Welcome to part one with Father David McCallum. Father David is a Jesuit priest who also happens to be intricately informed and I have known him for years. Father David currently works at the Vatican and I find him a very learned, wise and humble man. He has a lot to share. Also he has a lot of insight into the late Pope Francis and our new Pope, Pope Leo. So I think you're going to love this. Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society, Spirit, Life Enhancing, Paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuy. And our guest today is Father David McCallum, a Jesuit priest currently serving in the Vatican who has played many roles. He's been a professor and an administrator in the Jesuit Higher education at the Lemoyne College in Syracuse. And he is the executive director of the Discerning Leadership Program which offers guidance and training for clergy at many levels. And he's also a very broadly educated and big picture thinker, someone who's being a student and expert actually in topics like adult development and Ken Wilber's Integral Theory. So he brings a lot of different, different elements and facets to a consideration of all things. And he's devoted his life to the church. So David, there are a lot of topics to be covered. You know, religion in today and the church today are going through so many changes. But let's start personally. Please say something about how you came to devote your life to the Catholic Church.

Oh my gosh, what a mystery that is. Yeah. Roger, first of all, it's a pleasure to be with you after years and you and John. You know, I was raised Catholic, but a post Vatican II Catholic. Jesus was my close friend and I never had any sense of the fear that people had grown up with in the pre Vatican II church. The sense that I had was that this was a welcoming and a really a nurturing place and community to be part of. And I never thought about priesthood as a younger person, but attending a Jesuit college, I was studying humanities and actually our program was called the Integral Honors Program. This would be back in the late 80s and we had Jesuits who were chaplains and professors, brilliant guys who loved their subjects and loved us. And I had one particular experience early on of a retreat where I felt that I thou experience in quite a profound way. In a way that from that point on I knew that I needed to factor that in to whatever and whoever I would become. But what it would mean had no idea. But from that point on, I was on the radar of the Jesuits and was then shoulder tapped a few times to think about this. And gradually, you know, after a couple of years of a lot of, you know, I'd say cold feet and then kind of approach avoidance, I eventually couldn't deny that something really deep was attracting me. I did an honors project looking at the fiction of Graham Greene, if you know his fiction and spy stuff, right.

International spy stuff.

And also, you know, looking at these protagonists who are very muddled in their kind of moral character and people of faith and of tremendous doubt, very human, very, you know, very much a kind of product of their times in the modern era and asking the deep existential questions, you know, the 21st and 20th century. And I really had this insight that I didn't want to end up like a lot of these characters who were just filled with egotism, and it betrayed who they were and who they wanted to be as well as their relationships. And for me, I had enough insight into myself as a young person to see I could end up that way. I don't want to end up with, you know, my vanity and greed and kind of achievement orientation getting the best of me. And I also knew that I needed a community to help me along the way. I needed a community. I needed a spirituality that brought me into a more direct relationship with God, that taught me how to sort through the motivations and the kind of urges that I was experiencing, and that would lead me deeper into freedom. And the heart of kind of our Jesuit spirituality is a deep, deep invitation to spiritual freedom. Freedom from attachments that are unhelpful, freedom from the kind of emotional disorder that early traumas can bring. And, you know, that we experience when we're unconditionally but conditionally loved. So by the time I was 21, I made the choice to enter the Society of Jesus. And in fact, it was. It was exactly the experience of being as a College student in 1989, hearing that the Jesuits had been assassinated in El Salvador, in San Salvador, in the fall of 1989, that. That I was really feeling like, okay, this is going to have consequences, and I want to have a life that has consequence. So that was my naive beginning, I would say. And, you know, the story from then on, 35 years later, has been a really interesting adventure. So, yeah, can I.

