The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (37 page)

And don’t worry if you get confused in the following discussion over what time you’re in, or what method you’re using. More important is finding some techniques, or combination of techniques, that work for you, that fit. Eventually, if you practice enough, you’ll find that the techniques will become second nature.

You’ll find something else about his techniques for decision making: they work.

T
HE
T
HREE
T
IMES
The First Time

Occasionally there is no question about what to do. This is decision making in the First Time. Your decision comes, says Ignatius, “without doubting or being able to doubt.”

One example: You’ve been searching for a job in a particular city with a particular company, starting at a particular time. After months of interviewing, you land the job. You are elated at your good fortune and sure it is the right move. You accept the new job immediately with barely a thought.

Ignatius compares the First Time with the story of St. Paul being blinded by a heavenly light and hearing the voice of Jesus. No doubt here. Paul was asked to go into Damascus, and he did so.

Recently an actor told me of falling in love with acting in high school. He decided on his career after his first play, never looked back, and never regretted his choice. “I loved acting so much that it hurt,” he said. That was that. The First Time.

In their book
The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed,
the three authors give a marvelous example of the First Time, from a woman known by one of the writers:

In all these cases a decision was made, and though someone might not compare his or her experience with St. Paul’s, it could not be doubted. In a sense, the answer comes as soon as the question is asked.

The eventual decision to enter a religious order was something like that for me. In an earlier chapter I mentioned returning home one night after work and stumbling upon a documentary on Thomas Merton, which led me to enter a religious order. Looking back, it was a decision made in the First Time.

At the time I was working for General Electric in Stamford, Connecticut, in human resources. When I arrived at my apartment one night, which I shared with two friends, it was nearing 9:00 p.m. After changing out of my business clothes, I rummaged around the refrigerator for some leftovers, popped a plate of old spaghetti in the microwave, sat down in front of the television, and started flipping through the channels.

Presently, I stumbled upon a documentary about a Trappist monk I had never heard of. All sorts of people—musicians, writers, scholars—appeared on screen to testify to the influence that he had in their lives. The program detailed Thomas Merton’s long process of conversion, from lonely boy to rebellious college student to aimless grad student to brand-new Catholic to, finally, Trappist monk. But the most arresting part of the show was not the story, but the photographs of Merton. His face radiated a kind of serenity that was unknown to me and that called to me.

The next day, I tracked down and began reading Merton’s autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain
. When I finished the book late one night, it dawned on me that I wanted to do what Merton had done in the 1940s: leave behind a life of confusion and join a religious order. (Little did I know that life in a religious order is not free of confusion.) Over time I learned more about the Jesuits, the religious order that seemed to suit me best.

Still, though the desire to join a religious order was born on that evening, I resisted it. It would take two years before I was able to see it with absolute clarity. After I buried myself once again in work, the thought of entering religious life lay dormant in my soul, like a seed ready to sprout—as soon as it received some water.

Eventually someone—a psychologist I was seeing because I was so stressed at work—watered that seed. He asked me a question that helped me to name my desire. One day I was complaining to him about my job. It wasn’t satisfying, wasn’t enjoyable, and wasn’t something I could see doing for more than a few more years.

Finally he said, “What would you do, if you could do anything you wanted to do?”

The answer came as if it had been waiting there all my life. “That’s easy,” I said. “I would become a Jesuit priest!”

And he said, “Well, why don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “why
don’t
I?”

The path to the Jesuits suddenly became clear. While I knew little about the Jesuits, and even less about the application process, I knew for sure that I wanted to join up immediately. It was a real
Aha!
moment. As with St. Paul, it was as if “something like scales” fell from my eyes. As Ignatius says, I neither doubted nor was able to doubt. Everything fell into place and a few months later I entered the Jesuit novitiate. It was the best decision I’ve ever made and also one of the few occasions when I experienced making a decision in the First Time.

The Second Time

The Second Time is less clear. It is not love at first sight. It’s not like being bowled over by clarity à la St. Paul. It’s less of an
Aha!
moment. It requires some deliberation.

In the Second Time you may not be completely sure, at least initially. Contrary forces and desires seem to pull you one way or the other. To return to our career example, you have found a job with a good salary, but it’s not starting at the right time. Or it’s the right salary but the wrong job. While the decision may not be clear initially, in time, after you think about it, talk about it, and pray about it, the decision gradually becomes clearer. You find yourself moved toward taking the job.

At this point, says Ignatius, it’s good to meditate on which option gives you the greater consolation. Ignatius asks you to look at the “motions” within you as a sign of God’s helping you with your choice. For people trying to discern God’s hopes and dreams for their lives, the presence of God will be reflected primarily through consolation.

Consolation, again, is the sense of God’s presence and those interior feelings that lead to peace, tranquility, and joy. Here, in a time of decision, consolation is a sense of peace and of rightness of the choice. Consolation leads you to feel encouraged, confident, and calm in your decision.

For many years I wondered about the connection between making a good decision and feeling consolation. It seemed almost superstitious. Does God zap you with consolation, like a magic trick, to help you make the right choice?

