Elizabeth Liebert > Quotes

“In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Discernment, then, is the process of intentionally becoming aware of how God is present, active, and calling us as individuals and communities so that we can respond with increasingly greater faithfulness.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“But Jesus is not limited to that time and place long ago; through the Holy Spirit, the risen Christ is still present with us today. We can rely, then, on the Holy Spirit to bring to mind that which we need to live out our Christian life today (John 14:26; 16:13).”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Give thanks for all God’s gifts and benefits Jesus, you have been present today throughout our world…. I rejoice in … Ask for light Be near now. Let us look together at my day. Let me see through your loving eyes…. Review the day: thoughts, words, deeds, desires, consolations, desolations When did I listen to your voice today? … When did I resist listening to you today? … Express gratitude, sorrow, and purpose of amendment Jesus, everything is gift from you. I give you thanks and praise for the gifts of today…. I ask your healing in … I ask your forgiveness and mercy for… Ask for the graces you desire for tomorrow Jesus, continue to be present with me in my life each day….1”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Entering into discernment, then, means becoming increasingly able to notice where God is at work in the world and in one’s own life, increasingly desirous of choosing the “more,” and, God willing, increasingly generous with one’s own life in response.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER: SEVEN STEPS FOR DISCERNING A DECISION How does one go about making a decision by means of discernment? I propose that discerned decision making proceeds in seven interwoven steps, which represent the components of a decision made by way of discernment. The steps represent a logical progression from the beginning to the end of a decision arrived at through discernment. Events in real life, however, can be less of a straight line and more of a circle; with discernment, you may expect to find that the progression of these steps is less linear than I suggest here. More importantly, some steps must be repeated regularly (1, 4, 6, 7), and some can change midstream (2, 3). Nonetheless, as you’ll discover, these seven steps will always be part of your discernment: 1. Seek spiritual freedom, the inner disposition upon which discernment rests and which creates the climate for discernment. Indeed, without this basic intention of seeking spiritual freedom, discernment collapses into self-assessment, self-improvement, or decision-making techniques—all of which can be good and helpful, but they are not discernment. The”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“1. Begin, as always, by preparing your body for relaxed attentiveness, and also gathering your concerns and then letting go of them for the duration of this time of prayer. 2. When you are sufficiently quiet, inside and outside, ask God for the grace you desire: to remember and reexperience a moment in which God was clearly present to you. 3. Allow such an encounter with Holy Mystery to surface, waiting for it without anxiety and with anticipation. If other kinds of memories surface, set them aside. 4. When a memory of an experience of God does come, recall the experience in detail. What was the quality of the freedom you experienced then? Reexperience that freedom now. Record it in your journal. 5. If possible, find a time to relate this experience and the quality of freedom to another person: a friend, spouse, pastor, or spiritual director, for example. 6. Give thanks to God for the grace God gave you at that moment.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Practice: Awareness Examen The Awareness Examen helps us look for the traces of God’s actions in our daily life. It is usually done in the evening looking back over the day, but you may also use it to pray about any other meaningful period of time (such as a week or a year), or discrete event (such as a meeting or a class). Allow between five and fifteen minutes for this spiritual exercise. This prayer is very flexible. You may use only the roman or italic lines, or you may use the entire prayer.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“GATHERING AND INTERPRETING INFORMATION Practice: Gathering Relevant Data The quality of a decision is directly influenced by the quality of the data gathered. That faulty data leads to less effective decisions is a truism whether or not the decision is made within a context of discernment. Just because we are discerning, we can’t presume that God will magically make up for not doing this essential step. But what sets discernment apart from other decision making is that we do assume that the very process of data gathering can be set within the context of prayer—and that is the goal of this practice. 1. Pause as you begin this reflection and each time you work on the task of gathering data. Ask for God’s gracious presence and help to seek out what is relevant to your discernment. 2. Ponder various kinds of information that will bear on your decision: —Information about yourself, your personality, history, life experience, spirituality. —Information about your relationships with family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and enemies that will affect or be affected by the decision you are contemplating. —Information about the groups, agencies, and entities that you belong to or interact with or that will be operative in the decision you are contemplating. —Information about the human-made and natural environment, that is, the wide external context in which the decision is set. —Other information that will help you make an informed decision in this particular case; including, for example, background leading up to the situation you are now discerning, knowledge of the players and their relationships, projected possible out-comes—that is, anything that could impact the decision or its outcome. 