Let's take a shot at Anonymous. Anonymous, are you there with us? Yes. Hi Anonymous,
your question for Jimmy? I'm just hoping to ask if you could offer
some advice about how a lay Catholic would discern, I guess maybe,
"God's voice" or the Holy Spirit or promptings from God, versus his or
her own thoughts? Just wanted to get your advice about
that. So I want to make sure I understand the kinds of promptings we're talking
about. We're not talking about things like an audible voice or seeing a vision
or anything like that, we're talking about little motions of thought that you
have, like an impulse to do something one way or another? Like maybe there's a
question you've been thinking about and maybe praying about, and you suddenly
have an impulse: "Oh, I should do this in response to this!" And you're trying
to figure out "Is that a little kind of nudge from God, or is it maybe just my
imagination?" Is that it? Is that accurate, is that the kind of thing we're talking
about? I guess on two levels. Mostly, yes, I'd say
a lot of them are kind of nudgings or promptings; but I guess on maybe a
slightly higher level, but in a smaller scale, or smaller frequency, could
God also use an audible voice to kind of direct your action or your choice? Not
in a "puppeteer" sense, but in a virtue sense? Yeah. So, the second
question is actually the easier one to answer. Yes, God can use more direct,
explicit forms of communication to guide us, including audible voices and visions
and things like that. Those are what are referred to as
private revelations. And the Church has a set of criteria that it uses to discern
those. In fact, in February I'm going to have an episode of Mysterious World
specifically about how the Church evaluates private revelations like this.
But those do tend to be less frequent than the little impulses that people
have. When it comes to evaluating those impulses,
you know, there's no single answer. I hear various people telling me that "Well,
God told me to do this," and they don't mean they heard an audible voice. They
mean they had some kind of intuition that they attribute to God, some
impulse or intuition that "I should do this." Right. And I can't say they're wrong.
What I can say is I wouldn't attribute my own intuitions and impulses to God
easily. Because I know my own mind, and I've got lots of stuff going on, and most
of it is coming from me and some of it is even, I mean, some things—I mean,
we're all subject to temptation. Some of it is not good, it's coming from my own
brokenness or it's coming from bad influences in the world, may even come
from demons on rare occasions, but I don't look under every rock to see a
demon. But most of the time it's just stuff that my subconscious
is coming up with. It's like dreams. Yeah. Sometimes God can give you a prophetic
dream. I've even had a prophetic dream once. But most of the time, dreams are
meaningless, they're just cobbled together by our subconscious. And so I
personally tend not to look to my impulses as divine communications, at
least if I don't cross-check them with reason. God also gave me reason, and he
gave me reason that functions much more reliably than emotional impulses. And so
if I have an impulse to, "Oh, this is the answer" to some dilemma I'm
facing, I'll also think about it and apply
reason to it and see "Is my impulse in line with reason, or is my impulse
unreasonable?" And, you know, sometimes I'll find "Oh, this is a reasonable
impulse. I can act on that." It may or may not be from God directly, but it's
reasonable, so I can act on it; as opposed to "Oh no, that's not a
reasonable impulse. I should not act on that," in which case I would say "I don't
think it is from God," or sound otherwise. So it's hard to say—some people have a
kind of theological narrative that they provide for "This is what my impulses are
telling me, and that's what God is telling me." Personally, I'm more
hesitant to directly attribute impulses to God directly, especially if I haven't
cross-checked them by "Are they reasonable or not?"