Episode 22: Lisa Fullam – Making Decisions the Ignatian Way

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Intro  

Jared  

It’s time to tell you about our last summer school class of 2023.

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Awe. The last one. Well, our August class is called “Universal Salvation is Not Modern: Universal Salvation in Historical and Systematic Perspective,” very long title. But it’s going to be taught by Dr. Roberto De La Noval.

Jared  

In summary, the class is about Christian universal salvation, which teaches that everyone will eventually be saved or reconciled to God through Jesus Christ and the holy spirit, and that is a hot topic today. But also, historically.

Pete  

It’s all over Christian history. 

Jared  

Yeah, it’s been around.

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Yeah, that’s pretty cool, right.

Jared  

This isn’t just a new thing.

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And that’s an important point, folks. But when you sign up, you’ll get access to the live, one-night-only class, plus a live Q&A session, a link to the recording afterward, and downloadable class slides.

Jared  

It’s so much. The class though is happening live on August 14th. So put that in your calendar folks, August 14th—

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Do it now. 

Jared  

—from 8-9:30pm, Eastern Time. And as always, it’s pay-what-you-can until the class ends, and then it’ll cost $25 to download. 

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And if you join our community, Society of Normal People, you can get access to this class and all our other classes for just—how much is that, Jared?—$12 a month.

Jared  

That’s just like Pete, to ask a question and answer it himself.

Pete  

I know! It’s how I teach. It’s why nobody likes me. Okay, [Laughing] anyway to sign up, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/SummerSchool.

Jared  

Hey, everybody, today on Faith for Normal People, it’s just me. And I’m talking about making decisions the Ignatian way with Lisa Fullam. And Lisa is Professor Emerita of Moral Theology at Santa Clara University Jesuit School of Theology. And for me, this is an important conversation, we could have gone a lot longer, to really unpack a certain way of thinking about decision making that’s more rules-based and then what are some ways that we can move beyond that? So I hope you enjoy it. Don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for Quiet Time, where Pete and I will reflect on the episode. Alright, folks, let’s dive in.

Lisa  

Jared  

Welcome, Lisa, to the podcast. It’s great to have you. 

Lisa  

Great to be here. 

Jared  

So I wanted to give the listeners a little context for the questions that I have around this topic and why I was so interested in bringing you on the podcast. A lot of our listeners, including myself, have come out of a fundamentalist evangelical understanding of the Bible, particularly where moral decision making wasn’t much of a process, but it was—I’m going to use a fancy word here—like a deontology, like a rule-based understanding on, what does the inerrant bible clearly say? And so there wasn’t a lot of figuring out how we make moral decisions, there was really just reading and then doing what it says. 

So I’m hoping our conversation can help provide some tools and maybe even imagination for how moral decision making or just decision making can be more complicated on the one hand, but also more freeing on the other hand. But before we do that—so that’s kind of the context. But let’s zoom out a little bit. And can we just start with the idea of conscience? So what is that in Catholic tradition? And how is that different than maybe our assumptions around that idea?

Lisa  

Sure. In Catholic tradition, actually the most commonly quoted vision of what conscience is, actually plays off a verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans, in Romans 2:14. “When Gentiles do what the law requires, though they don’t have the law, they’re a law to themselves. For the law is written on their hearts.” So the notion of conscience in Catholic tradition is two things. Partly it talks about our moral decision-making capacity as human beings and how we think through things, but it’s also a spirituality. Our conscience is a place of meeting God. The Vatican 2 text speaks of, “in our conscience, we are alone with God whose voice echoes in our depths.” So what I love about the Catholic notion of conscience is this confluence of the rational and the spiritual. Professors like me often overemphasize the rational, but I think the spiritual is something that we must never lose track of in a Catholic understanding of conscience.

Jared  

Can you say a little bit more about that? Because in some ways, those don’t often maybe go hand in hand. And so in what way does that play out? Or you say, as professors, you sort of lean on one maybe more than the other, but how do they interact? Or how should they interact?

Lisa  

Yeah, I think when we’re confronted with questions of conscience, in a way, we’re standing before God, right? When we think about especially a hard decision in our lives, right, not the trivial decisions, right? “Can I cross the street against the light?” Stuff like that. But the big decisions in which our whole selves are invested. Those are questions which, when we finally stand before God, at the end of our days, we are accountable for. And therefore as we make these decisions, it shouldn’t be something like, “Well, here I am all alone with my left brain trying to figure out how to answer a question.” But also remembering that we are spiritual creatures, we can think deeply in prayer about how we approach questions, we can consult other people, we need to make wider use of the spiritual tools at our disposal, as well as the intellectual tools. The intellectual tools are important, but they’re not the whole picture.

Jared  

Right, right. Well, in some of my tradition growing up, it would have been the opposite assumption that the intellect isn’t that useful in making some of these decisions. And so it’s interesting to come at it from the other side, where there also needs to be this emphasis on the spiritual tools as well.

