PRAYER & DISCERNMENT
LAURENZ KLEINHEIDER, UNSPLASH.COM
Listen closely by
Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was longtime editor of Portland magazine, poet, and prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction articles and books. This article originally appeared in VISION 2016.
Brian Doyle
TO HEAR GOD, it helps to let go of our fears, our masks, our busyness, our desire to control, construct, and analyze.
God rarely makes booming announcements about what you should do with your life. Quite the opposite, it takes a lot of quiet to hear God inside you.
D
iscernimento. It means, according to an Italian friend, not making a total and complete fool of yourself. He and I were talking about the word discernment in its various contexts, and how both of us, growing up Catholic, thought vaguely that the word meant waiting around to be picked for the holy all-star team with the same shout, “I Am Who Am!” that Moses got. Both of us, at the tender age of 13, had visited a seminary, he in Palermo and me in New York, and both of us had sat in chapels there, diligently trying to discern if we were being called by the Lord to selfless service, but neither of us felt anything at all except increasingly hungry for lunch. My friend said all he
24 | VISION 2020 | VocationNetwork.org
