The Quest for Discernment
A Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston
For the past few days, as I’ve mulled over the contents of this editorial letter, the word discernment has run through my mind, over and over. And the quest of discernment–and for discernment–might well be a good orientation point for all the works we have on offer in this edition.
We talk a lot about the problem of attention these days, “screen time,” and the dangers of continuous partial attention, but it seems to me that the problem is not so much of attention as it is, yes, discernment. What is worth paying attention to in the first place, and why?
It’s a word for which, for some reason, I have vague, mildly unpleasant associations–of tediously earnest Bible study discussions about discovering one’s “calling,” or whether it was a sin to watch Caddyshack.
We talk a lot about the problem of attention these days, “screen time,” and the dangers of continuous partial attention, but it seems to me that the problem is not so much of attention as it is, yes, discernment. What is worth paying attention to in the first place, and why?
One answer might lie in Robert T. Rogers’s artist statement in “Faithful Through and Through”:
I am a multidisciplinary artist focused on contemporary views of mental health and spirituality. Drawing from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I highlight the importance of aligning with one's values to boost motivation and manage moods and emotions. Influenced by Christian ethics, I use various mediums like oil painting, drawing, photography, and text to create multilayered projects that reflect the complexity of my subjects.
So many of the artists here offer their own answers to these questions–but what they also offer is a window into their practices and methods. Visual artist John L. Gronbeck-Tedesco speaks plainly about what the process entails: “Moving human vision beyond habitual ways of seeing the material world and into the spiritual involves a good deal of editing.”
That’s echoed in Lisa Shirk’s interview with iconographer Philip Davydov, where he discusses how, in the quest to create art that can focus prayer and contemplation, “[s]kills are important, but it’s not only about style, it’s about the choices you make.” Further, Davydov discusses the ways in which those choices are guided by the conventions of the Tradition—such that the discernment here is not only of technique, but of living into a spiritual discipline.
Some efforts at discernment ultimately end up being ironic: Consider protagonist Bob Lawson’s evolving perspective on his assent to participate in a Cold War defense strategy on his heartland farm, in Micah Harris’s haunting short story “The Dead Hand.” Like the missile he believes is hidden in the guise of an oil well on his land, Lawson’s own discernment is often hidden, and only emerges fitfully.
These themes carry through Vita Poetica’s once-again-ample bevy of poems. Just two to think about: Alea Peister’s “Thoughts upon Reading On Beauty and Being Just in the Oncologist’s Office” vividly dramatizes the anguish and tension of the examination and waiting rooms in terms of how it embodies the philosophy she is reading. Riley Morsman’s “Like a Mother Peeling Oranges” takes almost the opposite tack, the grinding physical metaphor embodying the spiritual transformation.
Discernment is also at the very heart of our new Contemplative Practices Editor Deb Baker’s instruction in “Awed By Creation,” in which she seeks to correct the anti-nature, materialist presuppositions that have snuck into our religious practices. Among the admonitions she gives, she urges us to “consider how what you’re focusing on has an essence, something that makes it itself, as you have an essence. Consider how little you know it, how incomplete your understanding is of what it’s like to be that being. “
That would seem to be a good criterion for all the ways in which we are grappling with these exigent times, bringing to bear our own visions and skills–and maybe even callings!--to live into wholeness and healing, and efforts to repair the world.