Can I say what I need to say, Roger, so we can get on to the other stuff? I'm great for getting off script, if we had one, but that's me. This been the last few Days preparing for this has been very transformative. And this, that's the name of the game here. Deep transformation. So give you a little background. I had a very powerful spiritual awakening when I was 12 years old, reading the New Testament. I grew up Catholic, by the way. I'm definitely a cultural Catholic. And all of a sudden I had the experience that God is love and God is everywhere. And it just like, I thought this was the most important thing anybody could know. And why didn't they ever tell me about that in church? So I never dawned in my mind to go to a priest to get, you know, counseling and everything. So one thing led to another. I ended up a couple of years later joining a religious cult for about eight years. And then I. I joined the army and got out of there. I wanted something to really break. I didn't want. I wanted to burn the bridge. And that was a good choice. And anyway, so I just. I was just struggling with God, the whole thing. And it says, I don't care. I want the truth that there is no God. There is God, you know, But I just didn't. I was so full of this cult stuff that I had to. Had to get free of that. And then a few years later, I mean, I was spiritual. Not, you know, spirituality came to the fore in my life. We had this integral Christianity thing. And Brother David Stendel Ross was there in Boulder, Colorado, and some woman had a breakthrough or a breakdown and really touched me. And he gave her a hug. And I said, can I vote too? I usually don't say that kind of thing, but he did. And I said, where were you 40 years ago? And he said this, this hug goes back 40 years, you know, thank you. And that really did something in my heart was step forward for me. And in preparation for this, well, we've been doing these conversations with, ah, Almas or Hamid, and he is, he's an amazing man. But one of the things he said in the books that we're. We're going through with him, he says that you can't practice your way to enlightenment, you know, and he says, in fact, practice sometimes will just reinforce a separate self. Yeah, and Roger and I practiced a lot, you know, so I was like, oh, great. And I kind of knew that, you know, but when I was reading your website, here, here's the point of all this, which I really liked, by the way. Did you write the copy? It's very good. Everybody should look at it. I was very touched. And again, I thought, wow, if I'd have seen this kind of church when I was growing up, I'd probably still be there, but I was this, where it gets very. It's all very personal. But I read the phrase, I think it's an opening to grace, and I just went, that's. That's the answer to the co op about practice won't get you enlightenment and can make you reinforce a separate self. The practice is opening to grace. Yeah. And I was deeply moved. And instead of, you know, got to practice today, since then, I just. I can't wait to go and just open myself to God, if you will. And I really appreciate it. And I just want to let you know how what you're writing and what you're doing, it sounds so healthy. Sounds very Quakerly in some ways, which is a group I have respect for. But if that's the direction of the church, thank you. Oh, and one last thing is that when my country does bad stuff, I feel really bad, okay. Because I'm American. When my church, albeit separated, does bad things, I feel very bad. I take it all personally. It hurts. So with that, I'll just.

John, you know, when you spoke, I just want to just honor the opening in your heart that was happening and to invite you to allow yourself the willingness for your own vulnerability to stay there with that. When you do feel that, because, you know, the trying. Right. That all of us are tempted to do to kind of, in a sense, bridge the gap, it's always going to be counterproductive to the work that God wants to do on our behalf. You know, this initiative that I think God wants to take with us. And I don't know, growing up, you know, as a very individualistic American male, the whole logic of surrendering to grace, to accepting grace, is so, so difficult to just kind of get our heads and hearts wrapped around. But for me, I feel like it's the journey worth making. Right. The journey of surrender, the journey of opening, the journey of kind of allowing ourselves to be held and to be supported and to be loved, as David Stendahl Ross was embracing you that day and transmitting that kind of love in a very incarnate way that God, I think, wants to give to all of us, wants all of us to feel as beloved children, you know, and, yeah, I think that's ultimately the message of Christ. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I was also reflecting on Matthew, Mark chapter 16, which the scholar says was added later. But be that it is a may, it's. It's what's come down to us. And Jesus said, going to all the world preach the Gospel to every living creature. And I was thinking, every living creature, that means my dog, the squirrels, the cats, you know, the bugs, everything. And by giving out that love, not just making it exclusive for humans, but for all creatures. And St. Francis had a big impact on my life. And that's what Francis used to do. There's a famous thing where he. He preached to the birds. And that was. That was a really nice opening for me. I just started feeling more love when I was walking my dog this morning. Just, you know, it's not. There's humans we gotta fix and there's everything else. No, it's all God. And the gospel includes all of it.