Lisa  

It helps us to get through questions that maybe Scripture doesn’t address. Perhaps because they just weren’t questions when Jesus was walking around or when the Hebrew Bible was written, or because they are genuinely new questions. You know, Jesus said nothing about artificial intelligence, say, and how we should negotiate that. Jesus said nothing about climate change. And yet these are two really important moral issues facing us now and we have to think and pray and consult our way through them.

Jared  

That may be a good segue, because I wanted to talk about methods for moral decision making, but maybe we can talk about it in the context of what you said, which are moral questions that Scripture doesn’t address. Which again, for some traditions that I would have grown up in, that’s almost a nonsense thing to say—Scripture does address everything, in some sense. And so I appreciate the intellectual honesty of like, “No, we have things that, you know, just couldn’t have been in the minds of the Ancient Near East at the time. And we have to figure out how to, as Christians, make our way when there isn’t a clear rule addressed in the scripture.” So can you talk about these methods for moral decision making or how we approach decision making?

Lisa  

Sure, when we’re thinking about using scriptures for moral decision making, there’s always a process of translation. What are the meanings at work here that we want to embrace as we address particular questions before us? And then in Catholic tradition, we would often speak of the question of formation of conscience. How do I work with my conscience so that my decisions of conscience are better and better? I think of formation of conscience as like becoming a musician. Jared, do you play a musical instrument? Or do you sing? 

Jared  

Yeah! Mhmm, mhmm. Well, it’s relative, what you mean by play. But yes, I do play instruments. Mhmm.

Lisa  

Okay, so the first time you picked up guitar or piano?

Jared  

Yeah, both of those, mhmm. 

Lisa  

Both of those. So the first time you picked up a guitar, you probably didn’t sound like Santana. Right? 

Jared  

Lisa  

And yet you kept at it and as you keep at it, you became a better and better person so that at some point you became a musician, you were able to express your deepest self through music, through the instrument itself. Or if you’re not there yet, that may be a goal for you, right? [Chuckles] So questions about formation of conscience are similar. We think about intellectual resources for formation of conscience. And also, we think about people that we trust, that we consult, we think about making use of Christian tradition and how the tradition—and when I say tradition, I mean Christian tradition broadly, not just Catholic tradition—and other religious traditions have approached questions, and begin to work our way through and into these hard questions. Sometimes when we think just about the question-answering part of conscience, right, so everybody’s got a conscience like a conscience is something that every human being is born with. It’s just something we got.

Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century Dominican theologian that I do a lot of work with his work, said that we must absolutely never violate our conscience when our conscience tells us the right thing to do, then we must do it. He said it was better to die excommunicated than to violate conscience, which is kind of a shocking statement from a Dominican friar. But what that means is that we bring everything we have to the table as we work through moral decisions. The thinking part of conscience, the process part of conscience, then is amenable to a number of different approaches. You mentioned rules, and that rule or deontological basis for making decisions of conscience has been certainly prominent in Christian tradition. But of course, there aren’t rules for everything. And you don’t always know what rule applies or when. It’s not always clear if two rules conflict, which rule you follow. And so even in applying rules, there’s a way in which we have to discern, we have to reason and think and pray and consult our way through those questions, even when we think we’re following rules. 

Another way of looking at moral questions generally is to look at consequences. A pure rule follower is going to say the consequences don’t matter at all. And yet, you’d have to say, “Gee, don’t you want to take into account the consequences of your action?” So there are other ways of doing moral reasoning that think about consequences as determining the moral rightness or wrongness of a particular act. 

A third way of thinking through moral decisions is thinking about relationships between say, the relationship we have with God, with neighbor, with the world generally, and the relationship we have with ourselves. How does this or that decision affect those relationships? 

But the way that I find most compelling to think about moral questions is that of virtue ethics. Virtue points to, it starts with a conviction that God wants us to flourish and be happy, and that God has given us the equipment, the mental equipment and the social equipment and the capacity and the teachability to figure out wherein our flourishing lies. So what the virtues are is component parts of what Aristotle called happiness or flourishing of living the best life that we can. 

Virtue ethics is enjoying a real comeback now. It’s not just Aristotle in the third or fourth century BCE and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, but there’s a whole contemporary school, looking at how do we live our best lives, as virtuous people, virtuous people tend to take into account all those other things: Is there a rule? How compelling is it? What are the consequences? How do we weigh those and bring those in? What effect does this have on my relationships? So those are some ways of approaching moral questions. That’s all very abstract, though, I wonder if we should get down to earth a little bit more?

