Leadership Transformed through Discernment, Part 2: Interview with Ruth Haley Barton

Have you ever noticed how a word can lose its meaning simply through overuse? Similar to semantic satiation—the psychological phenomenon whereby repeating a word over and over causes the word to lose its impact—we can sometimes hear certain words so frequently that they begin to lose their weight.

This happens often in Christian circles. Words or phrases packed with profound spiritual significance are used so frequently and casually that we lose sight of their importance. But when it comes to discernment—a word commonly used among believers—Ruth Haley Barton does just the opposite: she brings new depth and richness to a familiar word.

In Part 2 of this interview, Ruth takes us deeper into discernment, highlighting the ways it shapes the inner life of leaders and transforms teams. Ruth reflects on the embodied nature of discernment, offers practical ways to incorporate discernment in any work context, explores why indifference is both good and essential to the process, and reveals the surprising ways discernment can lighten the leader’s burden while deepening unity within teams.

If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.

You talk quite a bit about consolation and desolation in your books as key elements of discernment. Can you explain what you mean by these terms?

Consolation and desolation are not mere feelings, as some might think. They are actually visceral, in-the-body reactions and responses to things. The dynamics of consolation and desolation are experienced in our bodies, and Scripture teaches us that the body is a tool for our discernment.

Here’s where I would point us to Deuteronomy 30, where God speaks to the Israelites through Moses and says, See, I’ve set before you life and death, now choose life so that you and your descendants might live. Life and death are not up in the heavens, or across the ocean. They’re in your heart and in your mouth for you to observe. Another way to put it is it’s a sense of life flowing into me versus life draining away from me. That’s a visceral thing that’s happening in your body; your body knows things before you can even identify what emotion it actually is or what caused it.

So with consolation and desolation, you first have to be willing to work with your body and to trust that it’s a sort of tuning fork for the divine, that we are created to be attuned to spiritual realities in and through our bodies. And that you can trust it—that your body is a trustworthy instrument for discernment.

In some circles that’s a very scary thought, because we’ve been taught as Christians not to trust our bodies, but that’s just not what the Scriptures really teach. The Scriptures teach us that our bodies are a gift, and they’re meant to help us with our discernment. In the story of Jesus walking on the road to Emmaus, the disciples say, “Were not our hearts burning within us?” That’s how they knew it was Jesus they were speaking to—it was a visceral, in-the-body experience that Jesus was with them on the road that they weren’t able to figure out with their minds.

In regard to consolation, I would say there are several different ways that you could talk about it. It may come as a sense of all being right with the world, or it could be that you have a sense of God being with you. Even if you’re going through a deep grief, like having a funeral for someone that you loved, you can experience consolation. On the surface, you have your emotions of sorrow, grief, and loss, but underneath, you can still have this bedrock feeling that God is with you and you’re right where you’re supposed to be with God. That is very characteristic of consolation.

Another characteristic of consolation is that it’s a sense of freedom for your authentic self, a sense of freedom to be given over to God in love. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. We know that love is the litmus test of our spirituality, so when I’m free to be given over to others in love, that is a sign of consolation. Finally, with consolation comes what we read about in the book of Philippians: peace that passes understanding. Even when you’re going through something that’s really difficult, it passes your own understanding.

Desolation is the opposite. It’s the feeling that nothing is right with the world. It’s a feeling of being disconnected from God or being disconnected from our most authentic self. Maybe it’s an awareness that you can’t be who you really are in your work environment. You might not want to pay attention to it because who knows what it’s going to mean for your job, but that is the truth. There’s also a sense of not being able to be our most authentic self in God or that we aren’t free to be given over to others and to God in love. There can be a spirit of stuckness, or a spirit of confusion. These are experiences of desolation.

Going a bit deeper, how do you understand consolation and desolation specifically within the context of leadership and discernment?

In the context of leadership, discernment has to do with those inner dynamics that you feel in your heart: consolation, desolation, desire, and calling. There is a set of questions that I offer in Sacred Rhythms that gives us ways of paying attention. For example, if you’re deciding between two things, you might ask which one would give you the most consolation, the most sense of life, or the most sense of being able to be my most authentic self in God? I then encourage people to take a step forward in time to your deathbed, and as you look back on this decision, which decision would you wish you had made? It is very is powerful to take a step back and look at things from an eternal perspective, and consider what has the most spiritual value. Those are spiritual questions, not so much strategic ones. They are not coaching questions so that your career can go up and to the right. It’s not about that at all. These are spiritual questions that can be brought into the practice of discernment on your own and in community, like with your spiritual director, or close spiritual friends around you—because discernment doesn’t take place optimally outside of community. And then eventually, a way forward might begin to emerge.

Discernment has to do with those inner dynamics that you feel in your heart: consolation, desolation, desire, and calling.