So, yeah, I mean, we may be in a kind of detour, as you said right now, but, you know, what Ignatius of Loyola suggested is that God is in all things. And so there's this panentheistic way of holding this simultaneous sense that creation right, has been generated in some way. It's a mystery. And at the same time, God can be found in all of it. And that we have the senses and we've been given the intellect, we've been given the sensibility to perceive that presence and to, in fact, even pursue or allow it to come to us in ways that are just as. As close up. Right. As your interaction with the people in your family. The walk in the nature. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Amen.

Amen.

This is a very, in some ways, a different understanding of religion from conventional understandings. Certainly not the message that is most frequently heard. And yet it's so beautiful, so. So encompassing, so loving. So, as you said, panentheistic.

David, you know, I think that most of us have only had experiences of the exoteric religion, you know, the institutional religion, but often transmitted through rituals and practices and community, but often lacking the substance of a deep spirituality. So, yes, we have the comfort of kind of repeated rituals and prayers and things like that, but. But often, you know, in a sense, disconnected from this deeper wellspring. And I think that one of the benefits of the many spiritualities that are within the Christian sort of sphere is that they're often originated in founding figures who had a very particular experience of God at a particular time. And they were able to, in some ways, give expression to that in a way that people felt it spoke to them. And Ignatius was one of those people. Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, you know, these founders and foundresses of often religious congregations. And there was often not just an experience of God, but also a sense of mission that grew out of that, some sense of wanting to respond to this gratuitous love, this experience of wholeness, this experience of forgiveness in a way that was then shared with others. And, you know, that's the way I would think a good spirituality, you know, is expressed. It's not something that's just only for oneself, but it's meant to be a gift for others as well. So, yeah, there's a lot to say about Ignatian spirituality, of course, as there is about, you know, every religious tradition and every spirituality. But you could get me on for this for a long time.

I'm just warning you.

Yeah, yeah. We want to talk about the work you're doing. I also want to talk about. Francis is no longer the living pope, and we have a new pope. And that's important to me. And so far, I like him. And I think that he's American, is really cool, because I think that was consciously done by spirit or by somebody, and that he's a mixed race, you know, has a Creole background from New Orleans. It's just about perfect. And he's been like. He's really supported Ukraine and has come out. And I know you. I can't say anything negative. He's your boss. But anyway, Francis was a really important figure, and for me, anyway, for millions, obviously, But. But toward the end, I think it was the whole sexual abuse thing that kind of just really hurt him. He was in Peru. He got off the plane, instead of having all these people cheering and everything, a bunch of angry people with signs, and he got angry. This is a story I've heard documentary. And he said, okay, well, I'm going to have my people investigate it. And it was all very true. So I think he was deeply hurt by that, as many of us have been. And. Yeah, and now he's gone phenomenal person. But now we have a new man who lived in Peru for years, and I guess he has dual citizenship now. He became one with his people, his flock, if you will. So any comments that, you know, can have about that.

Yeah, well, Pope Francis, you know, was a Jesuit brother of ours.

That's right. First Jesuit, a pope.

