Not Every Open Door Is Yours to Walk Through: Ignatian Wisdom for a World Overflowing With Good Options

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too many bad things, but from doing too many good ones. It is the fatigue of the school board member who also chairs a nonprofit committee, mentors graduate students, and has not sat quietly with God in three months. It is the weariness of the educator who cannot say no to a single student in need because every need is real, and every student matters. It is, in short, the spiritual condition of a great many well-intentioned Missourians who have confused abundance of opportunity with clarity of vocation.

The Ignatian tradition has something precise and demanding to say about this confusion. And it is not simply, "Do less."

The Problem With Saying Yes to Everything Good

When Ignatius of Loyola developed his Spiritual Exercises in the sixteenth century, he was not primarily addressing people who were choosing between vice and virtue. He was addressing people who faced a subtler challenge: choosing between competing goods. His framework for discernment was designed, in large part, for exactly this terrain.

Dr. Margaret Holloway, a formation director affiliated with a Jesuit educational institution in St. Louis, has spent more than a decade guiding individuals through that terrain. She describes what she calls "the tyranny of the legitimate."

"Most of the people I work with are not tempted by obviously destructive choices," she said during a recent conversation at her office. "They are tempted by board seats, by leadership roles, by causes that genuinely need champions. The difficulty is that none of these things are wrong. They are all genuinely good. But they cannot all be theirs."

This distinction — between what is good and what is mine — sits at the heart of Ignatian discernment as it is practiced in Missouri's Jesuit communities today.

Interior Freedom as the Starting Point

Ignatius called the necessary precondition for genuine discernment indifferencia — a term often translated as indifference, though "interior freedom" captures the meaning more accurately for contemporary readers. It does not mean apathy. It means arriving at a place of genuine openness before God, where the ego's appetite for prestige, the culture's expectations of productivity, and the fear of disappointing others have been quieted enough to hear something deeper.

Thomas Wrenfield, who leads a Kansas City-based nonprofit focused on workforce development, describes the moment he first encountered this concept during a retreat at a Jesuit spirituality center.

"I had been operating on the assumption that if something was a good cause and I had the skills to help, then I was obligated to help," he said. "The retreat director asked me a question I had never seriously considered: 'What has God actually asked of you?' Not what could you do. Not what would look good. What has been placed specifically on your heart?"

That reframing, Wrenfield said, was both liberating and unsettling. It required him to relinquish a self-concept built around availability and begin the harder work of specificity.

The Consolation-Desolation Framework in Practical Life

One of Ignatius's most durable contributions to the spiritual life is his framework of consolation and desolation — interior movements that, when attended to carefully, reveal something about alignment between a potential commitment and one's deeper calling.

Consolation, in the Ignatian sense, is not mere happiness or excitement. It is a movement toward God, toward greater love, toward what Ignatius described as an increase of faith, hope, and charity. Desolation, conversely, is a movement away — toward confusion, contraction, or spiritual restlessness.

Applying this framework to professional and civic decisions requires patience and practice. Sister Anita Reyes, R.S.C.J., who offers spiritual direction to Jesuit Volunteer Corps alumni in Missouri, notes that many of the young adults she accompanies initially mistake excitement for consolation.

"Excitement is real, and it matters," she said. "But excitement can come from ego, from novelty, from the pleasure of being asked. True consolation tends to be quieter. It has a quality of settledness to it, even when the commitment itself feels demanding. That is a meaningful difference."

She encourages those she accompanies to sit with a potential commitment through several prayer periods before responding — not as a technique for procrastination, but as a discipline of honest attention.

When Cultural Expectation Masquerades as Calling

One of the more demanding aspects of Ignatian discernment, particularly in the American Midwest's culture of civic engagement and hard work, is learning to identify when a sense of obligation derives not from God but from social expectation.

Missouri's professional communities — whether in business, education, or public service — carry strong implicit norms about what constitutes a responsible, generous, and successful person. These norms are not inherently harmful, but they can function as noise that drowns out more personal, particular forms of divine invitation.

James Achterberg, a Jesuit-educated attorney in Columbia who has served on multiple community boards, describes the moment he recognized this dynamic in his own life.

"I was on five boards simultaneously and doing none of them well," he said. "When I finally brought it to prayer, I realized that at least three of those commitments were about how I wanted to be perceived in this community. They were not about where I was genuinely being called. Naming that honestly was uncomfortable. But it was the beginning of something much more focused and, frankly, much more effective."

He has since reduced his board service to two organizations — both chosen through a deliberate discernment process — and describes his engagement with each as qualitatively deeper than anything he offered when spread across five.

Discernment as an Ongoing Practice, Not a Single Decision

One of the most important clarifications Jesuit formation offers is that discernment is not an event. It is a practice, woven into the rhythm of daily life through habits such as the Examen — Ignatius's twice-daily prayer of reflective review. The Examen invites practitioners to notice, at the close of each day, where they felt most alive and most depleted, where they encountered God and where they felt distant.

Over time, this practice builds a kind of interior literacy. Patterns emerge. Certain commitments consistently produce energy and a sense of rightness. Others consistently produce a low-grade sense of misalignment that is easy to ignore in the moment but accumulates into genuine spiritual fatigue.

Formation directors across Missouri's Jesuit institutions increasingly encourage this practice as a tool not only for personal prayer but for professional self-governance — a way of maintaining ongoing accountability to one's actual calling rather than simply to one's calendar.

The Courage That Discernment Requires

Ultimately, the Ignatian art of saying yes to the right thing demands a form of courage that is rarely celebrated in public life: the courage to disappoint worthy people by declining worthy requests. It requires trusting that one's particular, limited contribution — offered wholeheartedly and in genuine alignment with one's calling — serves the common good more faithfully than a diffuse, exhausted presence spread across every need within reach.

This is not a counsel of withdrawal or self-protection. The Jesuit tradition has never confused contemplation with passivity. It is, rather, a counsel of precision — the conviction that God calls particular people to particular work, and that the discernment of that particularity is itself a serious spiritual obligation.

For Missouri's Jesuit communities, the question is not whether to engage the world. It never has been. The question is which engagement, at which moment, in which way — and whether one has been still enough, honest enough, and prayerful enough to know the difference.