Spiritual Discernment 101

So Saint Ignatius, uh, breaks it down into, uh, a few types of movements of the soul.

We can think of, like, um, having an impulse to do something.

So that impulse presumably is either coming from God, the Holy Spirit, your guardian angel, or it's coming from the bad side of things.

Um, you know, the devil trying to tempt us to, to sin and be separated from God in some way, say, in the case of mortal sin.

So he frames it as kind of an evaluation of a movement or emotion within the soul.

And he breaks it down into, you know, the clearest, simplest kind of dichotomy, and that is that inclination is either gonna move you towards God or away from God, right? Um, the idea that, yeah, the, the basic idea of that kind of duality, that you're either moving towards God or you're moving away from God and towards the devil.

Um, there's, there's only these two directions, right? Good and evil.

So he calls the movement towards God, that inclination in the soul that's gonna lead to a movement towards God, he calls that a spiritual consolation.

You know, and that can take the form of, like, feeling courage about following through on something morally right or feeling comfort, um, in the face of, you know, having to do something, uh, morally right that is godly, um, but might lead to some sacrifice on your part.

But feeling comfort within that would be a movement of the soul that came from the Holy Spirit, from your guardian angel, from God, um, from Jesus, you know, a, a heavenly figure.

It all-- Anything coming from heaven is from God, but mediated in a sense, say, through a saint that you have a devotion to.

Uh, feelings of peace, you know, even when things aren't peaceful around you, could be a movement of the Holy Spirit that is a spiritual consolation.

And when spiritual consolations are going on, he points out that the enemy is going to sow seeds, uh, of doubt within that, right? So there's gonna be like, for instance, false fears.

You know, um, if we're feeling courage and comfort about taking a good step in our lives that's morally good and godly and moves us towards God, there's often that fear of, you know, "Oh, but what am I giving up?" Or, "What about my selfish desires?" And, "Won't I be sad not having indulged my appetites?" Um, you know, we can think of, of the classic, um, struggle of the seminarian.

You know, do I follow through and get ordained a priest and commit to living my life, um, you know, without a wife and children? Um, or do I, you know, say no and drop out and marry a woman and, and have a family? And I could feel that courage and that, uh, call to the priesthood, you know, uh, coming from God.

I could feel comfort within that, peace within that sacrifice, but at the same time wrestle with moments of doubt and fear about kind of the essential and necessary other side of when we make a choice, we're closing another door.

It's just part of making a choice.

Sometimes one choice necessitates closing the door to the opposite choice.

Okay, so spiritual consolation.

And then he calls a movement away from God, so we have an inclination in our heart to sin, right? In the soul to sin.

And maybe we're, we're going over memories of sin and, and the passions are stirred up and, you know, um, we, we look at something or think about something and remember it in our imagination, and we're inclined to go seek out that sin again.

Well, that sin is pointing away from God.

It's pointing to an action that's going to move us away from God.

And then what's gonna be happening during that is our conscience is going to bother us, right? So we feel that little prick of guilt in our conscience, that, that nagging sense that, "But, you know, deep down, I know this isn't good." And that is while we're having that spiritual desolation, that inclination in the soul away from God, we're also experiencing a consolation in a sense, that movement towards God which says, "Hey, w- this is evil." Realize that, feel that, feel that guilt, feel that nagging sense in your conscience that you know this is wrong.

And so my point in, in bringing that up is when we're discerning spirits, sometimes, in fact usually, we're struggling with both, right? It's not as simple as, well, I have an inclination to do a kind thing or I have an inclination to sin.