Spiritual Critiques

Spiritual Discernment

Introduction

One of the most important questions when one is trying to be spiritual is telling what God or the Flow or the Universe wants you to do. Sometimes messages can be clear and simple, other times they can be harder to deal with. I have spent over 50 years dealing with these questions in my personal life, and I have been editing a book of classic writings on spiritual discernment from the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and New Age traditions. So, I have both personal knowledge of this matter as well as intellectual knowledge of what some of the greatest spiritual people have thought about it. This knowledge may help people understand and use the process of spiritual discernment in their own lives.

In this essay, there are two main sections:

1. Direct divine messages, which could come in the form of a voice (such as, “go to Texas now”), a deep gut feeling (such as, “do not have anything to do with this person”), a dream, a bodily impression, or another kind of sign. If you are being correctly led, many traditions say that you will then be taken care of by God as you follow the message. These traditions also say that if you do not follow the message, and instead follow what you want to do with your life, you are no longer on your spiritual path and can end up alone, sad, poor, or in some other bad circumstances.
2. Situations where you have not received divine messages, but you are trying to follow your spiritual path. I find this situation a lot more interesting and a lot more challenging to deal with. It is also a lot easier for people to get lost in such a situation as it is easier in these cases for lower personality desires to pull people off their spiritual path.

When you have not been given divine messages, the best guidance comes from what I call “connections.” Connections are people, activities, and situations that you are especially connected to because of your karmic situation and spiritual path. If you connect well with these people and activities, you will be given the things you need and your life will be blessed. These connections will help take you to the next level in your life, and when you make these connections, it is like being blessed with hits of the Spirit. Whereas when you have karmic troubles from the past or personality problems that prevent you from seeing your connections or connecting well with them, your life can be very empty in that area; you can be miserable, lonely, hungry, or otherwise struggling. You might be sensitive to the fact you are missing your connection, or you might just feel life does not have much to offer. The people who make movies know a lot about connections: the winners make them and get what they need to keep doing well in life. The losers have some personality problem (usually some kind of self-centeredness or caring too much for things that are not appropriate for them personally) and do not succeed with their connections.

Dealing with Divine Messages

This section assumes that you have some kind of message or guidance and that you want to make sure it is a divine one and not one from your ego desires, an evil being or force, or some random thought.

This section deals with four questions:

1. What qualities are commonly associated with the divine message itself?
2. What feelings will I have if I receive a divine message?
3. Will things work out for me in the world as I follow a divine message?
4. Can a real divine message tell me to do something that is immoral?

Qualities of Voice or Message

In my experience and the experience of many other spiritual people, there is often a certain quality associated with a divine message that makes you immediately sure it is a divine one. St. Teresa of Avila in her autobiography, The Interior Castle, says that a divine message has “the sense of power and authority” in it that makes the person sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is a divine message. The Protestant writer E. Stanley Jones says that a divine voice, “just speaks and it is self-authenticating. It has the feel of the voice of God within it.”[i]

John Weslely, the founder of Methodism, in his first sermon “The witness of the Spirit,” says:

How do you distinguish light from darkness? Is there not an inherent, obvious, essential difference between the one and the other? And do you not immediately and directly perceive that difference provided your senses are rightly disposed? In like manner, there is an inherent, essential difference between spiritual light and spiritual darkness; and this difference also is immediately and directly perceived, if our spiritual senses are rightly disposed.

Of course Wesley’s method assumes that your spiritual senses are rightly disposed, which is why it is so important that you be focused on spirituality and not get dragged down to lower levels of consciousness.

Not all the messages I have gotten have come with this self-authenticating quality, but the most important, life-changing ones have.

Does the Feeling of Peace come with all divine messages?

Many spiritual writers believe that experiences of deep peace, lasting joy, or some other positive emotional feeling are signs that we are following the will of God. Many writers particularly emphasize the experience of peace as the most consistent and recognizable sign of the presence of the divine.

In the Christian tradition, many writers say that feelings of peace and joy are a sign that a messge or vision is from God. The founder of Christian monasticism, St. Antony of the Desert, said a divine message or vision “comes so quietly and gently that immediately joy, gladness and courage arise in the soul.”

Contemporary Christian writer, Joy Dawson, says:

Regardless of what other ways God speaks to us, every method should be accompanied by a strong assurance in our spirits and a deep, settled peace in our hearts and minds that God has spoken. … If you do not experience this state of mind, do not act on impressions you receive. Wait, and seek God’s face again. ….No matter how many Bible verses fit your circumstances, or how many signs and wonders you may be given, if there is an absence of that deep peace from the Holy Spirit that assures you God has spoken, don’t act. Wait on the Lord until His peace rules in your heart in relation to the decision.

