";s:4:"text";s:6010:"So I’ll delete those five brilliant (believe me) paragraphs and see if I can finish instead by engaging with the good spirit a little more.I am looking at my computer and hesitating to open this file. How Ignatian Spirituality Gives Us a Way to Discern God's Will by David Fleming, SJ. Running in parallel, I am aware of the bright winter sky and glowing Oxford stonework in my peripheral vision. See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions. Gensic explains the ways that congregations are drawn into the life and work of the Trinity by prayerfully engaging such a process. Share on Facebook Tweet Widget Google+. I have been focused on the strategy of rejection; I have been fascinated by the bad spirit. But, while the bad spirit is fascinating, the good spirit tends not to draw attention to itself: like the God it serves, it specialises in humility and gives itself freely and without fuss.Discernment of spirits gives us the practical opportunity to become aware of the many microseconds making up our lives, to tease apart the different motions that make them up, and then to choose to lay aside those from the bad spirit and engage more with those from the good. The light wants to lift my heart. But I refuse, in my fascination, to give the bad spirit more airtime than it deserves. To accomplish this, the author walks the reader through the basic principles of Ignatian spirituality and discernment, making suggestions for how these can impact congregational decision-making along the way. But brute force opposition has failed me for weeks. So exactly what do I mean by micro-choices?Discernment – discernment of spirits – is first of all about telling apart the motions arising from these three sources and, in his ‘rules for discernment’ (and elsewhere), Ignatius gives an eloquently pithy catalogue of what the work of the good and bad spirit looks like in the human heart, in terms of the motions they inspire. People differ and the good and bad spirit have many strings to their bows but I think I can advance a general rule of thumb here: when making micro-choices – and macro-choices, for that matter – we do best to engage with the good spirit rather than oppose the bad. The term discernment often gets used these days to refer to two quite distinct but related things: making big apostolic decisions, life choices, and such – what Ignatius called ‘election’; and the more humble practice of discernment of spirits. Discernment blog . Ignatian spirituality has been called a ‘mysticism of choice’ and that is true. St Ignatius developed his Spiritual Exercises to help us make good decisions. Learn more about discernment and the discernment process at Loyola Press.