3. Imagine how you can gather this relevant information. Make a plan about what information you need to gather, and outline the information-gathering process in your journal. 4. Begin gathering necessary information. As you do so, keep a record of what you find out, assembling the relevant information in a form and in an appropriate place where it will be accessible to your continuing discernment. (This process of data gathering may continue throughout your discernment.) 5. Offer this reflection and the sometimes tedious homework of data gathering back to God. Record in your discernment journal how the growing amount of data affects your discernment. Speak to God about what it reveals: about the situation, about you, and about your relationships, especially with God.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Practice: Framing Your Discernment Question Clarifying the scope and content of your discernment can simplify the subsequent steps of your discernment process. This exercise sets that clarifying and winnowing of your issue or question within the context of a prayer that God will help you see clearly where you should focus your discernment. 1. Let the silence deepen around you. Enter into it. Ask God for the desire to follow God’s call in and through the decision you will be making. Do not rush. Simply turn your attention to God, as you experience God, and address your desire to God. 2. Describe the decision that you wish to discern. 3. Elaborate in your discernment journal the aspects of this decision that seem important to you at this point. 4. State as concisely as you can the decision before you. It will be helpful if you can formulate your issue in a question that can be answered yes/no (for example: “Should I begin to work outside our home?”). 5. Bring the issue and the process you’ve engaged in thus far to God and attend to any thoughts or feelings that arise in you. Note these stirrings in your journal. Your first statement of the decision before you may shift; if so, repeat steps 4 and 5 until you sense that you have as clear and concise a statement as possible at this point. STARTING”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“—Ask God to look at your day with you. —What does God show you about your day? —What was important to God from your day? —Talk to God about your day.4”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Practice: Remembering Your Personal History How have your decisions and actions affected the person you are today? This prayer exercise helps you write your personal history of sin and salvation. The purpose is to see yourself as God sees you, not to pass judgment on yourself. If you find yourself slipping into self-judgment, return to the first step and allow your focus to rest again on God’s loving presence with you. 1. Let the silence deepen around you. Ask the God who has known you since you were in your mother’s womb (Ps. 139) to allow you to become aware of God’s loving presence that surrounds you like air. 2. In the presence of this loving God, review your life, simply and humbly noticing what has been. First, without judging yourself, allow the hurtful, isolating, negative, and sinful things you have done (as well as the positive things you avoided doing) to surface in your awareness. Note each of these memories in your journal, and, as you do, offer a simple prayer of sorrow. 3. Next, without judging or congratulating yourself, allow a parallel history to form, this time a history of significant blessings and graces you have received. As you note each of these memories in your journal, offer a simple prayer of gratitude. 4. Looking at these two lists, what would you now like to say to God? Say it in your own way, perhaps writing it in your journal. 5. Listen to God’s words to you: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow” (Isa. 1:18). “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, [God’s] mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22–23).”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Even though every discernment is unique, your search for data should always involve collecting four kinds of information: Intrapersonal information (from within your unique self). Ask yourself: What are my personality and work preferences? Time, energy, and health? Economic resources? Do I notice that I am having any particular physical responses as I think about the situation? What do I deeply desire? Interpersonal information (through face-to-face relationships). Ask yourself: Who are the people close to me who will be affected by my choice? How will this proposed option be likely to affect my interpersonal relationships, especially with those close to me or with whom I have prior commitments, especially my family? What supporting relationships exist for me personally? Structural information (from pondering those organizations, personal and impersonal, that exist regardless of the individual players). Ask yourself: What structures are in play here? What are their goals, their reasons for existing? What are their dynamics? What would be my role and responsibility in these systems if I were to make the decision I am pondering? How is power exercised? Who or what is marginalized in these structures, and what would they say if they could talk with me? Information from the natural