Spiritual Discernment

Sort of like doing laundry?

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Friends,

Spiritual discernment is a deep listening to what is calling to you in your process of decision making. What is the wisdom Spirit is leading you to? As I was discerning this week, I wrote about what the process of spiritual discernment felt like by me. How can we pay attention to the feelings in the moment before we package them up and move on.

Peace,

Jace

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Spiritual Laundry

My heart is jumbled up like laundry

after the spin cycle. Pant legs twisted

together with shirt arms.

It all looks flat

against the drum of the washer

when you first open the door.

The spinning makes it all a blur.

The outside is calm until you open and

begin to untwist and sort out the concerns.

Feelings are slowly exposed as each twist unfolds.

Laundry is like discernment. Colorful emotions

sorted into warm and cold cycles.

And where is Spirit?

In the water soaking and penetrating every piece.

And in the end, untwisted or not, it’s all put in the dryer.

Ready to be folded and placed in a drawer until the next cycle.

Jace Belz

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Discernment is key to every wisdom tradition. It’s about sorting out the stuff of life — the experiences we have, the people we walk with, the “signs and signals” we pick up — by asking good questions about their meaning and importance in the living of our lives.

Is this my problem, or does it belong to someone else?

Is this something from which I can learn, or have I already been there and done that?
Is this life-giving for me and those around me, or is it death-dealing in ways small or large?

Is this something to which I can give myself, or must I let it go?

Parker Palmer
From What Moves and What Stays: The Essential Movement of Discernment.

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You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you
long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
for the hour of clarity.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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