Friday, January 06, 2012  Discernment and Dithering  Michael
Hannon has an excellent post on the current Catholic fad of
"discerning one's personal vocation." For those of you who are
not Catholic, "discerning your personal vocation" is Catholic-
speak for "dithering about what you should do with your life." I
find this bit of faddish Catholic-speak largely exasperating,
because in fact almost everything that goes into what's known as
the 'discernment process' really is just trying to make people
dither. The point of true discernment, as opposed to this
fakery, is to come to a clear decision on the basis of the kind
of information that's needed for a good decision. For some
people this will take some time, yes, but for others it won't.
What people don't need are stupid exercises and long drawn out
excuses; they need good, clear information in the form in which
they can best understand it. That's it.  The fact of the matter
is that every Christian already knows how to discern their
vocation; every Christian has