Yeah, yeah. And probably the last. None of us ever expected a Jesuit to be pope because we take a special vow of obedience to the pope. It's our fourth vow. And it's one of the things that makes the Jesuits kind of distinct. So the folklore for us, you know, growing up in the Jesuits was it'll never happen. And so none of us ever gave it a thought. And when Francis was elected, in fact, I was the Dean of a business school and my associate dean. We were in a strategy meeting, and he said, oh, we have a pope, and he's a Jesuit. And I slammed my fist down on the table. I said, that's impossible. Well, one of the many ways I'm wrong. And initially, I think there was fear from Jesuits, especially in the United States, about Francis, because his reputation in South America was very mixed. A very strong leader, but divisive. He used his authority in a very strong way on behalf of the poor, but also during the course of the Argentinian dirty war, you know, he made decisions that seemed contrary. Right. To the Jesuits who were working for liberation theology. And so there was a sense of not knowing exactly what to expect. And Francis even had been in exile at one point, you know, after a kind of divisive time in his own province. He was in Cordoba for two years, basically in a kind of spiritual retreat, but. But also in exile. And. And I think it was during that period of time that he began to do some soul searching about his own exercise of authority. And then years later, as an archbishop and then a cardinal, and really exploring the way in which the Church was operating in South America. What began to be clear to him is that we have to make a change around the way that authority and participation are balanced. And there was, I think, an incredible groundswell of support for this shift that would expand participation and enhance the diversity of decision making in the church. And he brought that to Rome. He was, in a sense, hired, when in the conclave, to be a reformer, to reform the Roman Curia and potentially to bring this South American vision into reality in Rome. So, you know, from the start, I think he was set up to be someone who would not be necessarily making things easy for everyone, but be a prophetic figure, be a challenging figure. And I had the privilege of working with him directly, in a couple of ways on this process of synodality, which we might talk about some more. During both of these synods, he was there and available after our lunch break, and it happened to be my mom's birthday in the middle of these two October gatherings. And he lit up every time that people wanted to do something very personal and very down to earth with him. He was not a big fan of the formalities and things like that. And I asked him to do a video for my mom's birthday. He did it two years in a row.

That's awesome.

Just made her day. You know, just funny and personal and very kind. But he also recognized his imperfections. He didn't hide them from people. He wanted people to have controversies out in the open instead of in the back channels. Part of the shift he wanted to catalyze for the church was to really help people to realize ideological perspectives, distance people from reality. And so, you know, more important than ideology, no matter how powerful, is to get people into direct encounter with others, to have real dialogue, to have the opportunity to sort through our assumptions together and to do that in a respectful and caring way, guided by the Spirit. So he introduces the importance of discernment, of listening to the Spirit within ourselves, between ourselves, amongst us, and then following where that Spirit wants to lead us, which is to more life, which is to more fruitfulness, which is to greater joy. In fact, he wrote a whole encyclical on joy. So Francis, you know, played a very important role, I think, at a particular time. Not perfect, as you say. He would apologize when he made mistakes, which is unprecedented for popes.

Absolutely.

In fact, he really opened up this new way of being Vatican. By the way, I should clarify, I don't work directly for the Vatican. I, I have run a program that is in service to the Vatican and others who are headquartered here in Rome. But Francis had a way of introducing a whole new key in which to read basically how we are church. And that's this business of.

And he never stayed in the papal apartments, he stayed in the guest house the whole time he was Pope. I mean, what a man. That's such a great statement.

And part of it is, you know, not only his simplicity, which he was, he was very, very keen on living poorly and living generously, but it was also because he was an extrovert. And the papal apartments are pretty lonely, in fact. And the guest house put him in touch with all kinds of interesting people coming through all the time. And he would take meals with people. I mean, he's a very, very down to earth extrovert when it comes down to it. Now, Leo, who I knew before he was elected because of his work also on the synod and for the congregation of Bishops, he's really a remarkable man for all kinds of different reasons. He struck me during the synod process as someone who is one of the most self effacing people I've ever met. In fact, it's very deeply inspiring to me the degree to which he seems free from himself to put the other person so much at the center of his attention. He's an incredible listener. He's also very generous, he's very hardworking. It worried me a little bit because Francis was so hardworking. He never took Vacations. And I was really heartened to hear that Pope Leo used to have a trainer here locally who he'd never told he was a priest. When the priest saw he was elected pope, he was really shocked. I'm glad to know that he takes care of himself, plays tennis and things like that, because we need a better example, you know, for those of us who are workaholics. But Pope Leo, you know, he's a. He's a man who's going to bring balance and discipline. And by discipline, I mean the helpful support that structures and systematic approaches to things can provide. He's not going to be impulsive and kind of spontaneous in the way that Francis was. And he's an introspective person in a different way as an introvert. So he's going back to the papal apartments, I think, just to be able to collect his thoughts at the end of the day. I honestly could not keep up with the schedules that these guys are maintaining in their late 60s, 70s and 80s. It just. It's incredible. Okay, I've said too much there, but no, thank you.

That's so helpful.

