The Art of Spiritual Discernment

Attuning Your Intuition to the Flow of Divine Love

This article will remain unlocked for free until 9:00 pm (CST) next Friday night. So, if you want to read it for free, you can do so for a limited time.

This endeavor is an important part of my income. So if you find value in what I offer, please consider becoming a paid member to the newsletter & live online community. However, if you genuinely can’t afford a subscription, just hit the reply button and let me know. I will give you a free 3-month paid subscription, no questions asked.

Back in college, I dated someone involved with Campus Crusade for Christ. One night, she asked me what I thought about God.

Keep in mind I had grown up a cultural Christian. That is to say my parents identified as Christian, but we never went to church (except on rare occasions). Most of what I knew about Christianity came from TV movies like The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Ten Commandments.

So I told her: “I consider myself to be a Christian with a Taoist bent.”

I accepted the broad Christian framework (at least what little I understood of it), but I had recently encountered Taoism through a Chinese history class, and it captivated me. I loved how the Tao was described as “a mystery”. In fact, if you were ever to describe the Tao, you weren’t actually describing the Tao but something else. Being influenced by Taoism, I believed our primary spiritual task was to pay attention to the natural Way of things, and then participate in that flow.

She, on the other hand, strongly identified as a Christian and embraced the more rigid Evangelical idea of God as revealed exclusively in the Bible (not surprising, given her involvement in Campus Crusade). Apparently, my response was troubling to her.

Fast forward a few years…

I went through my own fundamentalist phase, then eventually emerged on the other side. Today, I consider myself a “Christ-oriented mystic.” And in a strange way, I’ve come full circle.

You see, Taoism (what little I understand of it anyway) taught me the spiritual art of attunement. It showed me the importance of noticing the Divine Pattern in and around me. Once you've attuned with the Way, you can stop resisting and start participating in it.

And that, I believe, is the heart of discernment.

Two kinds of discernment

It seems to me that there are two basic types of discernment.

First, you have what I'm going to call a “vocational discernment”. In other words, it’s about trying to figure out your next steps in life. It’s about getting a sense of personal direction. It includes questions like…

• Should I take this new job?

• Should I enter into ministry?

• Should I continue this romantic relationship?

While this article is all about discernment, I'm not going to be addressing this kind of discernment. (Maybe another time.)

The second kind of discernment is “general discernment”. This is what I’m tackling today. It’s about your way of being in the world. It's about how you interact with others. It's about how you behave. It's about the things you stand for or against in society.

In a sense, it’s your spiritual posture. Are you aligning with the Divine Pattern?

If you want to strengthen your spiritual posture—your alignment—you need to hone your intuition.

What is intuition?

When some spiritual folks talk about intuition, it sounds mystical—like an internal antenna tuning into divine broadcasts. That’s not necessarily wrong. But I think there's a better way to understand it.

Years ago, I was reading a book (unfortunately the title escapes me) all about intuition. The author simply boiled it down to this…

Intuition is pattern recognition.

As I recall, one of the examples in the book had to do with a firefighter who had been in the profession for many years. I’ll try to retell the story as best I can.

A seasoned firefighter was inside a burning building when he suddenly had a strong feeling that told him not to go down a particular hallway. Moments later, the ceiling collapsed into a pile of burning rubble. His “intuition” saved his life.

But where did that intuition come from?

The author believed that it came from deep, subconscious pattern recognition built from years of experience. He had seen enough fires to pick up on subtle clues that indicated a dangerous situation was unfolding before him. Consciously, the warning only registered as a sort of danger sense.

Or, here’s another example, this time something a more personal (and less drastic) that happened to me many years ago. I had what I considered a great idea, and I shared with a friend. He thought about how his wife would respond. He simply said, “She’s not going to like it.”

Nonetheless, I still thought it was a great idea, so I pressed a bit. All he kept saying was, “She's not going to like it.”

He was quite confident in his assessment. He didn’t need to explain why, to either me or himself. He just knew his wife’s patterns and therefore knew how she would respond.

That’s how intuition works. Suddenly, something feels off. Or maybe something just feels right. It’s a feeling you can’t explain because your subconscious is picking up on patterns your conscious mind isn’t even registering.

And spiritual intuition works the same way.

It’s about tuning in to the Divine Pattern. It’s the result of training your awareness to recognize the Divine Flow in everyday life. As you strengthen your spiritual intuition (your Divine Pattern recognition) you will become better at participating in that Divine Flow.

The Bible and discernment

Of course, the natural default for many Christians is to go to the Bible for help with discernment. However, this can actually be tricky. There are a number of ways the Bible is misunderstood and misused. And, if it is misunderstood and misused, I think it can drive discernment over a cliff. So, it’s important to use the Bible responsibly as a discernment tool.

The Bible is a complicated collection of books. It has many authors writing in many genres through many years. So, I’m going to narrow down my focus to just the Gospels, and I’ll use a bit of the Gospel of Matthew as my example.

Postmodern culture is experiencing a meaning crisis.

Why have we lost sight of Meaning?
Is there any hope of getting it back?
Better yet, is the loss of Meaning really a bad thing?

If you long for a path forward, my theology book Drinking from an Empty Glass: Living Out of a Meaningless Spirituality is the book you’re looking for.