we pause tο think at all.
Discretion ponders choice of action—or, more frequently, non-action. It determines how we decide to use or not to use what we have discerned. In Ursula Κ. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, Ged the mage says, “It is much easier . . . to act than to refrain from acting. . . . [Dο] nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble . . . do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must dο and which you cannot do in any other way.”9
Discretion entails and elaborates discernment. It has two potentially conflicting meanings, according tο the Shorter Oxford Dictionary: “Deciding as one thinks fit,” and—outrageous tο an in-your-face culture—“being discreet, discernment, prudence, judgment.” It defines the word discreet as “judicious, prudent; circumspect in speech or action; unobtrusive.”
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Discretion is a space apart. It has to do with preserving an emptiness where creative, even salvific potential can emerge, which is beyond what we could determine by self-conscious reason alone. Within it is the possibility of harmonious integration of every aspect of our lives, a potential that is brought to bear on every decision to act or refrain from acting. Within this space are silence, stillness, and waiting. Discretion is what Aristotle referred to as the space where virtue is found.10
Jesus gives a perfect example of discretion when he is confronted with the woman taken in the very act of adultery. He is entirely aware of the many agendas that her accusers bring along with her. He knows that he holds someone’s life, perhaps many lives, in his hands. He is silent. He squats and writes in the dust. (Much ink has been spilled speculating on what he wrote, from doodles to the names of the mistresses of the accusers.)
But the accusers—“the devil” is “the accuser”—cannot bear Jesus’s silence. They force the issue and, by doing so, elicit one of the great rejoinders of all time. Jesus stands up. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” (One hears, perhaps, a quiet, quizzical, ironic voice.) He squats again and resumes his writing. After the men have left, he stands to address the woman. “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? . . . Neither dο Ι condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again” (John 8:7, 10–11).
Jesus could have taken sides. He could have thrown the first stone to his political advantage. He could have blasted the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy. He could have allowed himself the short-term, personal gratification of inflaming petty factionalism for his own benefit. He could have ignored the woman after the men went away, which would have been proper protocol in his time. But Jesus’s discretion brings the resolution of the situation to a completely different and far more profound and relevant level. Nο one is condemned but no one can go away unashamed, either. By simply creating a space where all the resonances of the situation can amplify one another, Jesus has chosen to enable the potential for a greater good.
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The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, took office at one of the most difficult periods of history for the Anglican Communion. He set aside his own preferences in order to keep all groups talking and, more importantly, to try to get them truly to listen tο one another. He kept silence, eschewing empty public statements, when many people thought he should have spoken in support of one faction or another.
After the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States elected a woman primate in 200611—while in the same moment the Church of England was still debating whether it would allow women bishops at all, or whether a woman bishop was even possible—the Archbishop deemed the time appropriate tο speak. But rather than promulgating a diktat, which in any event would have been inappropriate to the largely symbolic jurisdiction of his office, he issued some “reflections,” which amounted to neither a judgment nor a proposal, nor a declaration. His words were exactly what he said they were: reflections, no more, no less.
His rationale became evident the following week in his opening address tο the Synod of the Church of England, when he summed up his vision of Anglican unity:
I make no secret of the fact that my commitment and conviction are given to the ideal of the Church Catholic. I know that its embodiment in Anglicanism has always been debated, yet I believe that the vision of Catholic sacramental unity without centralization or coercion is one that we have witnessed to at our best and still need to work at. That is why a concern for unity—for unity (I must repeat this yet again) as a means to living in the truth—is not about placing the survival of an institution above the demands of conscience, God forbid. It is a question of how we work out, faithfully, attentively, obediently, what we need to do and say in order to remain within sight and sound of each other in the fellowship to which Christ has called us. It has never been easy and it isn’t now. But it is the call that matters, and that sustains us together in the task.12
“How we work out, faithfully, attentively, obediently, what we need to do and say . . .”—this is an instruction in learning discretion. Williams does not use these words casually; they arise from a lifetime’s study of classical and Christian tradition. All three adverbs point to a discretion that arises from a matrix of silence.
“Faithfully” means releasing our tightly held prejudices and opinions concerning the way the world should work; such opinions can reflect only a small and blinkered aspect of truth. Faith is the acknowledgment that there is a larger vision than we can ask or imagine, and the willingness to be taken into it.
“Attentively” means not only listening but listening at a level of receptive responsiveness, allowing the words of the other to reach deeply into our hearts so that we may behold, however obliquely, the vast mystery toward which they gesture, the mystery of the human person, which is as deep as the mystery of the God whose nature each of us shares.
“Obediently,” in its root sense, is the attentive listening of the heart that Christ teaches (Phil 2:5–11). In other words, “putting on the mind of Christ” is the refusal to grasp or claim our prejudices, an attempt at possession that gives us an illusory sense of our own omnipotence and creates interior noise that impedes listening. Instead, obedience entails a continually expanding self-knowledge, a heart that knows there is nothing good or evil of which it is not capable, a heart that longs for conversion from the conviction of its own judgment tο being filled with the spacious perspective of the mind of a merciful God.
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Discretion cannot be taught; it is supremely mimetic; it is learned by example. This mimesis is especially clear in the desert tradition. The seeker divides his or her time, more or less, half in the cell and half taking counsel with the elders, who are exemplars of discretion. One learns from such people not so much by baring one’s thoughts, although this practice is often mentioned, but far more by absorbing the elders’ example through a kind of spiritual osmosis.
When one visits an elder, perhaps the light of charism is lit, perhaps it is not. Often the disciple lacks the discernment to recognize the light, even less the discretion to receive it. His mind is too full of his own ideas. The abba or amma may offer food or not, may allow the seeker to stay or not, most probably will not speak. On the other hand, the disciple may receive a word to do the best she can, tο eat when she is hungry, and sleep when she is sleepy, and pray as she is able. On rare occasions, the disciple might be allowed to stay and imitate in silence what the elder does.
Discretion is not always what our genteel sensibilities might expect. Abba Abraham left the desert to go to the brothel where his niece had immured herself after being raped. He paid the brothel keeper for her time, ostensibly for sex but in reality to persuade his niece of her continuing worth as a human person, no matter what she had suffered, and of God’s loving welcome, and his.13
The desert tradition reveals that discretion is not simply a skill; it is more like an art, the creation of an atmosphere where new connections can be made. We learn this art by repeated immersion in the resurrection to be found in the silence of receptive waiting, in the spaciousness of God, which is the true wellspring of our lives and our truth.
We have forgotten that the school of discretion has always been found in fidelity tο our own core silence. Silence