Seeing What's Real

God Draws Near, Part 3: An Advent Series

Today’s reflection is part three of the four-part Advent series called God Draws Near. You can read or listen to the first and second parts on Substack. The Woodlands is also available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

And now for Part 3:

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Seeing What’s Real

My stint in the county jail was short. I don’t remember a lot about it. A deputy led me down a narrow hallway lined with cells. Inmates peered at me through the bars. Some of those faces bore humorless smiles. A couple of the men called something out to me as I passed.

I was six years old.

Using his connection with the sheriff, my father had arranged this grim tour to serve as the bedrock of my spiritual instruction. The message was blunt: If you do bad things, this is where you’ll wind up.

Photo by Oscar Ivan Esquivel Arteaga on Unsplash

Maybe that’s how my father understood our chief spiritual challenge in life. We all want to do bad things, and so we need an incentive to just say no. He figured that fear of punishment would be the most effective strategy.

My greatest spiritual struggles have taken a different shape. I’ve pursued what the early Christian monk John Cassian (c. 360–435) called false goods and what Timothy Keller calls idols. Fear might keep you from stepping over a line, but it can’t help you recognize which path leads to a full-hearted life.

What I needed wasn’t a threat but spiritual vision. Discernment. To paraphrase Cassian, discernment is the mother of all virtues. It teaches a person not to be deceived by a false good.

Discernment is attention that has been honed to see with clarity. To distinguish between reality and appearance. Between seeing what is truly there and what we expect or want to be there. As Rowan Williams once said, “Most of our problems come from looking at what we expect to see rather than what is actually given.” (from The Way of St. Benedict)

Most of us understandably think of John the Baptist as a fiery preacher and a fearless prophet. He spoke truth to power when it would likely lead to his imprisonment and eventual execution.

But in addition to that, he seems to have had a keenly discerning spirit. While he was languishing in prison, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one? Are you the Messiah we’ve been waiting for?”

Here’s how Jesus answered:

Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. (Matthew 11:4-5)

This is what John would have been looking for: the marks that the loving, healing, liberating God was moving on earth as he does in heaven.

Jesus then went on to offer a lesson in discernment to John’s disciples. He said:

What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? (Matthew 11:7-9)

At the root of discernment is a desire for the truth. A desire to encounter reality as it is. Not as we might like it to be. Not as influencers and power brokers insist that it must be. As Pope Benedict XVI taught, without a genuine desire for truth, the heart becomes vulnerable to noise, passion, and fear.

The Moon over the Kisatchie

Discernment requires both the courage and the humility to allow divine reality to speak for itself. In AA rooms you’ll hear it said this way: seek to take reality on its own terms.

When reality speaks and we listen, it transforms who we are. As Dallas Willard taught, discernment is not about reading signs. It is about becoming the kind of person who can recognize God when He moves.

The Advent season calls us to a life of discernment. To intentional watchfulness, to wakefulness, to attention. It calls us to a genuine connection to the holy. As Simone Weil says, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” (from Gravity and Grace)

Part 4 of God Draws Near drops next week: Dare to Dream

Use these links to take in the first two parts (or head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify):

Part 1: A Sense of an Ending

Part 2: You Are Preapproved

Food for Thought

“Because what you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.”—John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

“We are asked to shape our lives, our time, our attention by habits and rhythms radically different from the windblown fury of the broken world. This means an entirely alternate shape of life, not just the subtraction of screens and distractions but the embrace of prayer, of daily wonder, of listening, of trust, of celebration that roots us moment by moment in that deep, watchful quiet that ushers us into the presence of God.”— Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet

“The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection—and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. ”—Richard Rohr, The Naked Now

Inspiration

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Prayer

Holy God, who calls us to hear the truth and see what is real, open our hearts to your perpetual presence. Give us discernment to recognize your grace, and the courage to follow where your truth leads; through Jesus Christ our Lord, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Thanks for being here everybody! Until next time, be well and God bless.

Jake

P.S. My books A Full-Hearted Life helps you discern the path to a life of true meaning, purpose, and belonging. Get a copy for yourself or a friend.

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