In the modern, non-traditional spirituality (sometimes called “New Age”), many writers also think that peace is a sign of doing the right thing. So, the New Age writer Doreeen Virtue says that “True guidance feels like a warm hug. ….true guidance will always leave you feeling loved and supported.” Lynn Robinson, who writes books on intuition, says that “Often you have no practical way to ascertain whether a decision is the right one for you or not. What then? In the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker asks Yoda, his mentor, ‘How am I to know the good from the bad?’ Yoda answers, ‘You will know through peace and calm.’”

Many Muslims also think that people are guided through feelings of peace. One practice many Muslims use to discern God’s will in unsure matters is istikhara. In this practice, a person completes a set of prayers beseeching Allah to rightly guide her in the decision she must make. Then, it is believed that one can trust and follow the feelings that arise in the heart because now Allah is inspiring and leading one through these feelings.

Everything would be so cut and dry if peaceful feelings always accompanied God’s guidance, but many people who have had extensive experience with spirituality say it is not that simple. David Middlemiss, a Christian pastor and writer, looks at the Bible and says tat it is clear that positive feelings do not always accompany a message from God. He looks particularly at the prophet Jeremiah who suffered continually as he did God’s work. “According to the Bible,” he said, “the reality of Jeremiah’s encounter with God is not demonstrated by mental certainty, calmness or good feelings towards God, nor in success in prayer or service; but in perseverance.”

Middlemiss generalizes from Jeremiah and other biblical people and says that positive feelings are not always connected to divine messages:

Feelings are an ambiguous indication of a religious experience, because one could easily be deluded, for example, about one’s safety (in many contexts), and happily sail into danger or overtake a car on a twisted road on the strength of that conviction. Feelings of anxiety or depression can be quite disconnected from ‘spirituality’, and have organic causes. Hypnotic experience can create a sense of peacefulness. Valium or anti-depressants could create a feeling of calmness….One can conclude that the simplistic criterion which equates the work of the Spirit with psychological well-being is inadequate as a means of assessment. It fails because feelings of well-being or otherwise are not necessarily caused by a religious experience. On top of this, according to the Bible there are times when it is not God’s plan for a person to feel good.

Jennifer Elam, a Quaker expert on discernment, says something similar to Middlemiss:

In Quaker circles, I have often heard people say that you can know an experience is of God if it brings peace. But OVERLY SPECIFIC CRITERIA CAN MISDIRECT THE DISCERNMENT PROCESS. Such criteria, for example, can cause people to be uncomfortable in sharing their “unpeaceful” experiences. Growth — as well as peace — are signs that we have been touched by God. And growth does not come peacefully to all of us. As we grow with God, some of us may find ourselves kicking and screaming. Eventually, the growth may indeed bring peace, but it’s not always peaceful at first.. . .So what we need to remember is that GOD IS BIG. Thus the manifestations of God are many.

I can see no reason why peace and love must always accompany a divine message. And I certainly have experienced many divine messages that did not feel like a warm supportive hug. After all, God can ask you to do very hard things that conflict with your personal desires.

Discernment gets much more complicated if you think that an evil force or being exists and is actively trying to cause problems in the world, including affecting people individually. Thomas Merton, a celebrated Trappist monk and writer, said that evil puts peaceful warm feelings into us to mislead us: “The argument [the devil gives] goes something like this: “God wills you to do what is right. But you have an interior attraction which tells you, by a nice warm glow of satisfaction, what is right. Therefore, if others try to interfere and make you do something that does not produce this comfortable sense of interior satisfaction, quote Scripture, tell them that you ought to obey God rather than men, and then go ahead and do your own will, do the thing that gives you that nice, warm glow.”

Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, makes an even more sophisticated point about our feelings. In his Spiritual Exercises, Loyola said that positive and negative feelings cannot be simplistically correlated to the activity of good or evil spirits. He said that the rules for discernment differ according to the current situation of the person. One who is reveling in sin may experience positive feelings given by an evil spirit to encourage him or her to continue in the same course of action. By contrast, people who are seeking to cleanse themselves from sin and rise to the good may experience obstacles and disquiet caused by the evil one who seeks to divert them from a virtuous course. By the same token, if the soul is disposed to sin, the agency of the good spirit may produce feelings of agitation and disturbance in the soul. But if the soul is progressing towards goodness, then the good angel’s action upon it feels delicate and gentle.

