In this article, Friar Hugo Badilla reflects on discernment as a spiritual and community key for consecrated life today. From an Augustinian and deeply incarnated reading, the author invites us to rethink the community as a home, a space for care, co-responsibility, and mission, capable of responding to the challenges of solitude, fragility, and hope in a changing world.
Friar Hugo Badilla is an Augustinian Recollect religious, Costa Rican, belongs to the Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino and has professed in the Order since 2014. He has a degree in Theology of Consecrated Life from the Pontifical University of Salamanca and currently resides in Mexico City, where he collaborates in various Augustinian Recollect spirituality centers.
Towards a Consecrated Life of open doors and a restless heart
Currently, a challenging paradox beats in the heart of Consecrated Life: we live in the midst of a hyper-connected world, but our communities and structures frequently house “ghettos of solitude.” In the midst of what Zygmunt Bauman calls a liquid society, where identities oscillate and commitments tend to dissolve, religious life is called to become a beacon of stability through the radiance of its love. To navigate these times, it is necessary to return to the compass of conversion, fidelity, and discernment.
This triad must mark the vital rhythm of those who have decided to follow Jesus. Saint Augustine, the man of interiority, gives us the key by affirming that “to discern is to separate and distinguish in order to love.” We do not discern to succeed in institutional management, we discern to love better, to purify our gaze and build the community that the world demands.
The Inhabited Clay: Our Anthropological Foundations
However, to build living communities, we must emphasize our efforts in rediscovering who we are; Christian discernment cannot remain in a vacuum but must rest on the reality of our anthropology.
We are natural beings marked by vulnerability, and far from hiding our wounds under a cloak of perfectionism, we must accept what we are. Saint Augustine urges us to recognize that we are clay, but not just any clay, but a loved clay. Our fragility demands an ethic of care because we cannot sustain fidelity if we violate our nature. Furthermore, we are social beings; self-sufficiency is a dangerous illusion. Our truth is dependence and otherness. As the Bishop of Hippo illustrates, holiness is achieved in the “coexistence of friends in God,” where the community becomes a necessary element to bring our projects to a successful conclusion. And finally, we are spiritual beings endowed with a freedom that reaches its culmination in obedience (ob-audire, attentive listening), aligning our will with God’s dreams.
Discernment: Gift, Task, and Crisis
Discernment is a gift that comes from above to the human being. An uncomfortable grace that makes us enter into a healthy crisis and pushes us to metanoia, to the conversion of the heart. The spirit does not enter our life to leave us the same; it comes to break the old wineskins and create new ones.
Therefore, discernment is both a gift and a task. It is a gift because it is given to us with the delivered Christ, and a task because it demands a vigilant attitude so that our freedom always remains disposed to God’s will. Tradition offers us four keys to recognize if our spirit is that of Jesus: communion (which unites), humility (which serves), creativity (which innovates), and joy (which confirms).
From Solitude to Home: The Urgency of Community
Honest personal-community discernment is the only way to heal our structures. Today, the Church expects communities rich in joy and the Holy Spirit (VC 45), which act as an effective stimulus against loneliness. However, it is clear that the community does not arise by spontaneous generation. Perhaps it is time to recognize that we have taken care for granted, relying on texts and decrees while isolation became increasingly strong in our communities.
It is time to break the structures of the “silence of death,” that silencing, conceding, and self-displacement out of fear, and walk towards a polyhedron society. Pope Francis uses this image to describe a coexistence where differences are not annulled, but integrated, enriched, and mutually illuminated. An image that makes us recognize that evangelical unity is not uniformity but the harmony of the diverse reconciled by the Spirit.
A Leadership for Co-responsibility
This new idea of community requires a leadership that is not mass-produced, but must be discerned. We need leaders who are not consumed by the fear of reality, who exercise co-responsibility, and who understand that leading is a process of embracing our imperfection and healing wounds. A leadership that does not repair worn-out structures but has the courage to make them new.
Bureaucracy cannot become a prison of the charism that is energy of communion and mission. It must become an open process that allows us to feel our God in new ways. Our efforts should not focus on insistently seeking equal minds but minds capable of thinking and feeling with the heart of Christ.
The Vital Signs of Hope
In conclusion, the fruits of this community discernment must be visible, and these four vital signs will help us measure the health of our consecration:
- Oxygen Level: Do our communities breathe a healthy and sincere environment? We all have the right to live the vocation in happiness.
- Personalization of the Charism: Does our community have its own face or is it an impersonal franchise? Maturity implies that the community has a personality and knows how to say what it wants and what it does not.
- Spiritual Happiness: Do we share the faith or only fulfill tasks? The community must be a space where deep life is shared.
- Sense of Mission: Are we open to being sent or closed in self-referentiality?
Discernment is separating to love. Separating what kills us (routine, fear, selfishness…) to love what gives us life (brothers, mission, the Gospel…). May our final question, in each meeting and in each prayer, not be “How do we survive?”, but: What does God want us to do in this situation in our life?
Only then, our communities will cease to be residences to become true homes, a prophecy of the Kingdom in the midst of the world.
