing out that sometimes we laugh, cry, mourn, dance, live and die, then the reading would be trite to the nth degree. The skill is in knowing the right time. Ecclesiastes is about wisdom and wisdom is about making right choices…and so is discernment.
As I look at the first 15 years of the twenty-first century, I see a disturbing tendency in what used to be the Christian world to refuse to discern. This spiritual blindness finds its roots in fear. The Western world no longer exercises suzerainty over the rest of the world. Jobs have fled away and refugees have flooded in. The rising standard of living which the post WWII generation saw as its birthright has been replaced by a concentration of wealth unseen since the time of the “robber barons” in the nineteenth century. Civil political discourse and a spirit of compromise have been replaced by yelling at anyone who seems to disagree with you.
Why do I typify this as a refusal to discern? Simply put, discernment is the antithesis of rigidly applying rules and preconceptions to situations. Discernment requires humility, a recognition of the uncertainly of one’s perception and a willingness really to look at what is, not through the lens of ideology, but rather in the Spirit of Love. In Annotation 22 of the Spiritual Exercises St. Ignatius tells us, “It is necessary to suppose that every good Christian is more ready to put a good interpretation on another’s statement than to condemn it as false.” Ignatius’s prescription is the antithesis of today’s public discourse!
It is so easy to surrender one’s autonomy, to rely on bromides and preconceptions, to give in to what psychologists call “confirmation bias,” which means to attend only to what supports one’s preconception….I might call it “The Fox News Effect.” And so we get the simplistic solutions of a Donald Trump. But there would be no Trump phenomenon without a ready supply of frightened people willing to jettison science, reason and even rationality in order to prop up a world view which is rapidly disintegrating before their eyes.
And lest I be accused of partisanship, there is a similar shibboleth rearing its ugly head on the political left. Increasingly, research is indicating that genetics play a much more significant role in societal outcomes than has been believed for 60 years. By some accounts genetic inheritance accounts for at least half of what is construed to be “intelligence.”
The link between intelligence and success in school is as well established as is the link between success in school and having a satisfactory income in a stable adult life. These facts present a serious challenge to our current theories and practices in education. I wonder how willing some of my socialist friends would be to instituting the sort of streaming of students which happens in Great Britain and Germany.
The path of discernment is not easy. In 2 Phil St. Paul urges us to “work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” We must never confuse solid Gospel principles with the rules and regulations of passing authorities. And we must always give the primacy to charity in humble imitation of Our Blessed Lord. But we also must remember that the only unchangeable in our world is our faith in God’s absolute love and fidelity; for all the rest, we need a humble and a discerning heart.