Are you experienced?

The heart-stirrings of a good man are good; those of a wicked person are wicked; but everyone must learn how to combat intrusive thoughts, and turn the bad into good. This is the mark of the soul that is well versed.

How does this come about, you will ask?

Here is the way of it: just as a man knows when he is cold or when he feels hot, so does the man who has experienced the Holy Spirit know when grace is in his soul, or when evil spirits approach.
The Lord gives the soul understanding to recognize His coming, and love Him and do His will. In the same way the soul recognizes thoughts which proceed from the enemy, not by their outward form but by their effect on her [the soul].

This is knowledge born of experience; and the man with no experience is easily duped by the enemy.

St Silouan - with thanks to Glory to God for all Things

To be vulnerable to one's own heart - that's the thing. Only by being prepared to listen into the hollow of one's very being (a thing some Buddhists call  vipassanā) can we begin truly to allow the Spirit to pray in us, for us...

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8.26-27)

Simples?

The whole spiritual life can be reduced in practice to one simple formula: doing the will of God.

Thomas Merton, Ascent to Truth

It’s interesting to consider, though, if this is the case, how important must be the discernment of God’s will.

St Francis, of course, listened keenly to God’s voice—and yet even he, at least when young, got it wrong. He interpreted God’s word about the armour marked with the Cross as predicting his knightly success, and later he took Christ’s words from the San Damiano crucifix, “Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin…” as referring to the building, and not to Holy Church herself.

St Ignatius of Loyola considered discernment impossible without a spiritual director.

No one who is trying to make spiritual progress should attempt to do so alone - a spiritual director is required. A director assists a Christian in examining the motives, desires, consolations, and desolations in one's life. Objectively, one can know what is right from looking at the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins in a thorough examination of conscience. But the broader picture of one's life is often not so clear. A Christian should, according to St. Ignatius, share everything with a director who can see things objectively, without being swayed by the emotions or passion. Discerning whether the good spirit (the influence of God, the Church, one's soul) or the bad spirit (the influence of Satan, the world, the flesh) is at work requires calm, rational reflection. The good spirit brings us to peaceful, joyful decisions. The bad spirit often brings us to make quick, emotional, conflicted decisions. A spiritual director can assist both by personal experience, listening with care, and giving an objective analysis.

St Paul (1 Corinthians 12.10) placed great emphasis on prayerful intuition, and seems to have lived by it himself (e.g. Acts 16.6-10), while John (1 John 4.1-3) seems to have proposed a creedal formula. The writer to the Hebrews, perhaps more helpfully, suggests measuring everything against Scripture (Hebrews 4.12-13).

For myself, regular readers of The Mercy Blog won’t be surprised that I most often simply give up attempting to “work it out”, and resort to the Jesus Prayer, holding my own ignorance of God’s will up, as it were, to his Son’s own merciful discernment:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

St Matthew's Day

The reign of God has much more to do with right relationship than with being privately right. It has much more to do with being connected than with being personally correct. Can you feel the total difference between these two?

The reign of God is not about a world without pain or mystery but simply a world where we would be in good contact with all things, where we would be connected and in communion with what Mary Oliver calls "the daily presentations." Then all the world is your temple and church.

This is living in the big, full, and final picture - and we can begin to do it now!

"Why do you reject the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith, while offering your pious sacrifices in the temple? You strain out gnats while you swallow camels!" (Matthew 23:23b, 24b).

Richard Rohr, adapted from Jesus' Plan for a New World, p. 11

I love it that the St. Matthew we know, and whose Gospel we read so often in church, is a man whom most of us would have given a wide berth were we around in Capernaum when he was at his tax collector's booth. Jesus' grace, and the utter precision of his discernment, are some of the things about him I find most reassuring. If he calls us, he really calls us. We don't have to worry if he's got it right, or if we can manage to hold it together. His grace is sufficient for us, for his power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). If that is so, then if the Son sets us free, we are, like Matthew, free indeed! (John 8:36)