Gordon T. Smith is a Protestant writer who draws on Loyola’s insights. In his book The Voice of Jesus: Discernment, Prayer and the Witness of the Spirit, he says that it is possible that we can feel very peaceful when we are not following our right path. He writes:

There are two other kinds of false peace that we need to be alert to as well. First, there is the consolation or peace that leads us to accept the mediocre and live within less than our full potential. We sometimes want to avoid the discomfort that comes with change, the tension that arises when we are forced to stretch beyond our comfort zone. So we need to beware of the false contentment that we use to justify being less than we can be. The second kind of false peace is the temptation to activity and busyness, particularly with administrative detail, for one or more self-centered reasons. For some, preoccupation with busyness and administration are a way of evading the real issues of life; sometimes the demands of work are an excuse to avoid the responsibilities of family, study or prayer.

He also says that we may get a message and feel very peaceful and joyful, not because the message is from God, but because we think it will lead us to riches, relationships, or social status.

I have experienced evil forces misleading me by giving me incredibly peaceful and joyful spiritual feelings. I was horrified when I discovered evil could implant these feelings in me, because I had thought there was a one to one correlation between these intensely spiritual feelings and following God’s will. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Worldly Results

Are positive worldly outcomes a sign that one is following a divine message? Conversely, if a person believes that God has commanded her to carry out an action, but then circumstances obstruct the fulfillment of that action, or the end results are not successful, should those difficulties be taken as evidence that one was mistaken in believing that she received a divine message? The answer depends on your view of the nature of reality and whether you think the spiritual and outer material levels are connected.

The early Catholic view on this question is based on a dualistic view of reality. Within Christian monasticism and ascetic spirituality, the joys of the world were seen as a temptation that divert us from focusing on God and spiritual pursuits. To expect comfort or success in the world is therefore antithetical to the path of following God. One Desert Father, Abba Daniel, said that “The body prospers in the measure in which the soul is weakened, and the soul prospers in the measure in which the body is weakened.” These ancient and medieval Christians do not think we can tell whether we are following our guidance by whether things are succeeding in the external world because they believe these worldly things should not be enjoyed.

St. Francis de Sales, in the sixteenth century, articulated this attitude in his Treatise on the Love of God:

Painful things cannot indeed be loved when considered in themselves, but viewed in their source, that is, in the Divine Will and Providence which ordains them, they are supremely delightful. Look at tribulations in themselves, and they are dreadful; behold them in the will of God, and they are love and delights. The truly loving heart loves God’s good-pleasure not in consolations only but in afflictions also; yea, it loves it better upon the cross in pains and difficulties, because the principal effect of love is to make the lover suffer for the thing beloved.

So, for Catholic spirituality based on a dualistic view of reality and developed for monks, there is no connection between a divine message and positive worldly success.

Contemporary, non-traditional spiritual writers are the exact opposite of the Catholics. They say that if one is following her divine guidance, then she will be in a supportive universal flow and that things will naturally work out for her in the external world.

As the writer Theresa Winter says, “When we are in harmony with our inner voice and the natural flow of the universe, doors open easily for us. When a door closes, the universe is telling us to look in another direction. . . .that our energy is not harmonious with this particular path. When we find we are swimming upstream we are going against the natural flow.” So, if we are following our guidance correctly, we will be in a natural flow where things work out for us in the external world.

This natural flow sometimes results in synchronicities or meaningful coincidences. These synchronicities provide us exactly what we need at that moment, and so another name for them is Divine Providence. Synchronicities are not seen as random fluke accidents but as the universe’s way of guiding us to our right place. As one anonymous writer in this tradition says, synchronicities are “miraculous events [that] occur to guide us, nudge us, and give us a ‘thumbs up,’ letting us know that we are on the right path.”

Sometimes it can be hard to know if things are working out or not. An incident from the life of the well-known Christian minister David Wilkerson highlights this difficulty. In 1959, he was serving as a pastor to a small rural church in Pennsylvania. He had recently sold his TV so that he could spend more time praying and getting closer to God. He was reading a magazine about seven gang members on trial for a brutal murder in New York City, which was 350 miles away.

In his autobiography, The Cross and the Switchblade he described what happened next:

I was dumbfounded by a thought that sprang suddenly into my head-full-blown, as though it had come into me from somewhere else. Go to New York City and help those boys. I laughed out loud. ‘Me? Go to New York? A country preacher barge into a situation he knows nothing about?’ Go to New York City and help those boys. The thought was still there, vivid as ever, apparently completely independent of my own feelings and ideas. The idea would not go away: I was to go to New York, and furthermore I was to go at once, while the trial was still in progress.

