People Who Are Alive

I had to make some decisions recently, for myself and my son. I am, by nature, someone who likes to keep options open; a decision made may eventually feel like a relief, but the process of making it sometimes feels like cutting a limb off. I was also brought up very much in the habit of always doing the right thing, the thing that you ought to do, even if it's not  what you want to do. Mix that with a little evangelical Christianity and you can end up with a toxic combination, a recipe for worthy but deadening situations.

Finding my way out of that cloud began a couple of decades back, first with some visits to a Benedictine Abbey, which freed me from the idea that spirituality meant always doing the thing you don't want to do, and then through Ignatian prayer, which has among its principles the idea of consolation and desolation as modes of discernment. Ignatius defines consolation as  "Every increase in faith, hope and love, and all interior joy that invites and attracts to what is heavenly, and to the salvation of our soul, by filling it with peace and quiet in its Creator and Lord."

Desolation, he says,  is "What is entirely the opposite of consolation … darkness of soul, turmoil of spirit, inclination to what is low and earthly, restlessness arising from many disturbances which lead to lack of faith, lack of hope, and lack of love. The soul is wholly slothful, tepid, sad, and separated, as it were, from its Creator and Lord."

When decisions have to be made, and the way forward is not clear, by using your own reasoning and imagination, and listening to the counsel of others, you can clarify your thoughts and identify the options. But the decision itself still needs to be made. At that point, consolation and desolation are like a litmus paper to those options, to test within your own soul where you are being led.

The presupposition is that you lay aside the things that will mis-lead you - not only pride and selfishness, but also the kind of inverted pride that leads you to do things you think you ought to do, not the things you love. It's important to recognise that periods of desolation can't be avoided (indeed, he teaches on how to endure desolation when it comes to you, and says that decision making should be avoided while in that state.) Life decisions are not made in order to escape desolation, or to try to avoid it in the future. But equally, a decision to go forward deliberately into something that seems like a desolation is not what God requires of us. It's a twisting of Christian thought to believe that if I don't want to do it, that is surely where God will send me.

Once you have settled as best you can on the choices before you, without consciously loading the dice one way or another, then the litmus test of consolation or desolation is able to help you discern the way forward.

A friend called on me recently when he was making decisions of his own. I wrote to him about the Ignatian principles:

"Regardless of what is sensible, and regardless of what you think you "ought" to do, which of the courses ahead of you makes you feel alive, makes your heart open wider, makes you feel hopeful and as if the future is opening up not closing down? That is the route you should go."

As I wrote, it came to me that I should take my own advice...