Jared  

Yeah. And if that is a professor of moral theology, ethics, saying, well, virtue ethics is the thing that you tend toward or lean toward, I wouldn’t mind making it practical and say, okay, how do we then make these moral decisions? I used to teach an ethics class and I would often talk about—whether we like it or not, if we grew up in America, in the 20th century, our moral framework likely already includes these other three, whether we like it or not, just because it’s part of our intellectual tradition, the rules-based, the consequences, the relationships, those are sort of baked into probably how we were taught to think about ethics. And so to pick one feels like we’re gonna have to be inconsistent in one way, because it’s really hard, like you said, to be a true rule follower deontologist. You just bump into ways of making decisions that are intuitively in our culture going to be difficult to just follow that. But if virtue ethics sort of encapsulates all of that, can you say more about how does virtue ethics…how does it work as a way of making decisions? And be practical if you have some examples or thought experiments for that.

Lisa  

Yeah, virtue ethics starts with the notion that people of good character, by and large, do the right thing, or strive to do the right thing whenever they can. A story I used to tell my students is, there I am standing in the grocery store in the 15 items or fewer line with my 12 items. And just as I’m about to put them on the belt, some guy runs up behind me, shoves me out of the way and says “Out of the way, lady, I’m in a hurry.” And I look up, and it’s the Dalai Lama. And my students always laugh at me. And they say, “No, no, it wasn’t.” And I said, “Okay, you’re right. It wasn’t, why not?” And they say, first, he probably doesn’t do his own grocery shopping—which may be true, I don’t know. 

But then they say he’s not that kind of guy. He’s not the kind of person who behaves that way. So in virtue ethics, we focus on becoming the kind of person who is aimed at—I think of virtues like justice as a virtue, something that lives in us and helps us strive for the right way of being in society or virtue of fidelity of those who are closest to us. How do we foster those relationships and become the kind of people who are good at it? If you wanted to summarize virtue ethics in three short questions, it would be: Who am I? And that would include just who am I as a human being, but who am I in a particular context? A doctor dealing with a patient or…can be contextual as well as broad. 

And then who am I called to become? is the second question. That “Who am I called to become?” is a question of imagining our best selves, imagining how we can be the kind of person we want to be. An example I always use is Rosa Parks. When I’m looking for a person who is an exemplar of justice in the world, I often think of Rosa Parks. She didn’t just get tired one day and refuse to take a seat in the back of the bus. Her action of opposing those unjust laws was planned, she had worked her whole life for racial justice and was there and ready to do it. So for me in my life, it doesn’t matter where I sit on the bus, that’s not going to make me like Rosa Parks. But I have to translate into my own life, how I can be the kind of person she is in dealing with justice questions in my own life. 

And then the third question of virtue ethics is: How am I going to get there? What are the concrete things that I can do in my life that help me become the kind of person that is admirable, that I admire, that the tradition admires? That question about people we admire is an important one too, because virtue ethics, it comes deeply with a sense that we emulate, we don’t imitate, like, just rotely doing the same thing that admirable people do. But we copy what they do so that we can become like them in our own lives. That process of emulation is important, or to use more traditional language, who are our saints? Who are the people who we look at and go, “Oh, yeah, I want to be the kind of person who…” Right? So the kind of person who doesn’t, you know, shove people out of the way at the grocery store [Laughing] like the Dalai Lama never does, I’m certain.

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Jared  

I think there’s a lot we can talk about in here. I just think of my thought process early when I was in my 20s of thinking about this question, you know, who am I? And I think one thing we do—and I don’t know your church experience. Growing up in the south, just in my experience, maybe it’s not everybody’s—but in the tradition I was in, the question “Who am I?” was often so clouded by expectations to be a certain way. And so I didn’t realize until my 20s I wasn’t really ever honest with myself about this question of who am I, because it really was to bring a sense of guilt, and if I’m honest with people in my church community, is to bring a sense of shame. And so I spent a lot of time pretending to be better than I was. And by “better,” I put that in quotes, because it was sort of according to that particular tradition’s understanding of goodness, or it seems superficial, but things like you don’t listen to certain kinds of music. And so, you know, I bought the same Jay-Z CD three times because I broke it twice, and felt guilty about it. And so my question is, how important is it that we are radically honest with ourselves with that first question of who am I? Because in my experience, without being radically honest about the first question, I didn’t get to go to the second, or third questions.

Lisa  

I think you’re absolutely right, there are personal or communal expectations. And we also live in an American culture which offers us a vision of flourishing that really doesn’t fit for a lot of people, doesn’t fit the Christian story, for example, you know? Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous is not something that Jesus would have said, “Oh, yeah, that’s what you want to do. You want to be rich and you want to be famous.” Instead, part of what was shocking about his message was, it was about being with the poor, the marginalized, the humbled. That’s where I think it’s really important in moral life to have people that we can talk to and be honest with, right? We can’t be people of prayer unless we are going to be honest with God. Even if prayer takes us into shouting and crying, right? We don’t have to put on our best faces to approach God, we come as we are. But similarly, we need friends. People who can call us on our stuff and say, “Gee, that really doesn’t sound like it’s making you happy.” 