And, here’s a little “technique” that’s really powerful: Once you think you’ve landed on your discernment, then before you start to make headlines with it, you walk around as if you’ve made that decision. And you listen at the level of consolation and desolation, desire and calling, and you wait for that inner confirmation. You seek inner confirmation in peace by locating where the peace rests. And so, you haven’t told anybody about your decision yet, but you’re, in a very interior way, walking around as if you had made it.

I’ll add one more thing that’s extremely challenging for leaders: when utilizing consolation and desolation as part of your discernment, you need practice knowing in which part of you does the consolation rests. Does the consolation rest in the true self part of you, or does the consolation rest in the false self, or the ego self part of you? You can see how that would make a difference! Because somebody’s ego might get stroked by getting offered a promotion—which is a fine feeling, it’s okay to have it. But, if you go into that deeper place, and if you’re an experienced discerner, then you might also sense desolation in there, too. Maybe you’re thinking, This new job is going to require me to travel more than I want to travel. My kids are young and I promised them and myself that I’d be there for them. There’s desolation in that authentic part of yourself—it’s conflicting with the kind of parent that you want to be. So you see, there’s the ego part and there’s the parent part—there’s the authentic part. So leaders have to get better at discerning where the consolation or the desolation lives within themselves.

In Pursuing God’s Will Together, you describe a communal process of discernment for ministry leaders. What wisdom would you offer a board member or executive who wants to practice that kind of discernment in a fast-paced, results-driven, non-ministry organization?

First, it’s important to recognize the sphere of influence that you have. Sometimes when people first read Pursuing God’s Will Together, there’s a tendency to overstep, to talk to the person high up above and say, I just read this book, we should do this. But that’s not their sphere of influence. Instead, begin by asking, What is the territory that God has given me to work? If you lead your own team, you can bring some of these things in without even using religious language, if that would be helpful. Then you can work faithfully in your field rather than overstepping and trying to lead up too high before you’re ready. Work with the team that God has given you. Work with the influence you have.

Here are some simple, practical examples of how to bring these things in. One would be asking those on your team to share how they feel about a certain decision being considered. You don’t have to use spiritual language like consolation and desolation, but you can invite people to share at a more human level to consider how certain decisions make them feel. And if God is working in your own life, you can find ways to share these things and embed some of them without even having to make it religious.

You could also incorporate silence before a meeting where you’re making big decisions. You can say, for example, “Let’s take a moment to be quiet, settle down inside, let go of the meeting we were just in, and touch the deeper parts of who we are.” There’s no question in anybody’s mind these days about the value of silence.

Here’s another way: in discernment, we talk about giving people an opportunity to seek inner confirmation and peace. We do that by giving people time to leave the meeting and walk around as if we’ve made a decision. You could say, Hey, I feel like we’ve said a lot today, and it seems like we’ve come to a good decision. But let’s take a break. Go sit with this decision, and we’ll come back to make our final decision in a week. What you’re doing is introducing some of the discernment practice and process, but you’re just not making it religious. But it’s still highly beneficial because that break gives people a chance to have it confirmed within themselves. In the space you’ve given them, new and important questions come forward, or resistances and reservations. Giving people a chance to think about something for a bit and come back is valuable.

Many leaders feel like leadership often happens under urgency, risk, and with incomplete information. What practices would you recommend to leaders to help them remain spiritually grounded when there isn’t time for an extended discernment or process, yet the consequences of a decision are significant?

The more you practice discernment in your own personal life, the more you’re able to trust it in highly anxious or urgent moments. We learn we can trust God to work in nanoseconds, if that’s what we need, because we’ve been practicing it. We’ve practiced learning how to pay attention to consolation and desolation, and we’re willing to trust it more quickly than when we’re new to discernment.

The more you practice discernment in your own personal life, the more you’re able to trust it in highly anxious or urgent moments.

In Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about intuitive leadership, which is a level of discernment. He says that intuitive leaders can often perceive something in 90 seconds. For example, if an intuitive leader is interviewing a potential new hire, within 90 seconds that leader might know whether this person is a good hire or not. They might still go ahead and do the longer interview, but within 90 seconds they know if it’s right. And here’s the other part: they trust it. They trust their intuition, which again is another way of talking about discernment. It’s not completely one-to-one, but I think that intuition and learning to trust it is part of discernment.

So when you’re practicing discernment in your personal life—and you’re learning to trust it—then God can bring it in a moment when you need it.

In regard to the urgency leaders feel, I think the key question is whether or not this situation or decision is as urgent as everybody says it is. As a spiritual director, when a leader comes to me for spiritual direction all riled up with a sense of urgency, I will ask them right there, Who is creating this sense of urgency? Where is that coming from? What is the urgency about? And you’d be surprised when offered that question how often it becomes clear to the leader that it’s not as urgent as the people around them seem to think it is.