Very humanizing and a wonderful example of authenticity in leadership. As you talking about Pope Francis, just. Just offering the fullness of his being on public display is just a wonderful lesson and model for us all.

Yeah. And one more contextual thing just about me. One of our best friends is a Jesuit priest from Ireland, and he's. For over 20 years he's been coming, except during the COVID years, staying with us for. In Utah and for a month to six weeks. And, you know, we talk every month on the phone and everything. So I feel I have a really deep connection with the Society of Jesus. Oh, and I stayed. I stayed in Dublin at the Jesuit house and in Belfast, too. I know there to give some talks or something. And anyway, so there's a real. It's a real personal connection with your. Your community.

Nice. Nice. Yeah. Well, we're always grateful for those mutually beneficial and really happy connections. So.

Yeah.

David, there's so many topics we could get into, and we'll see which ones we get to cover. But first I'd like to see what your. You have a rare scope of vision and you've deliberately marinated yourself in meta theories, these big pictures theories, these big picture ways of understanding life and ourselves and. And religion. And I wonder how your understanding of, for example, adult development, states of consciousness inform and enrich your understanding of both religion in general and the church in particular.

Yeah, well, I'm grateful for the Question. When I was studying theology in the late 90s, I was first exposed to Bob Keegan's work. I was there at the Western Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge and had a chance to meet with him and read the Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads. And I remember the first time I was going to have a meeting with him in his office there at the Education school. And I was very nervous. I got there maybe 45 minutes early, and I was alone for the better part of 40 minutes. And then at 45 minutes, the line behind me was enormous of people who were lined up to see Bob. And he comes walking to the front of the line, looks at me and says, I think you're first. And, you know, leads me into his office. I must have been sweating or like, you know, wild eyed, because he looks at me and he smiles and he says, do you want a bite of my sandwich? And it completely, completely made me, you know, kind of at home. And then I sat in his office and noticed a whole shelf of Ken Wilbur's collected works. And I said, oh my gosh, you're reading Ken Wilbur. And he said, well, not reading Ken Wilber. Ken sent me all these. So again, kind of this easy, easy relationship. And then, you know, to be honest with you, Roger, I. I was at that stage when reading theories like that where all of a sudden that's all you can see and all you can see through. And he could tell, you know, and he said, oh gosh, you know, you've caught the bug. And he basically helped me to take a little bit of a subject, object move at that moment about how totalizing, you know, this constructive developmental view had become for me and to hold it lightly. And I will tell you that to this day, I remember that encounter. I remember how gracious he was. I remember how I appreciated that someone who had generated such a powerful theory could also hold it with a bit of a light touch. And I share all that to say that that's been my approach with all the meta theories I've read since then. You know, I. I really can appreciate their tremendous power as lenses to help us to see and perceive things. But I also am someone who likes to hold them lightly enough to see their shortcomings and their strengths and to see how they play with one another. And for me, I think the moment we're living in, this moment of such complexity and volatility, so much uncertainty and ambiguity, you know, these VUCA times, we benefit from these meta theories in a. In a very real way to try to make Sense of a change of era that we're going through, you know, so, you know, if you and John were a little bit ahead of me in the 60s, I was born in 1968. You came to consciousness and adulthood, you know, really as that postmodern time was really starting to trickle up right in our consciousness. For me, you know, living with the benefits of that over the last 50 some odd years, I think I've really come to see how now we're living into a new moment, a new age, and it is very, very murky. And this is not just, as Francis would say, it's not just a time of change, it is a time of changes. Like we are literally living through a change of eras. I don't think any of our meta theories can predict exactly what it's going to look like on the other end. But what they do help us, I think, to do, is to have a little bit of a map of what could be. And I like maps because they give us choices. And I think we, we're really confronted with a lot of very, very critical choices right now about to what extent we want to live our lives passively, recipients of the meaning and the constructs that we've received, or how much, you know, we want to be discerning and dreaming and designing the future that we, we want to live together. So, you know, I think that these meta theories can be incredibly instrumental tools for us. And at the same time, you know, they all have their caveats. And I think one of the big caveats that I'm aware of is that because so many of us continue to work through, I would say, the late conventional stages, these theories are often taken in and applied in a way that's reductionistic and totalizing, just like I had that experience in the late 90s. And that can be abusive. So how to be skillful, how to be wise in the way we hold these. Yeah.

