Taking the Plunge into Gifts Discernment

Eryn Huntington

You look at the beautiful icon of Catherine of Siena created for the Institute, her face radiant with peace and promise. Doctor of the Church, model of personal responsibility for the Church’s mission to the world, she cradles a tiny cathedral in her gentle palm. It’s so serene…

But I’ve gotta confess: discerning my call hasn’t been like that for me at all.

If I were going to write Catherine’s icon, she’d be juggling. A church. A phone. A checkbook. A box of baby wipes. A Day-Timer.

The process that gifts discernment plunges you into is exciting. It’s also terrifying. A few weeks ago at Mass, I was listening to the story of the Man Born Blind and I realized this man is like someone who begins to discern his gifts.

The man asks to see, and Jesus opens his eyes. Suddenly, the man can no longer sit outside the synagogue and beg for a living. Now he has to find his own way through life. What a shock it must have been!

Isn’t this an interesting image of a layperson suddenly aware of his spiritual gifts? No more begging. No more sitting in the pew just listening to the apostles—we are the apostles.

As fabulous as it is not to be blind and helpless, it’s a rather terrible empowerment…as in, "Who, me?" You find yourself looking around expecting the Spirit to alight on someone else, someone who has a clue. A saint, maybe. But no, it’s you. And you walk around, blinking, wondering "What do I do, now?"

"Pick an area of possible giftedness and begin to experiment with it," says Sherry. And the juggling commences in earnest.

When I took the Called & Gifted Workshop last fall, I was well into a seat-of-the-pants discernment process that had begun over a year earlier. I had taken the leap out of the known realm of freelance business writing, where I’d proven myself, into the dark vacuum of a full-time fiction career.

Behind me lay three years of dedicated work on a book for business leaders about how to motivate people. Two weeks after finishing the manuscript, with the best agent in the business waiting to sign us up with Simon & Schuster, the guy I was ghostwriting for decided to resign from his firm
to start his own business. The firm kept the copyright. Three years and 90,000 words came to nothing but a string of paychecks. I decided
to experiment seriously with fiction, since it had been my real dream ever since I had tried (and failed) to write a sequel to Star Wars in
third grade.

At the time I took the Workshop, I was puttering with a few short stories, learning to run a single- instead of a dual-income household, and doing a lot of volunteer work for my parish. I walked into the Workshop with three questions:

• Am I supposed to write fiction?
• What about another baby? (My daughter is almost four).
• Should I cut back on the volunteer work to concentrate on these first two?

I walked out with another nonfiction book on my shoulders.

It happened like this: I took the inventory. Writing and Helps appeared at the top of the list, and I noticed "ghostwriter" featured prominently as a possible expression for both charisms. Ghostwriting, I thought, was nearly a year behind me—and thankfully receding further every day. I walked out the first evening deeply motivated by the vision of lay Catholics everywhere awakening to their spiritual gifts and answering the call of the Holy Spirit.

The next day, Sherry went into describing the charism of writing and mentioned she’d recently discerned she had talent and skill in this area, but not a charism. Innocently, I raised my hand and asked, "So…if you had discerned you did have it, would that mean you would shift to writing a book on this stuff instead of going on tour and speaking?"

"Ye-ess," she said like she couldn’t completely agree. "But the fact is, we need to put this into a book, anyway. That was supposed to be a project this year, but we’ve been so busy…"

Uh-oh.

She didn’t know it, but I suddenly felt like God was pulling an Uncle Sam: pointing his finger inexorably at me, saying "I want you." And in case I didn’t get it, the person sitting next to me leaned over, nudge-nudged me and whispered, "Hey—that’s your cue."

What about focusing on fiction? What about another baby? A book takes so much time.… But I knew just what they needed: an accessible, motivating, how-to book any parishioner could read. A book like the one I’d already written.

So I gulped, volunteered, and waited to see what would happen.

I’m still juggling.

Where does St. Catherine get that serenity? It’s mysterious. The "peace that passes all under-standing" certainly passes mine.

But I have felt it.

I felt it when I realized I didn’t need to have four kids to be a good Catholic.

I felt it when I got to scratch Administration off my gifts list, realizing I was seeing aspects of Wisdom and Helps. I can organize, and I can do, but please don’t ask me to delegate!

But I felt it most when I saw that everything I had learned over the past four years—about writing, about collaborating to share a vision, and even about what energizes people—all of it was going to be resurrected instead of entombed forever in some corporate file cabinet sealed with a copyright.