Now, if it is truly urgent, I believe God will give you what you need. But it’s important to always be asking questions like, Does the final decision have to be made this week?, or Would another week or another 24 hours hurt? And as human beings who respect one another in leadership, if somebody that we really respect says, I’m partway there, but I need a little bit of time, can we respect each other enough to say, This person wouldn’t slow us down if they didn’t really feel the need to do it? Can we respect them enough to consider that if they have reservations or they need a little bit more time, we can give it to them? I had a teacher who used to say that with God there are no emergencies. So, we have to ask ourselves, What’s creating the emergency here?

You write about the prayer of indifference as the most essential dynamic of discernment. Can you explain what this prayer is and how this prayer offers freedom from fear and over-functioning for leaders who hold significant power and responsibility?

Most of us don’t think of indifference as being a positive thing. But in discernment, it is. It’s being indifferent to anything but the will of God. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. We don’t see the words or the phrase “prayer of indifference” in Scripture, but we do have examples of it. First, when the angel comes to tell Mary about the birth of Christ, she says, Let it be with me according to your will. That is a prayer of indifference, to say, I know this is going to be inconvenient for me, I know it may cause pain for me, and I know that I’m going to be misunderstood, but let it be with me according to your will. She knew the risks and still wanted to surrender to the will of God.

And then in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus himself actually had to wrestle and work hard to get to the prayer of indifference. He begins, If it is possible, let this cup pass from me. He knew that what he was going to be entering into was going to be challenging, and he actually sweated great drops of blood trying to get to the place of indifference. He finally did and his prayer of indifference was, Not my will, but thine be done. That is a prayer of indifference to anything but the will of God.

So we have Jesus and Mary, who are really good examples of being able to pray a prayer of indifference to anything but the will of God. And we see that it’s not that we’re indifferent as in apathetic. It’s that we are indifferent to anything but the will of God—and the will of God is something we’re actually very passionate about! And once we know what it is, nobody can stop us, hopefully. Look at Jesus—he got up, set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem, and nothing was gonna stop him once he knew what the will of God was.

There’s also the prayer for indifference. This is asking God to do a work in our hearts that we usually as humans cannot do for ourselves. In most of our decisions, we have some sense of an agenda or an outcome of what we prefer. For a Christian to get to the place where we can pray with Jesus, Not my will, but thine be done, that is a work of the Spirit. We cannot make ourselves indifferent, but we can pray for it, and we can open up to the Holy Spirit to give us indifference as a gift. So this prayer for indifference enables me hopefully to be able to eventually pray the prayer of indifference—Not my will, but thine be done.

We cannot make ourselves indifferent, but we can pray for it, and we can open up to the Holy Spirit to give us indifference as a gift.

For leaders who sense their need for discernment but feel unsure about where to start, what spiritual practices most reliably form or cultivate a discerning heart over time? In your experience, what tends to be harder for people and what surprises them with grace?

Discernment, in some uncanny way, can lift the burden of leadership. Because it’s done in community, I’m no longer trying to discern by myself, like going up to the mountain and trying to come down with the Ten Commandments. Instead, I’m seeing discernment as happening with the group of people I’m leading. There’s still a tremendous amount of responsibility for each individual to be growing as a discerner, and to be in the process of spiritual transformation for themselves, because Paul says so clearly that being on an intentional journey of transformation is a prerequisite to being able to discern. But now you’re sharing the burden, which is exactly what God did for Moses when Moses was starting to be overwhelmed in his leadership. God said, You need some other people to share this leadership with. And that was when the 70 elders helped him to carry the burden of leadership. So when we discern with others, we are really entering into a practice where it’s no longer all on the leader alone. It’s no longer going to be about one leader producing something.

That is an unexpected result. You go into discernment thinking that you’re in it to discern the will of God. Then you come out saying, Wow, that really lightened my burden as a leader. I’ve been in leadership roles for well over 30 years now, and I’m not even sure I could have endured if I hadn’t had the practice of discernment and the commitment to discernment. Because you’re sharing it with God and with others.

Another unexpected outcome is unity. We are going into discernment trying to seek and know the will of God, but we come out with more unity as a group than when we went in. I’ve heard that over and over and over again from people who have engaged the practice of pursuing God’s will together. They had no idea that they would come out with so much unity. And in fact, eventually people will start to say, Well, the outcome doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we’ve come to unity. The value of the lasting outcome is that this leadership group is in more unity than they’ve ever been before.

About Ruth Haley Barton
Ruth Haley Barton is founder of the Transforming Center, a ministry dedicated to strengthening the souls of pastors, ministry leaders, and the congregations and organizations they serve. A practitioner, teacher, and leader in the area of Christian spirituality and spiritual formation for over twenty-five years, she can always be found teaching and leading the Transforming Center’s two-year Transforming Community experience—a practice-based spiritual formation journey for leaders.

Ruth is a trained spiritual director and retreat leader, and is the author of numerous books and resources on the spiritual life including Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Sacred Rhythms, and Pursuing God’s Will Together, plus her most recent book, Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again. She reflects regularly on spirituality and leadership in her blog, Beyond Words, and her podcast Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership.