How to Discern God’s Calling — Ignatian Discernment
⏱ 15 min read
You have been weighing a decision for months — possibly longer. The decision has more than one defensible answer, which is what makes it difficult. If one option were clearly wrong, you would have closed the question already. Both — or three, or four — are reasonable. Both feel partially right. Both feel partially wrong. The friends you have asked have given conflicting counsel. The prayer has not produced the kind of clarity the discipleship books promise will come. And the question of how to discern God’s calling has begun to sit in your chest like a small held breath you cannot quite release.
This is the slow version. Ignatius of Loyola wrote The Spiritual Exercises in a cave at Manresa, in Spain, in the 1520s, after a cannonball had ended his military career and left him a year in bed with nothing to do but read the lives of the saints. The Exercises are not a book most modern Christian women have read. They are a thirty-day directed retreat, walked under the guidance of a spiritual director, and the parts of them that have become known to the wider church are the rules for the discernment of spirits — a small set of careful observations Ignatius made about how the human soul, when honestly examined, reveals which movements are from God and which are not. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow contemplative attention into a small daily evening practice, if you would like a place to take the question after the article. For now — read slowly.
Ignatian discernment is not, despite the formal-sounding name, a complicated method. It is, at its heart, a slow and patient attention to what the soul actually feels in the presence of each option — and a careful trust that the soul, when it has been quieted enough, will register what is from God differently from what is not. The Jesuits have used these rules for five hundred years. The rules work, in the patient hand. We will walk three movements of them, drawn from Ignatius’s own prayers in the Exercises.
The first movement: the prayer of indifference
“Give me the grace of doing what Thou desirest, and ask what Thou wilt.”
— Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
Read it once. Then again, slowly. The line is shorter than the modern devotional ear expects, and the shortness is the point.
Ignatius would call the posture this prayer asks for holy indifference. The phrase is unfortunate in modern English — indifference now sounds cold, uncaring, the opposite of love. In Ignatian Latin, indifferentia meant something gentler and more precise. It meant the inner state of a soul that has not yet attached itself to one of the available outcomes. The soul that wants the right job for its own sake will hear God’s voice through a filter — the filter of its own preference — and the filter will distort the hearing. The soul that has, slowly, released its preference and become indifferent to which outcome God chooses is the soul that can hear God’s actual voice rather than the echo of its own wanting.
Give me the grace of doing what Thou desirest. Notice the careful grammar. Ignatius does not pray let me know what You desire. He prays for the grace of doing it — meaning, in his vocabulary, the inner condition of being able to do it once it is known. The grace is not informational. The grace is dispositional. The soul that has been given this grace is the soul that has been freed from the chronic preference for one of the options, and the freedom is what makes the discernment possible.
This is the first uncomfortable truth of Ignatian discernment. The reason you cannot discern God’s calling in the matter you have been weighing is — often — not that He has hidden the answer from you. It is that you have not yet been freed from your preference for one of the answers, and the un-freed preference is loud enough to drown out the quieter signal of His leading. The first move is not analysis. The first move is the slow prayer of indifference: I am willing for either. Either, if You ask. Either, with peace. Either.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the move that takes the longest. The preference is usually unconscious. You believe you are open to either option, but underneath the believing there is a quiet, persistent leaning — toward the more comfortable one, or the more impressive one, or the one your mother would prefer, or the one your husband would prefer, or the one your imagination has been quietly rehearsing for months. Until that leaning is named and released, the discernment will keep returning ambiguous answers, because the ambiguity is not in the calling. The ambiguity is in the listener.
The practice is small. Each morning, sit quietly for two minutes. Hold the decision in your mind. Then, slowly, pray: Lord, give me the grace of doing what You desire — even if it is the one I do not prefer. Repeat the prayer for as many mornings as it takes. The first week, the prayer will feel like a lie. The second week, the prayer will feel like a stretch. By the fourth or fifth week, the prayer will start to be honest — and the honesty is the beginning of the discernment.
(If the daily small practice of this kind of slow indifference has been the thing you keep losing track of by Wednesday, how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin walks the slowest re-entry. And if the prayer for the un-preferred option has been the part that feels too vulnerable to write down, a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray is the companion piece.)
The second movement: the prayer of full self-offering
“I beg of thee to obtain for me from thy Divine Son the grace of following His example in the practice of all the virtues, doing whatever He may desire of me and that at any sacrifice. Oh, dearest Lord! by Thy love for Thy Blessed Mother, obtain for me, this precious grace from Thy Heavenly Father. And Thou, my Supreme Lord and Master, God the Father, grant me this entire devotedness at the prayer of Thy Divine Son.”
— Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
Read it slowly. The Catholic vocabulary may sit unfamiliar in the Protestant ear — the appeal through Mary, the layered Trinitarian address — but the underlying movement is recognisable to any Christian who has prayed seriously about a hard decision.
What Ignatius is doing here is the second movement of discernment, and it is the harder one. He is praying for entire devotedness — the inner condition of a soul that has not only become indifferent to outcomes (the first movement) but has actively offered itself, in advance, to the harder version of whatever God chooses. Doing whatever He may desire of me and that at any sacrifice. The phrase at any sacrifice is doing the work.
This is the part of Ignatian discernment that the modern find your calling genre tends to skip over, because it is uncomfortable. The genre tells you to follow your passion, use your gifts, find work you love. Ignatius would say: those are useful inputs, but the discernment is incomplete until you have, in prayer, offered God the willingness to be called to the option that does not follow your passion, does not use your most public gifts, does not look like the work you love. The willingness does not mean He will require the harder option. The willingness means He could, and the discernment is honest enough to hold the could.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the movement that exposes the parts of the calling question that have been quietly negotiated. You have been willing to follow God’s call — as long as it leads to the work you wanted to do anyway. You have been willing to follow God’s call — as long as it does not ask you to leave the city you love. You have been willing to follow God’s call — as long as the financial implications do not become difficult. The conditions are not stated out loud. They are quiet floorboards under the prayer. Ignatius’s prayer of full self-offering walks across the floorboards and names them, gently, one by one.
Entire devotedness. The phrase is unsoftened. Ignatius is not asking for a partial willingness. He is asking for the inner condition of the soul that has been released, entirely, into God’s hands — and is willing for the option God chooses to be any of the options on the table, including the ones the soul has been quietly hoping it would not be.
The practice for this movement is the prayer itself. Ignatius prayed it daily, in the Exercises, until the entire devotedness became a settled state rather than a momentary act. The modern Christian woman who wants to learn how to discern God’s calling can do worse than to spend a week with this prayer — a single line of it, written out by hand each morning, and prayed slowly. Doing whatever He may desire of me and that at any sacrifice. Not as a vow. As an asking. The asking, repeated, slowly forms the soul that can be led.
A pause — the body knows this too
Sit somewhere quiet. The teaching has a body to it, and Ignatius was, despite his soldierly reputation, deeply attentive to the body’s role in discernment.
Place both feet flat on the floor. Let your hands open in your lap, palms upward — the small physical gesture of offering. Let one slow inhale come in. On the exhale, notice — gently — the option you have been quietly hoping is the one God will choose. Hold it lightly. Then take one more breath. On the second exhale, let the hands stay open, and offer that option back — not as a sacrifice you are making, but as a small physical letting-go of the grip your imagination has been holding on it.
This is what Ignatian indifference feels like in the body. Not numbness. Not the absence of preference. The body of a woman who has, for a moment, released the grip on the outcome and is genuinely available to either. The release does not mean He will choose the other. The release means you have become the kind of woman who could be led to either, and the leading becomes hearable as soon as the grip relaxes. Let one more exhale go all the way out. Then read on.
(For the kind of evening practice that holds the discernment over weeks rather than minutes, how to pray the examen — the daily reflection that changes everything walks the Ignatian evening prayer that is the most practical daily companion to the rules of discernment.)
A note before the third movement. The slow practice we have been walking — the prayer of indifference, the prayer of full self-offering, the patient attention to what the soul actually feels in the presence of each option — is the kind of daily contemplative work the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built to hold. One short page each evening, a place to record the small movements of the soul, no demand to perform. If you have been trying to discern a calling without a daily anchor that catches the small movements, the journal is the held form of it.
The third movement: the discernment of spirits
“How do we strengthen this supernatural union with Christ?_ He has deigned to tell us this also, saying: ‘If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love; as I also have kept my Father’s commandments, and do abide in his love’ … Consider on the other hand how powerful we are when assisted by the grace of God. For Christ says: ‘He that abideth in me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit.’”
— Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
Read it once. Then again, slowly. Ignatius is making a connection that, at first, looks tangential to the discernment question — but is, in fact, its hidden centre.