Wilkerson followed his guidance, arrived in New York, and tried to meet the accused murderers but found that it was nearly impossible to do so. He was told that the only way he could meet the accused youths was if the judge at their murder trial gave him permission. Desperate to talk to the judge, Wilkerson rushed up to him in the courtroom but was stopped by the police who feared that he might be trying to attack the judge. Photographs were taken of the minister being hauled away by the police, and this picture appeared in papers across the country.

Wilkerson was totally humiliated and felt he had made a mistake in believing that God had commanded him to go to New York City. He thought that he could not have followed God’s guidance correctly if things had worked out so poorly. He told his congregation, “you must be saying to yourselves, ‘What kind of egoist do we have for a preacher, a man who thinks that every whim he gets is a mandate from God?’ This is a legitimate question. It would surely look as though I had confused my own will for God’s. I have been humbled and humiliated. Perhaps it was to teach me a lesson.”

In the following days, Wilkerson kept praying. Then, he got a persistent message: “Go back to New York.” He followed this message, and after driving into New York, he soon had a very deep feeling that he should stop the car and get out. A few minutes later, he heard someone calling his name. It was the head of another gang who recognized his picture from the paper. The gang leader and the other gang members liked him because he too had been arrested. “Their logic was simple. The cops didn’t like me; the cops didn’t like them. We were in the same boat, and I was one of them. Immediately, I had their attention. More important, I had their sympathy. That afternoon I had a chance to preach my first sermon to a New York gang.”

Do Messages tell people to do irresponsible or immoral things?

It is well known that people get messages to do unconventional things or things that are against commonly accepted social mores. Probably the best known historical person who got these types of messages was Joan of Arc. Joan, who lived in the fifteenth century, was a teenage girl who got divine messages telling her to make sure that the prince of France was crowned king and to drive the English out of France. To do that, she had to ignore the biblical injunction to honor her parents, as she left her house without their permission. Secondly, she ignored the biblical injunctions for women to dress in women’s clothes and to wear their hair long. She cut her hair like a man and dressed like a man (in armor) when she led the French armies in battle. While many people nowadays may think these things are trivial, both of these things were seen by her accusers as significant evidence that she was a witch and were major factors in her being burnt as a heretic.

Margery of Kempe, although much less well-known than Joan, lived around the same time period and was told by God to do something unconventional and even illegal: wear the clothes reserved for nuns and virgins. While we have trouble taking clothing laws so seriously nowadays, they were an extremely important matter in that period. She followed her guidance even though she suffered for it.

In the nineteenth century, African-American women like Jarena Lee and Julia Foote felt called to preach the Gospel even though the Bible said that it was inappropriate for women. They endured much inner suffering when they resisted their calling and social resistance when they followed God’s command.

Most people who think about divine messages, would probably agree that God could give a person messages to ignore unimportant social rules. A much more difficult question arises if you think you have gotten a divine message to do something that you think is immoral or irresponsible toward major family duties and could easily hurt people as a result. In researching a book on spiritual discernment, I went through many hundreds of spiritual biographies of people from many different spiritual traditions. I found two extremely interesting ones where people were called to abandon their young children and follow God’s will for them instead.

Blessed Marie of the Incarnation was born in France in 1599. While a teenager, Marie was pious and uninterested in worldly things. She wanted to become a nun, but in obedience to her parents, she got married. Afterwards, she had a child, and then her husband died. Meanwhile, her sense of being called to a religious life returned and pressed upon her with great intensity. So, she made preparations to leave her eleven year old son with her sister so that she could become a nun. On the day she was to enter the nunnery, her son, unaware of her plans, ran away from home to try to join a religious order. She says in her autobiography that “for three days he remained lost without my being able to find him. All my friends blamed me for this loss, saying that it was a clear sign that God did not want me to become a nun.” Her son was eventually found safe.

Blessed Marie did not see her son leaving as a sign that he still needed her to care for him; she saw this as the devil tempting her to give up her calling. But she held onto her calling, saying “I never stopped hearing an inner voice which pursued me everywhere, saying, ‘Hurry! It’s time. It’s not good for you to be in the world any longer.’”

Shortly after she joined the nunnery, she suffered a trial that could have scarred many people. In her autobiography, she said:

a crowd of little school boys, companions of my son, gathered together and began to hoot and cry that he had been silly to let me enter a convent and that now that he was without both father and mother he would be disdained and abandoned. ‘Let’s go find her,’ they said to him; ‘let’s go and make so much noise that they will have to give her back to you.’ This upset my son so deeply that he cried grievously. Then a whole gang came to the gate of the monastery, making a hullaballoo and crying that I be given back to my son. This could be heard everywhere. At first I didn’t know what it was, but then among the other voices I could distinguish the voice of my son who was crying, ‘Give me back my mother! I want my mother!’ This pierced me to the heart and made me fear that the community, being so harassed, might get tired and reach the point of sending me away.

