Before You Can Hear Him

Why discernment requires purification, not just prayer

Most of us approach discernment as a technique. We make a list of pros and cons. We ask trusted people. We pray hard and wait for an answer. Then we interpret our circumstances, our feelings, our quiet moments — looking for the signal. And sometimes it works. And sometimes we get it spectacularly wrong and can’t figure out why.

We assume the problem is that we didn’t pray enough, or listen closely enough, or perhaps that God was silent. But there is another possibility — one the tradition has always known and that we tend to overlook in our eagerness to get direction: the problem is not the channel, but the receiver.

We cannot clearly hear a God we haven’t allowed to reshape us.