Intuition, Discernment, and Prelest

 

An ever-present struggle in the Christian life can be boiled down to a simple question:  How do we know?

And the hard answer is, usually, we don't.

We put words on our lack of true insight and knowledge.  Intuition, discernment, and prelest all can be used to describe the same phenomenon.  Sometimes our "spidey sense" is telling us something is wrong (or right), and that sense is correct.  That's intuition.  Sometimes we have the same feeling, but we're wrong.  That is a lack of discernment. 

Sometimes we think that because we've been right in the past, we must be clairvoyant, with a gift for intuition and discernment.  That's prelest.

What is the cure for this spiritual blindness?  Humility.  Remembering that because we experience something one way, that doesn't mean someone else experienced it as we did.  Remembering that even if something seems to be one way, we often only have fragments of the information we need to have a firm opinion that things are as they seem.  Remembering that even if God blesses us with insight and discernment, that is not because we are so great, but because He is, and we should never let such gifts go to our head or expect they will be repeated in the future.  None of this is magic. Doing the stuff is not equivalent to a vending machine, where we put in our effort and God gives us what we want.  Often, it is in doing the stuff that we figure out that God wants us to do something completely opposed to our subjective desires.

Of course, the biggest impediment to actually doing these things is the very antithesis of humility -- pride.  Too often, we want what we want, and even though that same little intuition is telling us something is wrong, we are too blinded by our desires and wishes to admit it, much less act to correct it.  Our contentment and sloth win out over what our very being tells us to be true.

I believe that, over time, most people in any given situation will eventually come to follow Godly intuition, exercise discernment, and avoid prelest. At some level, you have to be willfully ignorant to pretend some situations are okay.  But I have also come to believe people can convince themselves of a lot of things that just aren't so.  Humility remains the cure.  Be humble enough to understand when God is leading you a certain direction, especially if you don't want to go in that direction.  And be more humble still about presuming that God's plan always aligns with ours.  Because that is rarely the case, even with the saints.