The connection is this. The discernment of God’s calling is not — Ignatius says — an isolated event. It is downstream of the daily life of abiding in Him. The woman whose daily life has been built on abiding, on the keeping of the commandments not as a legalism but as the natural expression of a soul resting in His love, is the woman whose discernment will be clearer. Not because God hands her more obvious signs. Because her soul, having been formed by the daily abiding, is more attuned to the small movements that constitute Ignatian discernment in practice — the consolation (the inner movement toward God, marked by quiet joy, peace, increased faith) and the desolation (the inner movement away from God, marked by restlessness, agitation, decreased faith).
These two movements — consolation and desolation — are the practical instruments of Ignatian discernment. The Spanish original calls them consolación and desolación, and the words are doing technical work. Ignatius is saying that when you hold each of the available options before God in prayer, the soul will register one of two patterns: a quiet inner rising toward Him as you consider one option, or a quiet inner contraction away from Him as you consider another. The rising is consolation. The contraction is desolation. The patterns are not loud. They are not dramatic. They are small interior movements, detectable only by the soul that has practised paying attention to its own inner weather.
This is why the abiding matters so much. The woman whose interior life is chronically loud — the strategising, the worrying, the running of scenarios — cannot reliably detect the consolation and desolation, because both signals are quieter than the noise inside her. The woman whose interior has been formed by daily abiding has reduced the noise enough that the small signals become hearable. The fruit Ignatius is quoting Jesus about — the same beareth much fruit — is, in the discernment context, partly this: the abiding produces the inner conditions in which the calling becomes discernible.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the move that ties Ignatian discernment back to the daily practices that sound, on first hearing, unrelated to calling questions. The morning quiet, the evening examen, the small daily showing-up at the page — none of these are about the calling question. All of them, cumulatively, are forming the soul that can hear the calling when it comes. The discernment of God’s calling is not a special practice for the moment of decision. It is the natural fruit of a life that has been quietly built on the abiding.
The practical move, then, is twofold. Walk the daily abiding. Then, when you sit with the decision in prayer, pay attention to the small movements. Hold option A in your imagination for several minutes, in His presence. Notice the inner weather. Then hold option B for several minutes, in His presence. Notice the inner weather. Do not trust the first reading. Do not trust the most dramatic reading. Trust the quiet pattern that emerges over weeks, in a soul that has been keeping its daily appointments with Him. The pattern is the discernment. The pattern is the calling.
What Ignatian discernment actually delivers
The modern Christian woman who has been told that if you just pray about it, God will show you and has then prayed about it for months without obvious clarity is often disillusioned with the whole framework. Ignatius would not have been surprised. He would have said: the framework was incomplete. The praying-about-it, without the prior work of indifference, the work of self-offering, and the patient daily abiding, is the praying of a soul that is not yet quiet enough to hear. The prayer is not the problem. The conditions inside which the prayer is being prayed are the problem.
Ignatian discernment, walked slowly, delivers something different from a clear sign. It delivers a settled soul — one that has become indifferent to outcomes, offered itself fully to whichever God chooses, and learned to read the small movements of consolation and desolation as it holds each option in His presence. From inside that soul, the discernment of God’s calling becomes available — not as a thunderbolt, but as a quiet inner clarity that, over weeks, stops oscillating and settles into the option that has the consistent pattern of consolation.
The settling is rarely fast. Ignatius’s own discernment after his cannonball injury took years. The discernments of the Jesuits who walked the Exercises after him have typically taken months. The discernment of God’s calling for your particular life will, in the patient walking of these three movements, take as long as it takes. The point is not the speed. The point is the settling, and the discernment that becomes hearable from inside the settled soul.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at how to know god’s will for your life — murray’s three tests and what is my purpose in life as a christian — tozer’s plain answer, which together hold the same question in Murray’s and Tozer’s vocabulary. The three together make a slow conversation about how Christian fathers across the centuries have answered the question of calling.)
What you can do this week is the small thing. Pick the first movement — the prayer of indifference. Write Ignatius’s line on a small piece of paper. Give me the grace of doing what Thou desirest, and ask what Thou wilt. Put it where you will see it. Each morning, read it slowly. Each evening, sit for two minutes with the decision you have been weighing, and pray the line again. The prayer will feel artificial for a fortnight. Then, slowly, it will become honest. The honesty is when the discernment begins to clear.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the slow Ignatian work of indifference, self-offering, and the patient discernment of spirits.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Ignatius’s slow vocabulary — entire devotedness, the grace of doing what Thou desirest, consolation and desolation — into a daily companion built for the woman whose discernment of God’s calling is, at last, ready to be walked over months rather than forced into a weekend.
