Learning Discernment & Consistency From the Desert Fathers ~ The Imaginative Conservative

The hardest part of Lent is the consistency. It takes what the Desert Fathers, those famous old monks of the Egyptian desert starting around the third century, liked to call “discernment” or “discretion.” In a modern Catholic context, “discernment” often means determining whether God wants you to be a priest, a deacon, or a religious. Discretion means for us not spilling the beans: “Sure, you can tell John about your situation—he’s very discreet.” But for the monks, this word meant something more. They used the Greek word “diakresis,” which has the same root word as “crisis,” meaning a moment of decision.

Discernment was that ability to understand what God’s will was in any situation, above all to judge one’s interior motives for any action. If truly Christian behavior is not just doing the right thing, but doing the right thing for the right reason, then discerning what is going on inside of our heads and hearts is an important part of our Christian…