The sway of the heart
The discernment wisdom of a vain, preening, thin-skinned Spanish warrior (turned Christian mystic) - discernment, part 5
My hunch is that 2025’s word of the year will be overwhelm. There’s good reason to feel it right now. The confusing and chaotic political climate across the globe can set off a creeping despair, mixed with a dose of genuine fear, garnished with generalized anxiety - all of this shaken not stirred. A bartender might call this emotional cocktail “the paralyzer.”
Overwhelm happens when life comes at us like a tsunami, washing away the order we’ve established, overloading our nervous systems and short-circuiting our capacity to function well. This sinking experience distorts our emotional lens and twists our perceptions. The end result is that good judgment is swept away and wise decisions get lost in the psychic debris.
How to discern well in times like these? As is often case, we need someone outside our time and culture to offer needed perspective. I nominate a vain, preening, violent, thin-skinned Spanish warrior turned Christian mystic to deliver the help we need. I’m talking about Ignatius of Loyola who developed the term desolation, a powerful notion to make sense of what we call overwhelm.
During a time of convalescence (a cannonball had shattered his leg), Ignatius (Iñigo) was given a few books to occupy his time. The soldier in him had no interest in the religious books and so he whiled away the hours daydreaming of a life of chivalry and romance. But he found this only left him empty and dissatisfied. When you’re bored out of your head, even a bad novel holds some appeal. So with nothing else around to fill his time, Ignatius picked up the religious books which then spurred on new daydreams, now of imitating people like Francis of Assisi and Dominic. What he noticed was these daydreams brought him joy, deep peace and a quiet happiness.
Ignatius realized he was being led by God and eventually codified these observations into the Spiritual Exercises, a handbook providing guidance for discerning God’s direction. The genius of Ignatius is to name the central importance of emotion to discernment, what he called the "discernment of spirits.” Ignatius introduced the language of consolation and desolation, words that describe the affective origins of our thinking and perception.
The realm of affect and emotion are often seen as a hindrance to wise decision-making, believing it short-circuits good discernment; what’s needed is the objectivity of a rational mind. But this privileging of the intellect is a skewed understanding of a human person. We are not a mind without a heart or a soul minus a body. We are, as Andy Crouch writes, “a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.”1 Christian discernment gathers together all of these fundamental human capacities.
The Christian discernment tradition is one that honours our feelings and emotions. The movements of the heart are the data we discern through critical reflection. Discernment is not about doing whatever feels right and true. The mind and our rational faculties are fully involved, but put to use in service of making sense of the movements of our hearts.
This is tricky territory in our time, knowing how to engage our feeling and emotions. Our age of expressive individualism crowns the self as sovereign and we unreflectively grant whatever we feel with a sacred status. Not true, Ignatius would counsel. Yes these emotions are real but what is their source? We’re not judging whether they are right or wrong; they are part of the emotional landscape of our heart. But we must discern their source because even powerfully strong emotions that may feel so true can indeed flow from a false or bad spirit.
The Christian discernment tradition notes that these movements of the heart are a spring of sorts, sources of something deeper. Throughout Scripture, the heart is named as the place closest to God, the innermost dimension of human life. Ignatius understood consolation and desolation coming from one of two interior places: do they flow from a place of faith, a trust and love for God? Or are they bubbling up from a lack of hope or love, places marked by discouragement, confusion, fear, or anger?
In discernment, you scan for a pattern of thought that emerges from our emotions. A train of thoughts has left the station of our heart. We treat those thoughts as neutral when in fact they are not, already having been directed by the heart. We feel and then act on our feelings often long before rational thinking is engaged. The discerning question to ask is, where did that train of thought originate?
Think of the paralyzer cocktail of overwhelm for a moment. Ignatius would likely ask: in this signal of overwhelm your body is sending, what is its source? Is your heart resting in God in faith, hope and love despite the confusing circumstances? Or is God and his love obscured by the chaos? Is your heart filled with the brokenness you see? Is it settled into fear and discouragement? As I listen to others, as well as pay attention to my own heart, I sense this comes from a place of fear. I’m rattled and uncertain about our world. Beyond that, I can see how it uncovers an unhealthy attachment I have in good government or a growing economy for my well-being. If I track back a little further, these feelings of overwhelm reveal an attachment of my heart to something less solid than God - an attachment to comfort, wishing for an ease in my living, for this world to not demand hard things from me.
