📅 18 October 2026  |  👤  Br  Savio Saldanha SJ 

Every day we make small choices and big ones, and we almost always ask the same two questions: what should I do? What should I choose? Saint Ignatius of Loyola asks a different question underneath both — one most of us never think to ask: is this leading me toward God? He arrived at it during his own period of recovery, when he noticed that daydreams of chivalry left him restless, while thoughts of following Christ left him at peace even after the excitement of imagining them had passed. That difference in what remained, not what first excited him, became the seed of his method.

Discernment matters most in what the American philosopher Ruth Chang calls "hard choices" — not decisions between good and evil, but between two goods where neither is clearly better than the other, each opening onto a different future. No amount of weighing pros and cons settles a hard choice, because both options are genuinely valuable, just in different ways. It's precisely here, where analysis stalls, that Ignatius points somewhere else: not to guesswork, but to the movements within us.

He gives these movements names. Consolation is whatever draws us toward God — not always comfortable, sometimes even sorrowful, but oriented toward faith, hope, and love. Desolation is whatever turns us in on ourselves — restlessness, a loss of hope — even when it dresses itself up as good sense. Both movements can disguise themselves. A choice can feel good in the moment while in reality pulling us away from God. A difficult or even painful choice, on the other hand, can be exactly where God is leading us — not because God takes pleasure in our suffering, but because He sees further down the road than we do. A young woman weighing a career she has worked hard for against caring for her children or a sick parent at home faces exactly this kind of choice. Neither option is wrong. Both are real goods, both look like love, and either one can feel like consolation depending on the day. That is exactly where discernment says to look. I know a group of young men and women who give up their lunch hour, every day, to attend Mass. Nothing forces them to it, and it is the same movement at work: choosing what costs something now because it leads somewhere that matters more. Discernment, then, is not a feeling read once and acted on. It is attending to where a movement actually leads three steps down the road.

This is also where discernment breaks from simply "finding yourself." Chang's own account of hard choices stops at the human level: when reasons run out, you become the author of your own life through the act of choosing itself. Ignatius would agree that this freedom is real and necessary. But he adds something important: a Christian is never the sole author. We choose within relationship, alongside a God already present in the choosing. The question shifts from "who do I want to be?" to "who is God calling me to become?" — a deeper quest, and one that leads to a more lasting joy than the first.

None of this happens alone. Ignatius insisted discernment needs a companion — someone who can see the patterns we're too close to notice ourselves. This is why spiritual direction exists: a regular, unhurried conversation with someone trained to listen for these movements alongside you, rather than a single consultation for a single crisis. The Spiritual Exercises were never written as a manual to work through solo. They were meant to be accompanied.

Three questions can begin the practice for anyone, retreat or no retreat:

1. What have I been drawn toward today, and where does that pull lead if I follow it further?

2. Where have I felt resistance — and is it protecting something good, or just my comfort?

3. If I imagine the decision already made, do I feel free or bound?

None of these produce instant clarity. That's the point. Discernment doesn't hand us quick answers. It trains us to stay attentive, trusting that God is not silent — that God speaks through the ordinary movements of our own hearts, if we learn to listen.