Below is the text of Pope Francis’ weekly Wednesday audience, delivered on Oct. 19, 2022.
To receive these remarks and more in your inbox every week, join for America’s each day newsletter.
Dear brothers and sisters, welcome and good morning!
Within the catecheses of those weeks we’re specializing in the prerequisites for good discernment. In life we now have to make decisions, all the time, and to make decisions we must follow a journey, a path of discernment. Every essential activity has its “instructions” to follow, which have to be known to ensure that them to provide the essential effects. Today we’ll have a look at one other indispensable ingredient for discernment: one’s own life story. Knowing one’s own life story is, let’s say, an important ingredient for discernment.
Our life is probably the most precious “book” that’s given to us, a book that unfortunately many don’t read, or slightly they achieve this too late, before dying. And yet, precisely in that book that one finds what one pointlessly seeks elsewhere. Saint Augustine, an amazing seeker of the reality, had understood this just by rereading his life, noting in it the silent and discreet, but incisive, steps of the presence of the Lord. At the tip of this journey, he noted with wonder: “You were inside, and I without, and there I did seek you; I, unlovely, rushed heedlessly among the many things of beauty you made. You were with me, but I used to be not with you” (Confessions X, 27.38). Hence his invitation to cultivate the inner life to search out what one is looking for: “Return inside yourself. Within the inner man dwells truth” (On True Religion, XXXIX, 72). That is an invite I’d extend to all of you, and even to myself: “Return inside yourself. Read your life. Read yourself inwardly, the trail you’ve got taken. With serenity. Return inside yourself”.
Stopping and acknowledging: it will be significant for discernment; it’s a task of gathering those precious and hidden pearls that the Lord has scattered in our soil.
Repeatedly, we too have had Augustine’s experience, of finding ourselves imprisoned by thoughts that lead us away from ourselves, stereotypical messages that harm us: for instance, “I’m worthless” – and it gets you down; “every little thing goes flawed for me” – and it gets you down; “I won’t ever achieve anything worthwhile” – and it gets you down, and this becomes your life. These pessimistic phrases that get you down! Reading one’s own history also means recognizing the presence of those “toxic” elements, but then broadening our narrative, learning to note other things, making it richer, more respectful of complexity, succeeding also in grasping the discreet ways by which God acts in our life. I once knew a one that people said deserved the Nobel Prize in negativity: every little thing was bad, every little thing, and he all the time tried to place himself down. He was a bitter person, and yet he had many qualities. After which this person found one other one that helped him, and each time he complained about something, the opposite one used to say: “But now, to compensate, say something good about yourself”. And he would say: “Well, yes… I even have this quality”, and little by little this helped him move forward, to read well his own life, each the bad things and the great things. We must read our life, and by doing so we see things that should not good and likewise the great things that God sows in us.
We’ve seen that discernment has a narrative approach; it doesn’t dwell on the punctual motion, but slightly inserts it in a context: where does this thought come from? What I’m feeling now, where does it come from? Where does it lead me, what I’m pondering now? When have I encountered it before? Is it something latest that involves mind only now, or have I discovered it other times? Why is it more insistent than others? What’s life attempting to tell me with this?
Recounting the events of our life also enables us to know essential nuances and details, which may reveal themselves to be helpful aids, hitherto concealed. For instance, a reading, a service, an encounter, at first sight considered to be of little importance, over time transmit inner peace; they transmit the enjoyment of living and suggest further good initiatives. Stopping and acknowledging this is crucial. Stopping and acknowledging: it will be significant for discernment; it’s a task of gathering those precious and hidden pearls that the Lord has scattered in our soil.
Goodness is hidden, all the time, because goodness is modest and hides itself: goodness is hidden; it’s silent, it requires slow and continuous excavation. Because God’s style is discreet: God likes to go unseen, with discretion, he doesn’t impose; he’s just like the air we breathe – we don’t see it nevertheless it allows us to live, and we realize this only when it’s missing.
Discernment is the narrative reading of the great moments and the dark moments, the consolations and desolations we experience in the middle of our lives.
Getting used to rereading one’s own life educates the outlook, it sharpens it, enables it to notice the small miracles that good God works for us day by day. After we realize this, we notice other possible directions that strengthen our inner taste, peace and creativity. Above all, it makes us freer from toxic stereotypes. Properly it has been said that the person who doesn’t know his own past is condemned to repeat it. It’s strange: if we have no idea the trail we now have taken, the past, we all the time repeat it, we go around in circles. The one who walks in circles never goes forward; it isn’t progress, it’s just like the dog who chases his own tail; he all the time goes this manner, and repeats things.
We’d ask ourselves: have I ever recounted my life to anyone? That is a phenomenal experience of engaged couples, who once they change into serious, tell their life story… It’s one of the beautiful and intimate types of communication, recounting one’s own life. It allows us to find hitherto unknown things, small and straightforward but, because the Gospel says, it’s precisely from the little things that the nice things are born (cf. Lk 16:10).
The lives of the saints also constitute a precious aid in recognizing the sort of God in a single’s own life: the permit us to change into aware of his way of acting. Among the saints’ behaviour challenges us, shows us latest meanings and opportunities. That is what happened, for instance, to Saint Ignatius of Loyola. When describing the basic discovery of his life, he adds a very important clarification, and he says: “From experience he deduced that some thoughts left him sad, others cheerful; and little by little he learnt to know the range of thoughts, the range of the spirits that stirred inside him” (cf. Autobiography, no. 8). Knowing what happens inside us, knowing, being aware.
Discernment is the narrative reading of the great moments and the dark moments, the consolations and desolations we experience in the middle of our lives. In discernment, it’s the center that speaks to us about God, and we must learn to know its language. Allow us to ask, at the tip of the day, for instance: what happened today in my heart? Some think that carrying out this examination of conscience is to calculate the balance of sins – and we commit many – but additionally it is about asking oneself, “What happened inside me, did I experience joy? What brought me joy? Was I sad? What brought me sadness? And in this manner, we learn to discern what happens inside us.