How to keep the baby in up, throw it out with the bathwater.

Exactly.

You know, how to hold this with wisdom and compassion and not just intellectual, but spiritualized too, I think would be very important.

Exactly.

And David, there are so many you mentioned. This is a time of changes, quoting Pope Francis. And not only so many changes in the world and society, but within religion. And I'd just mention a couple which kind of seem like polar opposites and love to hear any thoughts you have. On one hand, we have a sweeping movement of secularization. Some 40% of people in the United States now claim they're not religious. They may have spiritual ideas and beliefs, but explicitly not religious. And there's a lot of research on those people. They tend to tend to be more independent thinkers, but they tend to be less happy. On the one, on the other hand, tend to be a little more troubled. On the other hand, we have a burgeoning fundamentalism and not only in United States and the west, but around the world.

Yeah, not only Christianity. I mean, you know, all the major religions, same issues.

Yeah. So we have these two apparently opposite trends going on. Love to hear you your reflections.

Well, you know, sociologists in the late 80s were really anticipating that in the United States we were going to see secularism rise. And then 911 happened and 911 catalyzed, I think a lot of searching around what's the role of religion? And if in the face of fundamentalism from radicals willing to use it as a legitimation for violence, what do we believe? And so there was a kind of uptick of religion. Again, you know, that the American experience of religiosity is quite unusual in fact, in many ways from the 19th into the 20th century. It's kind of an anomaly for the number of people who are adherents of a kind of institutional faith, but at least, you know, in modern times. And then, you know, I think that there's so many parts of the world where without some faith, there's no way of reconciling to the experience of suffering. So without some meaningful spiritual lens and some experience of a community, how can we make sense of the crushing poverty, the war, the experiences of violence that so many people experience in the secular West? I think you've got a rise of a materialistic, yes, imperialism as well, but empiricism, kind of scientific thinking that's reified as if it's kind of polarity with faith. And that's a product of, I think, either or thinking. And so long as we continue to operate in kind of a dualistic cognitive pattern, it's just natural that we're going to see people making those very easy compromises. You know, I'm just not going to go with faith. I'm going to let it go because science has got a stronger narrative. I think, you know, those things are going to continue to coexist. A kind of atheistic sort of secularism and an aggressive secularism and also, you know, fundamentalism. But it's going to be largely dependent on class, unfortunately, on the degree to which people have access, you know, to education. And that's not to say that there aren't, you know, plenty of well educated people who are are also, you know, prone to, to fundamentalism. I think that it's a very seductive narrative for people, no matter what their iq, if their ways of thinking continue to be kind of black and white.

It answers all the questions, you know, you have it all laid out, makes it things a lot easier.

Yeah, on both sides in some ways, the harder work is the synthetic work. You know, I think of people like Teilhard de Chardin, this, you know, Jesuit paleontologist. He had a brilliant mind and was, well, you know, respected as a paleontologist, but a profound faith and somehow was able to bring these things together. Or George Coyne, director of Vatican Observatory for many years. I had the privilege of living with him. And George was someone who was constantly invited to dialogue with the big, you know, kind of brand name atheists. And they were often confounded by George because he could hold things with a great deal of complexity and was completely comfortable with ambiguity. He didn't have to kind of like lock it all down. I have to say, guys, that one of the things that I'm particularly aware of is that with the amount of anxiety that's produced by our social, political and economic times, the massive amount of regression we're experiencing is not going to go away. And so how do we live in the face of that and in a sense really see the resources that come from our religions and spiritualities has resources to move through it and beyond it, not to be hooked by it. And one of the key things I think we have to negotiate in this process is the temptation of ideology. The current climate of polarization in the United States is a byproduct of people being hooked by this inability to think in both end terms, to hold a polarity in a generative way, to be able to discern what value can come from creating a kind of lively tension even between conservative and liberal or, you know, the ways that we think about science and faith. So I think it's a very interesting and precarious moment and it's why I'm hopeful that, you know, resources that come from people who are integrally minded but not alone, which support a kind of both and way of being in relationship to reality that this, this is a critical contribution during these.