world (from the environment in which we are embedded). Ask yourself: What is the environment—the physical context, both human and natural—like? How does the human-made environment exist within or against the natural world? Is this an environment that invites or repels me? What kind of impact will my actions have on the environment? After you’ve gathered your data, the next step is to interpret it, and it’s helpful to use the same four categories as interpretive lenses: Intrapersonal (your inner response). Ask yourself: Does the data give me energy? excitement? courage? confidence? tranquillity? satisfaction? Or are my reactions to it more like discouragement, anxiety, insecurity, agitation, dissatisfaction? Or, as is often the case, is my response a mixture of the two? Interpersonal (the reactions between you and those persons close to you or who would be affected by your decision). Ask yourself: How do I feel about the possible effects of my proposed decision on those close to me? What do these people say about my proposed option? How do others who are more objective about the choice facing me interpret the information that I have received; do expert interpreters agree or disagree regarding the information I have uncovered? Structural (what an analysis of the institutions, systems, and structures in which you live and work—or into which you would be moving—suggests about the matter at hand). Ask yourself: How will the various systems in my life have to be readjusted if I move in this direction: family, work, school, community involvement, relationship to worshiping community, and so on? What values are these systems preserving, and are these values worth it to me? In what way are the systems likely to resist my proposed change? What price could I pay? How does this feel to me? 4. Natural world (from the largest perspective, that of the grand scheme of things). Ask yourself: Does being in nature tell me anything about my proposed decision? Will it, or how will it, affect the environment? If I could stand on top of the world and look down, how would this decision appear?”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“the most central, the most important, the most attractive, the most full of energy. Select one that, for now, seems most central, and bring it back directly into your attention. 6. Without judging it (or yourself), ask, “And what is underneath this desire? What desire is even more basic than this one?” 7. Gently repeat this question for each subsequent desire that surfaces. Ask each one, “Is there an even more basic desire underneath this one?” 8. When you come to the deepest desire, honor it as central to who you are. 9. Finally, offer it back to God, just as it is, as an expression of who you are at this moment.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Practice: Seeking Spiritual Freedom The importance of desiring to follow God’s call through your decision making cannot be overstated. The attitude of indifference—that is, being willing to choose what God desires over all the other lesser things we might also desire—is the essential starting point for discernment. As indifference takes root in us, it flowers into the spiritual freedom to respond freely to God’s call. This prayer helps you form and deepen your indifference. 1. Ask for God’s Holy Spirit to be with you as you seek to understand what God calls you to do and be. 2. Consider the following statements. Turn them over in your mind, and then allow them to take root in your heart. Speak personally to God about what they mean for your life. Spend enough time on each that it becomes something you believe and accept as your own. —You, God, have created all that is, and are even now creating me, just as I am. —You desire that I become my truest and most authentic self. —You put in me my deepest and most authentic desires, Creator God. I can know what you desire, God, as I ponder and understand these calls of my heart. —Yet some of my desires lead me away from my truest self, where you, O God, dwell. I do not always desire what you desire. 3. Using your own words, ask God to deepen in you the desire for what God desires. 4. Commit yourself, here and in all the subsequent prayer exercises that mark the successive steps of your discernment, to ask for the gift to desire what God desires, and as God’s desire becomes clear, to choose it. 5. Give thanks to God for any new clarity and freedom that comes through this prayer.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Practice: Seeking Your Heart’s Desire Desires play a key role in discernment; they help us bring our whole selves to God. Here you will begin to identify your heart’s most basic desires. Prepare yourself to pray by attending first to your body, to any tensions, fatigue, lightness, or energy that it carries. Then attend to your mind, with its busy humming and noisy chatter, its naming, judging, and planning. Invite your body to relaxed attentiveness and invite your mind to take a break for the next few minutes. Paying gentle attention to your own breathing, without trying to change it, may assist your efforts regarding both your body and your mind. 1. Dedicate this time to God. Ask for the light of the Holy Spirit to notice your deepest desires, to name them accurately, and to respond appropriately to what you find. 2. When you are ready, ask yourself, as you sit quietly in the presence of God, “What do I want, right this minute?” 3. When you recognize what it is that you want, give it a name and jot it down in your journal. Return to the relaxed attentiveness. Ask again: “What do I want, right this minute?” 4. Again, notice, name, and jot it in your journal. (Repeat this process, until no more desires surface. After each, return to your relaxed attentiveness.) 