So yeah, that question of honesty is also something that we have to feel free to grow into a vision of our best selves. That’s where the role of the imagination comes in. And this Sunday’s readings in churches that follow the Common Lectionary is Jesus talking about the kingdom of God. And he says, “Well, the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. And the kingdom of God is like a woman who took a measure of yeast and leavened her whole lump of dough.” And those aren’t instructions right? Those are calls for imagination. What would it mean to be like a mustard seed that starts small and yet becomes the plant he was talking about, I understand as an ineradicable weed once it gets going. So when we think of the reign of God as an ineradicable weed if we do our small part as seeds, right, that it can become something great or a leaven in the dough, a similar kind of image. So imagination is really important in Jesus’s teaching because we have to imagine ourselves as the kind of person who… Or when he looked at the widow who tossed one coin into the hat, right? And Jesus said, “No, she did something really important. Don’t miss that.” So that’s an invitation to a kind of honesty. That is really important.

Jared  

Yeah, honesty and an imagination for that second question of who am I called to become? Because your point about Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous is resonating with me because it’s so hard to decide, who do I want to become? Where do I get the information that’s going to help me to pursue a life that leads to this flourishing? And because there’s nothing for me more heartbreaking than spending all this time and energy to a destination, getting there and realizing it actually wasn’t the destination that I thought it was, it didn’t deliver the thing that I thought it would deliver. So I think the parables speak to that imagination of what kind of people do we want to become? And that’s just as important as a second step as that radical honesty is a first step.

Lisa  

Oh, absolutely. If we cannot even imagine what it would be to be like, you know, like Rosa Parks, like Dorothy Day, like the people that we recognize are people who really made a positive change in the world, then we can never take that third step of how to get there. And part of that is a question of discernment. I’m going to use a little bit of a language of Ignatian spirituality. So Ignatius of Loyola was a guy, a Spaniard, a Basque, born in 1491. And he found himself lying in bed recuperating from surgery after he got his leg half shot off in battle, and he had two kinds of books around. One were the kind of courtly romances, right, where the brave knight would go off and do a valiant deed for the king and win the approval of the noble lady. And so he read a bunch of those. And the other book he had at hand was lives of the saints. And as he was lying in bed, he would notice that he enjoyed both kinds of literature right, he had fun while he was reading them. But when he was done, he found that the stories of military bravery and being a great knight would leave him kind of dry and unsatisfied. But the stories of the saints would leave him kind of energized and enlivened, and he found himself saying, “Well, what would it be if I were to do like St. Francis of Assisi did? Or like St. Dominic did in the world?” And that was his first paying attention to those movements of the spirit, right? The effects of ways of thinking, that are so important when we use moral imagination. What happens as we ponder this, and pay attention to how God may be touching us in our imagination, as well as in our intellect?

Jared  

Yeah, maybe you can say more about that, this idea of discernment. Because I resonate with that, now being, you know, Anabaptist going to a Mennonite Church. And one of the reasons I was drawn to a more Anabaptist tradition was this emphasis on discernment. It was a refreshing turn to say, we’re really going to wrestle with all of the pieces of this both internally and as a community. And then when we get really tired of wrestling with it, we’re probably just gonna keep wrestling with it, because there’s just so much to discern and to chew on in the process. And that was, again, very different than the top-down, “No, this is what the Bible says, this is what we’re going to enact. And you know, as the legislative head of the church, I’m just going to tell you what the Bible says, and we’re going to move forward with that.” So can you say more about from the Ignatian standpoint, what is discernment? And how does it fit into this idea of how we make decisions?

Lisa  

Yeah. Discernment, again, is that deep wrestling with what happens not just in our minds, but in our imaginations, and in our feelings, even in our bodies, as we ponder this, or that course of action. Right? so people speak of consolation and desolation in prayer. And anybody who prays knows that sometimes prayer is fun and sometimes prayer really isn’t fun. Sometimes prayer is dry and empty but anyone who prays knows that prayer is this multi-layered thing. And so the notion of consolation is, as I think, or as I pray, what is moving my spirit and my mind and my imagination, my body and soul, to pay more attention to God and neighbor, to God and the good of the world? That’s consolation. Consolation can be the warm fuzzies of prayer, when we feel like we’re being patted on the back or just given a new insight. But consolation can also be, “Gee, I’ve lived my life in this way and now I see that I need to make some changes.” 

