Howard Thurman - Week 3

Howard Thurman - Week 3

Surprisingly, I don’t think I’ve ever explained why I named my Substack “gather the inklings,” so here we go. I understand discernment as being the process in which we gather the inklings, the quiet moments we might miss, how some things light up something in our hearts, how some things send us into dark nights of the soul. Moments are fleeting, so we might miss them if we don’t gather them somehow, give them a place to be, so we can return to them and give them their due. You might gather them into the Notes app, or a piece of paper, a Moleskine that fits in your pocket, or even voice memos. It doesn’t matter how you gather them, it only matters they have a home so you can honor how they might be showing you a way forward into your soul’s direction.

The readings from Howard Thurman this week brought my soul, again and again, back to this practice of discernment, one of the most powerful practices of my life. Discernment can feel like one of those weird, spiritual words, or maybe you are in a context where the word discernment is almost always used to refer to someone praying about whether they feel called to ordained ministry. But discernment is far more than even vocation as a whole, because discernment is the practice of holy listening, of giving our minds, bodies, and souls to the art of seeking direction, girded with trust, without necessarily knowing where that direction is headed. Discernment certainly led me into the vocation of ordained ministry, but maybe more powerfully, discernment is the practice that led me into sobriety, into getting to know myself, into loving myself, and into trust amidst the times in my life when trust should have felt foolish.