Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Gordon Smith is President of the Overseas Council in Canada. He was formerly academic dean and associate professor of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancouver. His newest book is The Voice of Jesus: Discernment, Prayer and the Witness of the Spirit, published by InterVarsity Press.

You say there are two questions that every Christian should be able to answer: what is Jesus saying at this point in your life? And how do you know it is Jesus? What does it mean to be able to "discern" the voice of Jesus?

The context in which we are attentive to the voice of Jesus is what's happening to us personally. And when I say that I mean emotionally. That is, the emotional contours of our lives become the soil in which we discern, sift, or determine what is truly from God and what is not. Discernment is all about attending to what's happening to us emotionally in a way that's informed by the mind, by the breadth and witness of the Scriptures, and by the counsel of other Christians. But it's really testing our own hearts to see if this comes from God.

The more I read the Scriptures the more I realized how central the emotional life of Jesus was to him for the joy that was set before him, but especially when I read the Psalms. And then when I came to Paul's writings, "the deep longing for a peace that transcends all understanding." "Your joy would be complete." And I kept coming up against these texts in Scripture and realizing that the emotional life is far more central to the spiritual life than I'd realized.

As you note in your book, Ignatius Loyola takes emotions very seriously. He talks about desolation and consolation. Why do you think Ignatius is so important when we want to understand discernment and the ability to hear the voice of Jesus in our daily life?

It's important to stress the radical Christocentricity of Ignatius, that he's really focused on the Lord Jesus Christ at the heart and soul of the Christian experience. And while he's very Trinitarian, there's a strong focus on Christ. And the whole of the spiritual life is to be with Christ and to have Christ with me. From the experience of being with Christ, we live in freedom. He wants to ask what the indicators are that we are living with this kind of freedom of being linked with Christ and not having "the inordinate attachments to the longing for wealth or the longing for power or the longing for fame and recognition."

The evidence of that freedom is that we have what he calls "consolation." It's a rich word that brings together the language of joy and peace. Peace is the indication both that I'm united with Christ and that I'm walking with the Spirit. And that if I'm not experiencing that peace, then I can be fairly confident that however legitimate my desolation may be, my anger, my discouragement, whatever it might be, however legitimate it is, I can't trust it as the soil in which I can hear the voice of Jesus. Having said that, just because I have consolation doesn't mean I've got it right necessarily because, , "the evil one masquerades as an angel of light." And consequently, I have to test whether the peace I'm experiencing is genuinely from God.

You test it, Ignatius says, "by examining the beginning, the middle, and the end." Ignatius is part of a tradition where the examination of motive is very central to Christian experience. I think all Christians need to learn to cultivate the capacity to examine themselves and examine their motives in particular.

next page... |  1 of 3

November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47