I mean, it must have been difficult for you to step from a rules-based tradition—that very often has a theological underpinning that says, you know, “my way or the highway” and the highway will take you straight to hell—into something more discerning, more communal, more imaginative, and yet something in you said, “Oh yeah, this is a right move for me.” Whereas I am imagining that if you had stayed in your original tradition, then you might have followed all the rules but you would have found yourself in this sense, desolate. You spoke of having to hide from yourself, if you’re hiding from yourself, you’re hiding from God. And so you would have had to really kind of shut yourself down. You know, for other people, those may be perfectly good and life-giving traditions. It’s not about the tradition, but it’s about the tradition where you fit. And so you were experiencing consolation, I would imagine, along your spiritual journey as you found a new home.

Jared  

Let me say it in a different way and see if I’m tracking with you—whenever we are in these times of prayer, pondering, meditation, discerning which way to go in a certain scenario, what decisions to make—the consolation are, I don’t know the right word, it’s a feeling it’s an intuition or going in a positive direction. And desolation is a lack of confirmation, it’s going in the direction that doesn’t seem to be fulfilling?

Lisa  

It doesn’t seem to be fulfilling, and it doesn’t feel like it’s leading you to God. Consolation leads you to God. So you might find consolation when you walk in the woods and you’re just struck by the beauty and that beauty turns you to thank God for the wonders of creation. That was a moment of consolation. Similarly, if you find yourself in a clear cut then paved parking lot in the steaming heat, you might feel anger and a kind of desolation, the beauty that should be here isn’t. And that could move you also, in a way of aligning yourself toward the values of Jesus, the values of the Christian community, the values that lead you back toward God. So consolation is any movement of the spirit that causes you to turn yourself in freedom toward the face of God. Desolation is anything that causes us to turn away, or very often to close in on ourselves, or sometimes, as you mentioned, to lie to ourselves about ourselves, so that we can continue to seem to fit in when we don’t.

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Jared  

What if formation is de-formation? And what I mean by that is, it rubs me the wrong way to say consolation is what points us to God or the face of God, and I say it that way because I would say my formation was a de-formation. I was sort of coded with—the face of God, turning toward God, had a very specific set of behaviors, and thoughts and beliefs that were not life-giving to me. And so whatever that is, it can be going to the movies or listening to a Jay-Z CD. I was so programmed that if you had asked me, at that time, “In your deep wrestling, and in your discernment, is that really life-giving?” And I would have said in my little, you know, 9 or 10, 11 year-old way of thinking of things—like no, because I felt guilty when I did those things. But now I look back and say that was the formation. That’s what I was handed. And it took me a long time to mature out of that, to recalibrate that inner sense, and have it be more aligned with the character and who I want to be in a way that I feel really good about. But how do you do this discernment when the calibration is off? Does that make sense?

Lisa  

Oh, yeah. And let me make it worse. I’d say that people’s calibration to one extent or another is always off. There’s always something about each of us where we’re just not on track. And for each of us it’s different things, right? For you, what was it that first led you to say, “Gee, this doesn’t feel like God to me.”

Jared  

Okay, I think a few things. One, I was obsessed with reading the Bible as a kid. And so I came to conclusions about like, well I don’t think that’s really what it’s saying. I came to that pretty early on and so I just had my own questions about the framework that I was given, that I thought the Bible itself was sort of problematic, even from the text itself. But then secondly, I think importantly, my disposition. I have a personality where I don’t necessarily do well with just being handed authority as a framework. And so I tend to be a little mistrustful of that anyway, so I was always like, okay, yeah, I feel really guilty about that. But then once I had an out I was sort of like, no, no, no, no. Nope, that is not the vision of who I want to be. And was able to kind of go on a path where I felt like I had a solid sense of self early on, which I think I just was lucky in that way.

Lisa  

Yeah, I think you were lucky—not because you didn’t put an enormous amount of personal initiative into this, right? So I’m not saying you just happened to, right—but I think we all are dependent on seeing different ways of being, different ways of maturing for ourselves, and having the courage really and the imagination to try new things and see what happens. I think, for example, of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was a very important writer, even though he was a cloistered monk. A very important writer, among other things, in Catholic-Buddhist dialogue. And so he wrote really wonderful books about Zen Buddhism. And what he found was that monks can talk to each other, right? Catholic monks and Buddhist monks have things in common that not-monks don’t. And so they could have these fruitful discussions, even though they had these very, very different theological frameworks and theological commitments. It wasn’t that people left their theological commitments at the door, it was that they had things that they could share with each other about how they live those commitments. 

Similarly, I think when we look at the role models that are given to us, what happens when we look outside our usual circles? What happens when we say, “Oh, yeah, what would it be if I wanted to do like St. Francis of Assisi did or like what Rosa Parks did?” and really be willing to take a next step really be willing in that conscience space of encounter with God, to say, “Okay, I’m going to take a step, I’m going to experiment with this, and see what happens.” And so you said it yourself, right, you found yourself more able to have a stronger sense of self, when you found yourself in this other tradition, and it felt freer. And freedom is never just freedom, right, in the sense of license, right? But freedom to really contribute what you uniquely have that God gave you, for yourself and for the world.