Its important to note that we don’t deny these hard emotions, like anger, anxiety, discouragement, grief, and others. If we simply stuff them down or dismiss them, we live out of a false self. Remember, they are data, and there are probably very good reasons for the desolations we feel. But discernment is about sifting this data and knowing where are hearts are oriented.
Ignatius realized that are hearts are either in one place or the other: consolation or desolation. A heart in desolation is oriented towards the brokenness in one’s self or in the world, which then is the lens through which we perceive and see life. But desolation is not our true home. The movements of the heart like anger and fear, despair and discouragement often blind or distort our perceptions and so misdirect our agency. A false spirit then becomes our functional counselor and guide, and Ignatius says we can’t trust our hearts in this place. Rebound relationships are a classic example, someone who has lost a spouse or has divorced yet soon remarries, often chooses unwisely because their heart was actually responding to grief not love.
In contrast, a heart in consolation is oriented towards the reality of Christ and his lordship. Even though you fully acknowledge a discouraging season or the dire brokenness of the world, the lens through which you see and think is a settled faith that Christ is King and will make all things new. In consolation, my heart is oriented to the joy and peace of Jesus. We are made to live in and enjoy communion with God. This is the heart’s true home.
This part of discernment (not the only thing but a pivotal matter) is understanding our hearts. This is not the discernment of choices but what Ignatius calls the discernment of spirits, the orientation and movements of our hearts. Wise choices are made when we are able to understand the data of our hearts, when we sense our thoughts and intuitions are aligned with God’s presence and reign.
(As you can tell, Christian discernment offers no quick seven-step formula to wise living. It’s challenging, often slow, and enough times messy. There are no shortcuts. It’s more about forming a kind of person than about delivering a course of action, growing the habits that bear the fruit of wisdom and discernment.)
In our time of political unrest and overwhelm, yes feel the desolations. But Ignatius’ counsel would be to not make decisions or spring into new action in desolation (which echoes much recent mindfulness counsel, that the antidote to overwhelm is “non-doing”). One of the best Christian practices is silence, quieting the din of overwhelm and attending to the still small voice of God.
Consider Elijah in 1 Kings 19: he is overwhelmed at the injustice of political leaders of his day. Elijah is feeling a mess of anxiety and depression. His heart is in a dark place and he wants God to end his life. He retreats to a cave where he experiences continued forms of overwhelm - wind, earth quake and fire. God was in none of these, but rather in the quiet voice of silence. The path that leads from desolation to consolation, from despair to a renewed agency and faithful action, often involves a good meal, a nap, and a time of silence.
You might be thinking, “All very nice but don’t we need action now! All this rumination feels very self-absorbed. We don’t have the luxury in this urgent moment.” Remember, discernment is always connected to agency and action. Thomas Green writes that “discernment is the essential link between prayer and the active Christian life.”2
The goal of discernment is always God-empowered agency, and specifically wise and courageous action. Both wisdom and courage are the fruit of discernment — the wisdom that enables us to see reality but also the courage born of conviction that enables us to make hard choices. As Andy Crouch notes, “Even though it’s incredibly hard to simply know what we should do, it’s even harder to actually act on what we know we should do. Because almost all the time, the most faithful, the most loving, and the wisest thing to do is scary, hard, and painful.”3
A healthy discernment of spirits generates a freedom, the power to act free from fear or compulsion. Actions not swayed by the dominant mood of the day nor by fear of reprisals, but grounded in the well-discerned prompting of God’s Spirit.
Don’t we need more of that in the church — wise and courageous people who live out and embody the wise and good reign of God in this world.
Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For.
Thomas Green, Weeds among the Wheat.
Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family, p. 56.