Her son’s entreaties caused her great emotional pain, but she viewed them as a means by which the devil was trying to lure her from God’s path, and she remained steadfast in her vocation.

She prayed to God to help her son, and he was soon accepted into a Jesuit seminary where he later became a Catholic priest. Blessed Marie later received a dream to go help the Indians in Quebec, and she established an Ursuline nunnery there. She died in Quebec in 1672. She is highly esteemed among Catholics in Quebec. She wrote of her life in her book, The Autobiography of the Venerable Marie of the Incarnation, which was co-written by her son who grew up to become a priest and one of her greatest supporters.

Something similar happened to Peter Caddy and Eileen Caddy, who founded the Findhorn community in northern Scotland. Findhorn was a leading center for New Age spirituality in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it was so significant in nurturing many people and activities that many Christians in the late seventies and eighties called it the Vatican City of the New Age movement.

Peter Caddy was born in 1917 in England. When he was a young man, he developed a strong interest in spiritual metaphysics and was trained to listen to and follow his intuitions. Peter was an officer in the Royal Air Force. One day in 1953, Peter flew into an Iraqi base and was hosted by the base’s commander and his wife Eileen. Enjoying their company, Caddy spent time with Eileen’s family whenever he was in Iraq. Eileen and Peter’s relationship was nothing more than a platonic friendship until one day, when Caddy was in Jerusalem and he heard a voice.

In his autobiography In Perfect Timing: Memoirs of a Man for the New Millennium, Caddy described what happened

Suddenly, quite clearly, I heard a single sentence that is the closest I have ever come to hearing an inner voice: ‘Eileen is your other half.’ I rejected the idea immediately, finding it preposterous. Eileen was married to a senior officer, and had five children. There were no signs of any romantic love between us; all I felt with her was a warm friendship. ‘Besides,’ I told myself, ‘soul halves only meet once in a blue moon!’ Yet try as I might to shake off the echoes of the idea that Eileen was my ‘other half,’ they persisted.

Caddy said that he later told a spiritual friend about his voice as they were driving in London: “‘Look up in the sky, Peter,’ she said, smiling. There, hanging delicately over the city skyline, tinted by the smoke and the mist from the Thames, was a blue moon.”

Caddy’s spiritual training had taught him to trust his spiritual intuitions, and he gradually came to accept this intuition as divine guidance. It helped that he found out that Eileen’s husband was emotionally cold towards her and was extremely controlling.

Peter went back to Iraq and told Eileen about his message. In her autobiography Flight into Freedom, she described her reaction to Peter’s announcement: “‘Peter, you can’t be serious,” I protested. ‘With a husband and five children, I’m an unlikely other half. Besides, you’re married as well!’ He looked so crestfallen that I laid my hand on his arm and said more gently, ‘Peter, what is to be, will be. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

Peter pursued her over the next year and eventually she fell deeply in love with him and left her family to be with him. When she told her husband why she had left him, he took her kids away from her, and she was desolate as she had not expected that.

Shortly after her kids had been taken from her, she went into a sanctuary where she received a divine voice. She said she was “numb with the pain of the past 24 hours. Just a few days before I had had five beautiful children, a husband and a home with everything I ever wanted. And now, nothing. I shuddered again at the thought of what I had done. I had always had such proper ideas about marriage.”

In the sanctuary, she got quiet and peaceful and started praying, talking to God like a person. She called out to God for help. Then, she heard a divine voice: “Be still and know that I am God. You have taken a very big step in your life. But if you follow My voice all will be well. I have brought you and Peter together for a very special purpose, to do a specific work for Me. You will work as one, and you will realise this more fully as time goes on. Don’t be afraid, for I am with you.”

Peter was convinced that the voice was from God, but Eileen had doubts. She said,

The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became. I remembered the people God spoke to in the Bible. But those were special people with special tasks to do. Why should He speak to a woman who had left her husband and children to “live in sin” with another man? And yet here was this very clear voice telling me to listen and all would be well in my life. My thoughts kept turning to the Ten Commandments. The word “adultery” plagued me. The voice said I was doing the right thing, but how could all be well?

Guided by a voice that spoke through Eileen, the couple and another friend founded the Findhorn community, helping to launch the New Age movement.

Conclusion

I know many spiritually committed people who have never received a voice, vision, dream, or any other kind of message telling them what to do. Fortunately, there is another way of divine guidance, one that I prefer, one that is much more common and much more significant. This type of divine guidance is the subject of the Connections page.

Copyrighted 2009

FOOTNOTE

[i] in willard.