Father David, can you tell us your program is called Discernment Leadership Program? I believe.

Discerning leadership.

Discerning leadership. I mean, discernment. If you could kind of unpack that. I think it's one of the gifts of the spirit that Paul mentions someplace. It's discernment. And so it's there. And my hit on it, it's kind of being able to see right from wrong and seeing these complex situations and. And see the wisdom or see something bigger. And I have a pretty good gut for just not always. Doesn't work always, but it's pretty good. And since I was in a cult, I said I had cult dar. If somebody's being insincere and trying to manipulate with all this, it's like I pretty well get it. And yeah, so I was listening to you talk on YouTube and you mentioned discernment a lot. But what are we talking about?

So, you know, the. The original Greek goes back to this word phronesis, you know, this prudential judgment. But in religious and spiritual terms, the capacity to exercise this good judgment. Good judgment, which is actually, as you were saying, it's actually holding complexity. So it's to sift through the complexity, to discern basically, to kind of like see the different layers and dimensions, but then also hold it as a whole and to make a decision that sorts through that complexity and gets to the.

Other side so we can act in.

An appropriate way, not just even from a spiritual view, not just appropriate, which is wise, which is effective, which is strategic, but also one which is somehow spirit led. So the notion of discerning leadership is to reintroduce the idea that when we're doing a strategic plan for our organization, we're not just taking into account all the facts and the figures, the quantitative. There's a qualitative dimension of mission, of charism, of spirit, of purpose, of a kind of ethical and moral intent. And not just that there's some living sort of commitment to advancing a greater good which is transcendent. So discernment can be exercised by individuals. You know, we discern basically a vocation. We discern big choices in our life, whether we're gonna move forward with this spouse or, you know, move on to a different, you know, sort of option. You know, there's a way that discernment is practiced by individuals. Daily. We're bringing our questions and our challenges to prayer and waiting and listening to what stirs for us. A certain decision might feel extremely murky and cloudy, but we know that with discernment, we patiently wait until things can get clarified. So it requires patience. It requires a kind of sensitivity to the inner states that we experience objectively. Discernment can also be practiced by groups. You mentioned the Quakers a little bit earlier. The Quakers have a long and beautiful tradition of this. This experience of communal discernment. The Jesuits and The Quakers are often compared for that reason, because this sensitivity to how the Spirit arises not just in the individual, but through groups and how a group can pay attention to the shape and the pattern of what's emerging through them in a way that also sheds light on choices we need to make corporately to what is that future we want to create together. We discern that together. So it's a practice. But I would say, while many people reduce discernment to decision making, I would say it's a habitus in that kind of classic sense. It's a way of being. It's a way of knowing and making sense of reality, bringing this deeper subjectivity into play. I think, Roger, you know, your karmic yoga basically is really kind of a practice of this in many ways. And then it's also a question of action, doing and relating. Because when we're in discernment in our relationships, we're paying attention to, well, how is the Spirit moving amongst us, between us, right. What are we sensing right now, which is giving us consolation? Ignatius discerned the difference between what he called consolation, which is experiences of faith, hope, love, the energy to do good, or desolation, you know, which is a decline and a kind of loss of faith, hope and love. And it's a loss of the energy to go forward and do good. So it's a kind of a nutshell. Beautiful, thank you.

Well said.

And you pointed to the crucial element of turning inward, or for guidance in the Christian tradition, perhaps the voice of the Holy Spirit. And this takes us into the topic of contemplation on the contemplative side of the church and the fact that there seems to be both a revival of the contemplative dimensions of the church, or maybe a. Is it a coming into public knowledge? Because it seemed like this was more esoteric in the past.

Stay tuned for part two of our conversation with Father David McCallum of the Society of Jesus. In part two of our conversation with this good and wise priest, we continue the conversation to explore the necessity of the gift of discernment in what has been called the post truth era in which we find ourselves and where we go from here. Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation.

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