5. Now look at all the desires you have named. Notice which seem to be”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Practice: Approaching Discernment through Memory Our memories preserve, along with many other things, a personalized record of moments in which God has blessed, supported and guided us throughout our lives. This prayer opens us to recall one or more moments of God’s support and guidance related to our present decision. The connection between then and now may be subtle and require some pondering, so take your time, especially when you get to steps 5 and 6. 1. Prepare yourself to listen to the wisdom brought to you through your memory by becoming still—outside and inside. Gently noticing your breathing may help you come to a deep quiet. Take as much time as necessary to come to this place of quiet. 2. Offer this time of remembering to God. Ask God to speak to you through your memories, and tell God of your desire to be available to God through them. 3. As you think of the decision facing you, allow your memory to surface a particularly graced event or period in your life. The memory may but need not directly resemble the issue you face at this moment. Relive that event or period and remember it in all its textures. 4. Notice how God was “laboring” on your behalf during that time. Notice, too, how you responded. Remember the grace of the moment. Capture in your journal the highlights of the grace and your response. 5. Notice the similarities and contrasts between your experience then and your issue now. Record the salient points in your journal. 6. As you relive that graced moment in your past, examine what it suggests about the decision before you now, thanking God for God’s constancy.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“foundational attitude for which we pray is that we might desire what gives God glory more deeply than we desire any other created reality. This spiritual freedom is so radical and so beyond our power to create in ourselves that it brings us face to face with our own poverty and our need for continual prayer. Sometimes all we can muster is the desire to desire what God desires! But any degree of hunger, any desire for God, any seeking of God’s call already happens through God’s Spirit, and God accepts it as enough. Over time, through repeated discernments and through daily living of one’s Christian life, this desire can become an increasingly natural and habitual orientation. As that transformation occurs, we experience deeper and deeper spiritual freedom. 2. Discover and name the issue or choice you face. What is really at stake is not always self-evident. An ambiguous or sprawling issue can obscure or even prevent subsequent discernment. Carefully framing the issue not only helps to clarify the matter for discernment, but it also actually begins the process of sifting and discriminating that is at the heart of discernment. 3. Gather and evaluate appropriate data about the issue. Discernment is not magic. We have to do our homework. The efficacy of the subsequent decision can rise or fall on obtaining accurate and relevant information about various options and their implications. However, since decision making is not identical to discernment, it is possible to botch a decision while still advancing in discernment. Fortunately, through grace, it is quite possible to grow in discipleship, manifest greater spiritual freedom, and hunger more strongly for what God desires in the midst of a failed decision. But prudence demands that we do the homework necessary. 4. Reflect and pray. Actually we have been praying from the outset. We pray for spiritual freedom. We select and frame the issue for discernment in prayer. We prayerfully select and consider the relevant data. But as we begin the process of discrimination in a more focused way, it is important to renew our attention to prayer. 5. Formulate a tentative decision. Many different methods can help us come to a decision, and therefore aid our discernment. We will explore seven methods in the entry points in this book, but many options exist in the tradition. Discerned decision making can employ any decision-making process, whether traditional or newly created, that fits the material being”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making

“Practice: Naming a Moment of Freedom Memories of spiritual freedom bring us a special grace and serve an important role in discernment. They give us points of comparison for other memories: do these other memories also bring us spiritual freedom? This exercise guides you in remembering and reexperiencing a time of particular spiritual freedom. 1. Begin, as always, by preparing your body for relaxed attentiveness, and also gathering your concerns and then letting go of them for the duration of this time of prayer. 2. When you are sufficiently quiet, inside and outside, ask God for the grace you desire: to remember and reexperience a moment in which God was clearly present to you. 3. Allow such an encounter with Holy Mystery to surface, waiting for it without anxiety and with anticipation. If other kinds of memories surface, set them aside. 4. When a memory of an experience of God does come, recall the experience in detail. What was the quality of the freedom you experienced then? Reexperience that freedom now. Record it in your journal. 5. If possible, find a time to relate this experience and the quality of freedom to another person: a friend, spouse, pastor, or spiritual director, for example. 6. Give thanks to God for the grace God gave you at that moment.”
― Elizabeth Liebert, The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making