No. As David Lonsdale writes, we feel peace about a particular decision when it is “coherent with” God’s desires for our happiness. Ignatius understood that God works through our deepest desires. When we are following that path to God, things seem right. Things feel in synch because they
are
in synch.

Lonsdale’s explanation of consolation is superb. The main feature of feelings of consolation is that “their direction is toward growth, creativity and a genuine fullness of life and love in that they draw us to a fuller, effective, generous love of God and other people, and to a right love of ourselves.”

The flip side of consolation is desolation. By this Ignatius means anything that moves you toward hopelessness. You are agitated or restless or, as Ignatius says, “listless, tepid, and unhappy.” These feelings mean you are moving away from a good decision.

Ignatian discernment means trusting that God will speak to you through these spiritual experiences about the choices you are considering. As Fleming writes, our hearts will gradually tell us which choices are moving us closer to God. All this is based on the belief that God does move our hearts and that we can grow in our sensitivity to God’s voice within us.

While recovering from his wounds at Pamplona, Ignatius felt consolation when he thought about following the saints. When he thought about impressing “a certain lady,” he felt desolation. Gradually he realized that these were ways that God was calling him to the best course of action. These are the kinds of feelings that you weigh in your prayer during the Second Time.

Besides praying about decisions and examining whether you feel a sense of consolation, there is another practice that can be used during the Second (and Third) Times. It is imagining living with each choice for a set period of time and seeing which choice gives you a greater sense of peace.

For a few days, act as if you were going to choose one alternative. Though you’ve not made the choice,
imagine
that you have, and move through your day as if you had made the decision already. Try the decision on, like a new sweater. How does it make you feel? Do you feel at peace or agitated? Then, for the next few days take the opposite tack. How does that make you feel?

This is a powerful tool. Normally our minds move restlessly from one alternative to the other, jumping like a nervous grasshopper from one blade of grass to the next, never giving ourselves sufficient time to consider either alternative. But after imaginatively living with one course of action, and then the other, certain things will come to mind that you may not have noticed before. Advantages and disadvantages become more evident with time. In a sense, you’ll see the consequences of the decision before you make it. At the end of the process, ask yourself which option gave you the most peace? Then trust your feelings and make the decision.

But discernment, as Fleming notes, is not simply a matter of feeling peaceful. You must carefully assess what is going on inside of you. “Complacency and smugness about a decision can masquerade as consolation. At times, desolation can be a timely sense of restlessness pointing us in a new direction.” Honesty about what you are really feeling, and why, is paramount.

When it comes to making decisions, the First and Second Times present relatively few difficulties. The First Time is crystal clear. The Second Time may be less clear at first but, after prayer and consideration, becomes clear enough through these feelings of consolation and desolation and leads to what Ignatius calls “sufficient clarity and knowledge.”

The Third Time

For many people, the most common decision-making situation is the Third Time. You find yourself with two or more good alternatives, but neither one is the obvious choice. There is no
Aha!
moment. There is little clarity in prayer.

“The soul,” says Ignatius, “is not being moved one way and the other by various spirits.” And this murky time is where the clearly defined practices of St. Ignatius may be the most helpful. His techniques may also give you something unexpected: calm. Recently a young man who comes to me for spiritual direction said that simply knowing these techniques made him feel less overwhelmed by the prospect of having to make a big decision.

For the Third Time, Ignatius provides two methods. Let’s use a familiar example: whether to buy a new house or stay in the small apartment where you live. As anyone who has made that decision knows, that kind of move is notoriously complex—raising issues that are both economic and emotional.

The First Method
is based on reason. Once again, start with indifference. You should be inclined neither to move one way or the other, despite the agonizing you may have done over this decision already.

This is a key insight. We cannot freely consider a decision if we have already made it, or have made it by default. “I am not more inclined or emotionally disposed toward taking the matter proposed rather than relinquishing it,” writes Ignatius, “nor more toward relinquishing it rather than taking it. Instead, I should find myself in the middle, like the pointer of a balance.”

In this First Method, Ignatius gives us six steps:

First,
put before yourself in prayer the choice: in this case, buying a house or staying in your apartment.

Second,
identify your ultimate objective, which for Ignatius is the desire to please God, as well as the need to be indifferent.

Third,
ask God for help to move your heart toward the better decision.

Fourth,
make a list, either in your head or on paper, of the possible positive and negative outcomes of the first option. Then make a list of the possible positive and negative outcomes of the second option.

The house hunter would list the benefits of buying a new house: more space, more freedom to do what you want with the place, the money now going for rent will go to ownership, and so on. Then list the negative aspects about buying a new house: you assume a mortgage and will have to tend the property, mow the lawn, worry about repairs, and so on.

Then think about the alternative. What are the positives? Remaining in your apartment would mean you wouldn’t have to spend time moving, you would feel comfortable in your old place, and you could keep to your familiar daily schedule. What about the negatives? Rent increases, cramped surroundings, noisy neighbors.

The First Method reminds us that no decision leads to the perfect outcome. Each outcome is a mixed bag. Listing the positives and negatives frees you from the idea that a good decision means choosing perfection.