Jared  

What I’m hearing is even kind of meta. On the outside of those questions is a recognition that discernment implies that answering these questions is a lifelong calibration, decalibration, recalibration, adjustment. I think, questions one and two—Who am I? And who am I called to become?—are connected. Because when I thought I was called to become a certain thing, that colored who I thought I was. And whenever I was able to adjust who I was, it changed who I felt called to become. Those were dialectics, they were playing off of each other. And I think it’s just this humility to recognize I’m constantly learning about who I am. And so that idea that, the answer to that first question is changing week by week, and month by month. And that changes the second one, who am I called to become, where I thought I was this, but the more I learn, and to your point, the more I see of examples, and the more I learn and grow in the world, and culture, and society, and just have experience, the more that changes. The discernment is the process by which we’re weaving in and out of those questions. Is that a fair way to say that?

Lisa  

Oh, absolutely. And I think your emphasis on growth is really, really key here. Because in some forms of ethics, like rule-based ethics and moral decision making, right, if you don’t obey a rule, you’re just bad. In virtue ethics, in this more conscience flavored, Ignatian flavored—I’m mixing a bunch of things together here—way of thinking about moral questions, it’s like, “Okay, so I didn’t do the best job I could.” So something tugs on my sleeve—that’s one of the roles of conscience, is that little tug at the sleeves—and you said, “Well… I could do better.” And then that “how am I gonna get there” is, sometimes it’s an experiment, right? That how am I gonna get there, is something that then you reflect on as you try something new or different, and say, “Oh, my gosh, that is better.” 

I remember, for example, I was invited to be a volunteer at a prison when I was a doctoral student. And so I said, okay, and I went in with a lot of really bad preconceptions. And I sat there in the mass and listened to—this a women’s prison—I listened to the women praying for the whole world. And I thought, “Oh, my gosh, I am in the presence of people who society has said need to be locked up, but people who can teach me a lot spiritually about how to transcend where we are to be better people.” I was humbled and amazed and invited deeper into spiritual conversations, right? That involve just being aware of where we see the Spirit of God at work, even if we don’t expect it, or even if I think that I’m just coming in from the outside to offer something. No, I’m coming in and here was this rich experience in front of me.

Jared  

Well Lisa, I could talk to you about this for a while. I love this kind of stuff and I feel like we could just keep going on and on. But unfortunately, we’re running out of time and I wanted to make this as practical as we can here at the end. So if we grew up, if some of our listeners, you know, me, grew up with this “just do what the Bible says” mentality and we’re now trying to develop our own sense of conscience and decision making a discernment around these three questions. What are some practices for people to try? Where can people start to maybe shed a more rules-based framework and move more toward this nuanced discernment way of thinking about decision making?

Lisa  

Yeah, I want to think about resources for conscience. How do we become people who can make better decision makers, better moral decision makers, and the resources for formation of conscience are up to a thousands, right? But let me just offer a couple. Prayer. Right? If I’m trying to figure out what to do, I can pray about it. Not a surprise to people of faith, right? But very often again, in a sometimes overintellectualized understanding of conscience, we can think of prayer as a condiment rather than part of the substance of what we’re doing. Study. Right? Study in some ways of—you said you were obsessed with reading the Bible, and you found it problematic in some ways. Yeah, that’s what study will do. Study will open new questions for you, showing you ways of thinking that are new. Think about—another resource for formation of conscience is art. Very often in art, we find depictions of the good news and the bad news of human living, right? And so art is an important resource for formation of conscience, that helps us think better. I saw a picture recently of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, but what it was was a man and his wife, and a third person sitting in the diner eating fast food. It’s like, “Ah, okay, so what happens if I play out that road to Emmaus situation, here in my time? Who is unpacking the scriptures for me today?” So art can do that. 

Thinking about the ways that Christian tradition has answered questions in the past, right? On a good day, Christian tradition is a particular community’s attempt to live as faithfully as we can. On a bad day, we’ve been wrong, and need to be corrected. But it’s always worth finding out how we thought about things in the past. And then I think, think about saints. Who are the people who really lead you to say, “Oh, yeah, that’s the kind of person that I really find admirable,” knowing that over time, yeah, sometimes the saints we had as a kid, they’re not going to be our saints when we’re adults. We find different saints for [Chuckles] different situations and different times in our lives. 

