Sometimes You Have to Be Radical in Discernment

It's actually the wise thing to do

Photo by Rasa Kasparaviciene on Unsplash

The word “radical” usually conjures up images of screaming street protests and burning things down, but that isn’t really what it means.

The root of the word “radical” is “radix,” which in Latin means “root.” Someone who is radical is supposed to be going back to the root of the thing. And in discernment, it’s important to get to the root.

A situation in my own life had me thinking about this a lot...

Once, someone close to me was treated in a seriously unjust way. I found myself extremely angry: I was upset and frustrated with the total disregard for any sense of justice.

As the situation progressed, I found myself unable to overcome my anger. I couldn’t think clearly about a positive response because I was so overwhelmed by angry feelings.

Now, feelings are feelings: they’re like the weather and liable to change any time there’s a new cold front coming in. They aren’t reliable indicators of how we should move forward, but they do often tell us about ourselves.

And this is where I had to get radical. On the surface, I was angry about injustice - I absolutely was. But I had to dig into that anger a bit. I had to discern why the heck I couldn’t let it go. (By which I mean, (air)punch it out, write through it, talk it out with a friend, pray hard, etc. etc. I tried all the healthy processing tools [and probably some not-so-healthy ones, too.])

What was at the root of that anger? When I dug deep, I found that in addition to my hatred of extreme injustice, there was fear.

This particular injustice was a de-stabalizing kind. I felt that the rug had been pulled out from under someone I love, with no warning signs whatsoever. It felt like: if we can’t trust this situation that we had no reason not to trust, what other situations might turn out to be totally unstable?

I was afraid that all sorts of crazy bad things might start happening out of the blue, just like this had.

I couldn’t get past the anger because it wasn’t only anger that I was wrestling with. I had get to the root of the anger to see that it was tangled up with fear and uncertainty.

Sometimes in discernment, we can’t take a step forward because we haven’t gone to the root of what’s holding us back. We have to dig things up and see what’s tangled there.

Now, I won’t say I’m totally past the anger, but as soon as I named fear as a factor, I felt a sense of relief.

I could then take all my healthy processing tools and apply them not just to anger, but to fear. (My best tool? Playing worst-case scenario. Try it! It works so well.)

Getting radical about discerning what the heck was going on (and what I could do about it) really allowed me to know and deal with things as they were – and see a light in the tunnel moving forwards.

So next time you find yourself inexplicably stuck, try rooting things up. Get radical in your discernment.