And then there’s always that feedback loop into flourishing. The “how’s that working for you?” question. So for example, it’s a trick in Ignatian spirituality, you imagine yourself, you’re trying to make a decision about this or that, you say, “Okay, I am imagining myself on my deathbed, many, many years from now, and thinking back on this decision. Which way leads me to feel like I’ve made a better decision?” And then just play it out in your imagination. That “how’s that working for you?” question, or “how would you think of that, looking back at it from later in your life?” question is a way of imagining the impact of a particular decision. And I think these bring you into sort of broader circles of conversation, which is good, because if you think about the holy spirit, alive and at work in the whole world, right, then the holy spirit is touching each of us in a different way, and bringing something to the fore, that otherwise the world won’t know unless we say it. There’s a way in which that formation of conscience depends deeply on other people living their truth, and each of us living our own truth as well. So again, the beginning of a much longer conversation about formation of conscience. But those are just some starting points.

Jared  

Each one of those sort of tipped me off to a lot of experiences in my life and so I really appreciate that imagination of who am I called to become. I just remember so many different characters in movies and things that I watched when I was a kid and I sort of took these little pieces or these virtues that I sort of saw up on the screen and those were powerful for me as ways of thinking about how I wanted to be in the world.

Lisa  

Jared  

Barbie is a great way to end our conversation. Faith for Normal People where we talk about Ignatian formation of conscience, and the Barbie movie. I love it. I really appreciate the conversation. So thanks so much.

Lisa  

Thank you Jared, this was great.

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time…

Pete  

With Pete and Jared.

Jared  

Alright, let’s get into the meat of this episode. Because Lisa quotes Thomas Aquinas on never betraying our conscience. And I pushed back a little bit and I am curious, your thoughts on never betraying your conscience? And what is conscience to you, Pete? Do you feel in touch with it? How has that changed maybe as you’ve matured and grown? Talk to me about your conscience.

Pete  

Well, I think it’s a tough question in this sense, because, you know, we’ve talked to many people on this podcast, and we’ve had the same experience, and my kids have had the experience of being told that you know, your conscience, that inner voice, is corrupt and you can’t listen to it at all. And you know, the other extreme is like, “always listen to it, never betray it.” And maybe I’m some place in the middle. I take my conscience very seriously. I listen to it, because to me, my conscience is sort of my unfiltered self that sees things, that doesn’t go through my ego. That’s how I understand conscience. And so I want to and I do trust my conscience, but I don’t know if there’s room for interrogating our conscience as well and seeing like, okay, is this old Pete here conscience? Or is this older, wiser Pete conscience? And those are, those are tough things to navigate. But I think that’s what it means to be human too. And I don’t know, what about you?

Jared  

Yeah, I mean, I think doing some thinking since the episode, I have a knee jerk reaction to this idea of never betraying our conscience. Because it maybe feels to me, and I don’t want to at all put words in Lisa’s mouth. We didn’t have time to, like, get into this. So I’m not necessarily disagreeing with Lisa, I’m just sort of bringing my own baggage to bear on this, which is the assumption growing up—to your point, like you were taught, don’t ever, you know, the idea is like, don’t trust your conscience. You can’t trust that inner voice. But also, that inner voice is the Holy Spirit. And it’s inerrant. And it’s always right, because that’s what conscience is, is the voice of God. And so you can’t betray that because it’s the voice of God. And that’s inerrant. And that was completely confusing to me. 

And I just realized that when I started changing my mind about morality, what’s right and wrong, it took a lot longer for my conscience to catch up. And that told me that my conscience was just my culturally conditioned sense of right and wrong that I likely inherited from my community and my parents.

Pete

There’s a corruption to our conscience, in a sense…?

Jared

I wouldn’t say it’s a corruption. I would say it’s a contextualization. 

Pete

Yeah.

Jared

It’s not inerrant. And so sometimes my conscience can be a good guide. And sometimes my conscience was wrong. Like, when my conscience told me that I was a rotten scoundrel because I bought rap CDs, my conscience was wrong. It was over acting morality that didn’t cert—like now I’m just like, no, that was—my feelings of guilt over buying rap CDs was not correct. So I did betray my conscience, because I intellectually came to the conclusion that that wasn’t wrong. So I bought the CDs. But I still felt guilty for like three years after it, until I finally got it to catch up to what I believed now to be true. Does that make sense?

Pete  

Yeah. I mean, it’s sort of like training your conscience in a sense. 

Jared

Correct. It’s like, we have to reframe it because I have all this tape in my head about what’s right and wrong. I no longer believe that. But those tapes are hard to overcome.

Pete  

Right. And sometimes, you know, and again, not to smack on churches here. But it is very common to think that inner conscience, well, you just have to make sure it’s God doing the talking through your conscience and not Satan.

Jared  

Right. And how do you do that?

Pete  

How do you do that? Like, and that’s just the thing. If you do something you say you’re obeying your conscience, but it’s something like buying rap CDs, well, that’s Satan. Right? That’s not helpful. And I want to say no, don’t talk to me. I just need to exercise what I think is right. But it’s to me, it’s very, very complicated. And I do—I have sympathy, though, with the idea of, and this is so loaded with problems even as I think about saying it. Well, I’m gonna say it anyway. That inner voice inside of us, I think of—without being able to defend it—as sort of like a spark of the divine that’s in us, it’s who we are as people. Now, we’re always in the process of growing and changing and developing. So that has to be kept in mind. It isn’t like, “whatever you happen to be thinking is great.” You know, that’s different than conscience, which is, to me, it’s that deep thing that you just know has truth in it, you know, that has almost like a purity to it. It’s like, no, it’s wrong to let that person talk to me like that. And I don’t care what the Church says. Right? I think conscience is a deep conviction and not just a thought that we have. And with you with the rap music, the deep conviction was it’s wrong to do this. But that had to be corrected.

Jared  

Right. And that’s always—I think it goes back to, like, the bigger picture, to have the humility to say I could be wrong. Like, this is my conviction, this is what my conscience is telling me now, but I could be wrong. And I think that leads to, I think, another question I wanted to ask you about. Because this, this podcast episode was about decision making, and how do we frame our decisions? And, you know, Lisa advocates for balancing spiritual tools—I would just call them tools, they don’t necessarily have to be spiritual—just tools, intellectual tools, spiritual tools, emotional tools for making big decisions. What’s your process, Pete? How do you make big decisions?

Pete  

I go to see if there’s any scotch in the house, that’s the first thing I do. No, I’m just kidding. I am kidding, folks. I mean honestly, I probably sit there and overthink it. That’s how I approach decision making. I try to think in terms of what are the voices in my head that are having undue influence as I think about this issue? Am I getting trapped into ways of thinking that are just rooted in fear instead of rooted in some sort of an expectation of the future? So I think that’s—and to me, see, that is, that’s also a spiritual exercise. It’s not looking at a book and going down, you know, a 10 point thing to make sure you have the right decisions. It’s more complicated than that. But it’s—I would love to be able to say I pray about it, and then I get the answer. But that has never happened. You know, I don’t think that God and decision making, however that works, doesn’t work like that. I think, you know, meditating can be a good thing to do just to clear your head from thinking something stupid. But, you know, I just, I just, I don’t know. That’s how I do it. I just, it’s not really fancy. It’s nothing fancy. I won’t be writing a book on decision making anytime soon. I can barely write a paragraph on it.

Jared  

The two things I’ve learned, I think, that have been helpful to me, it reminded me of a story of—I was part of this small group. And there was a person there who was in his late 60s, he became a dear friend, old Mennonite guy. So pretty culturally conservative, you know. And we were making a decision like to buy a new car, maybe it was to move. I don’t remember what the decision was, but it was a very big decision. And we came and told the group of the decision, and he was so baffled. He was like, why wouldn’t you come to this group and talk about it? And like, get our opinion on what you’re going to do? And that felt like such an intimate question to ask. And it occurred to me that, like, I have a lot of baggage around asking people their opinion because I don’t want to look like a fool. I don’t want to be embarrassed if I’m not thinking about it right. And so I keep it close to my chest. But I really, just really stuck with me that our worlds were so different, where as a Mennonite kind of which is more community based, it was like unheard of that you would make a big decision without bringing it to your community and discerning together and hearing and listening and taking time to like, bat it around with others. And I was like—

Pete  

Yeah but do you make decisions in part by consulting with other people?

Jared  

I would say I do now. That was a good lesson for me to be like, oh, maybe other people do have some things to offer. But it took a lot of years to get over my baggage with like, I don’t do it. Not because I had never thought of it. It’s because no, I had acted like, no, I’m afraid like, I don’t want to look dumb, like I don’t know, I just had this sense of like, no, this is very private. I’m not gonna talk to other people about a big decision. I don’t want to be talked out of what I really want, or whatever the thing is. [Pete laughs] And so that was the kind of the second thing I’ve learned over the years is just being more patient with big decisions. I can be a quick decider, which has its advantages. It helps you know, kind of leadership when people are like hemming and hawing. It’s like, I can just make a decision. But sometimes I can be impatient when I don’t need to be and I can, I can be quick to make a decision when I don’t need to be. And it’s learning to sit in the discomfort of indecision for a long time until I get all of me on board with a particular decision. So those are like two things that I think have helped, kind of tools that I had to learn over time, and recognizing my own baggage with those and trying to overcome those.

Pete  

And I think, you know, there’s no need to baptize that process with Christianese. You know—

Jared  

Yeah and for me, it is like, I would call it like a spiritual practice. My spiritual practice is to be more community based in how I approach my life because I grew up so individualistic that it’s led to, I think, some shortsightedness in some other areas.

Pete

Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. 

Jared

All right. Well, uh—

Pete

Jared

As always, as always, case closed.

Pete  

See you, folks.

Jared  

Well thanks to everyone who supports the show! If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give. 

Pete  

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Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by The Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Natalie Weyand, Stephen Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, and Jessica Shao.