How can we discern our charisms? It’s a process of praying, listening, and getting in touch with your talents and desires.
Understanding Charisms
Firstly, the Holy Spirit gives individuals special gifts known as charisms or spiritual gifts. God freely bestows these gifts for building up the Church and Kingdom of God. Discerning our charisms is an essential step in discovering and effectively utilizing the gifts God has given us.
Why Discerning Charisms Matters
Discernment is not about acquiring charisms. Rather it is about recognizing and understanding the unique gifts God has already placed within us. When we discern our charisms, we gain insight into how the Holy Spirit moves within us.
One of the main benefits of charism discernment is discovering where we can plug ourselves into the Church. Each of us has a specific role to play. By discerning our charisms, we can find the areas where our gifts align with the needs of the community. This leads to greater fulfillment and effectiveness in our service to others.
Additionally, discerning our charisms provides us with clarity and confidence in decision-making. When faced with choices or opportunities, we can turn to our charisms as a guide. By aligning with our God-given gifts, we are more likely to make decisions that are in line with His will.
The Parable of Talents
Furthermore, to grasp the importance of utilizing our charisms, we can turn to the parable of talents in Matthew. In this parable, the master entrusts his servants with different amounts of talents (a form of currency). The master praises hose who invested and multiplied their talents. However, the master condemned the one who simply buried his talent. Similarly, by discerning and using our charisms, we are multiplying the gifts God has given us. We allow His grace to flow through us and impact the lives of others.
Discerning our charisms is not simply a spiritual exercise, but a vital step in living out our faith authentically. As we continue on our spiritual journey, let us seek to discover and cultivate our God-given gifts. Let us utilize them for the greater glory of God and the edification of His Church.
Learn more at Many Parts Ministries.
Jill Simons [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to Charisms for Catholics. My name is Jill Simons and I’m the executive director at many parts ministries where we equip the body of Christ by helping people learn about and discern their charisms, which is really another word for spiritual gifts. When you discern your charisms, you’re able.
Jill Simons [00:00:18]:
To see how the Holy Spirit is.
Jill Simons [00:00:19]:
Already active in your life and where he is inviting you to further build the Church. Let’s dive in.
Jill Simons [00:00:32]:
I kind of got a big fire lit under me to record some of the episodes that we’ve already had and so I actually want to take it back today a little bit and go back to some more of the basics. So today we’re going to be talking about basically just what is the process of knowing your charisms, how do you discern your charisms and really why? That term is what we always use to talk about learning your charisms versus just knowing your charisms or taking the test and finding them out. There really is a true process of discernment that needs to happen. So we’re going to go into all of that today, what that can look like, and just the whole breadth of things available on that front. So in a nutshell, we’ll go back to our definition of charism’s context. For anyone who is not familiar, a charism is a free gift, a grace given to us by God in the sacraments. It’s the primary way that we see that. We know that we have received these graces. Now God, as we’ve talked about lots of times, can do what he wants with his grace. It is a free gift from Him and so he is not limited by the sacraments. And so if you were to go through kind of a new depth of relationship with God, you were to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, lots of different things that can happen. We see God sharing the gift of grace with us also in those things. But it has to begin with baptized. I’m sorry, that has to begin with baptism. When you are baptized, that is when you first tangibly receive the grace of God. And so we teach as Catholics. This is right from the catechism. All Catholics have all people baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Protestants included on this front have received at least one charism for the building up of the Church and it’s frequent that it’s more than one. So when we go through a process to discern them, we are really looking to just put language to something that already exists. Discerning your charisms is not what makes you have a charism. It just makes it so that you can talk about your charism and understand with more of your willpower and intention what is going on when you are using a specific gift that God’s given you. So we’ll begin with what the benefit of discerning your charisms is. There’s so many benefits. I wouldn’t devote my life to this if I didn’t think that this was like one of the most beneficial things that you can do. But to keep it as brief as possible, I think a lot of times it helps you understand how the Holy Spirit moves in you. That’s really powerful. It helps you understand how God speaks to you in a lot of cases. Also really powerful. It helps you know where and how to plug into the church. Also extremely powerful. This is essentially the information about what parts of the body of Christ you are. And it’s very cool because people have different combinations of charism. So there’s only really 26 24 that we go through this kind of discernment process for, the process that I’m going to lay out. And we’ll talk briefly at the end about how you discern the other few. But when you go through the process of discernment you are really looking to uncover your unique mix of gifts. And so like any mixture that you encounter in your life, when you mix different things together, you’re going to end up with a different result. And so even though there’s this finite list of charisms that we draw from not to limit God but to just give ourselves some context to work within, we see that different people have different combinations that result in different expressions, which is very cool. It is something that we can then look at in our lives to help us understand more closely what kind of body part we are. And now this is not a one to one thing. It’s like, oh, I’ve discerned my charisms and now I know that I’m an eye. No, it doesn’t translate that way, but it does translate to I’ve discerned my charisms. And I recognize the fact that anytime that I have the opportunity to use my music charism and maybe also I have a charism for leadership, that the positions of leadership in music are going to be places that the Lord is inviting me to plug in. This is going to be something that is expected in my life. My walk with God as a Catholic and that is really empowering, that is really beautiful. Instead of feeling like every single minutiae decision needs to be individually prayed about and discerned, we move from this state of kind of anxious checking in with God about before we do anything to actual intimacy with God where we don’t. That does not mean we pray any less, we probably pray significantly more. But on decisions like this that we make, it’s like making a decision with a spouse. If you’re going to make a purchase over $1,000, that’s probably something that you have an extended conversation about and sort of weigh the pros and cons. But if there’s something that fits into the mission of your family as a whole, you’re not needing to check in exhaustively about doing those things. So for instance, I handle the grocery shopping in my family. And I know generally what our nutritional goals are for our family. And so I personally execute every shopping trip by myself without any phone calls to my husband. And he doesn’t lack any trust in me to do that because this is based on the intimacy that we already have with each other. Whereas early in our marriage there was a need for real conversations about like, okay, how are we going to do food and what kind of food do we like and what is our real needs on this front? And so charism discernment helps us to have those conversations with God, those early marriage conversations with God about what do you want me to do and where do you want me to plug in? But then as time goes on, there is a clarity born from intimacy that allows you to move forward in trust and faith in doing those things so that you are not crippled the way that I see some people being crippled by anxiety around, oh, but is this right? And is this what God really wants? And is this out of pride? Is this out of all of these endless, endless questions that the devil keeps feeding us to keep us on the hamster wheel? We can let a lot of that go because we have some clarity about, this is where God wants me to plug in. Okay, lots of benefits, this whole show, lots of other episodes of this show dive into specific benefits and how it helps. So there’s just a ton there. If you want to take a deeper dive on why, if you’re someone that really needs a lot of being sold on this idea, go ahead and listen to some of the other episodes of this podcast. Hopefully I will be successful in sharing that with you. But if not, as you will hear me say over and over again, you can be a lovely, faithful, wonderful Catholic without going through a formal charism discernment process. Now that said, it is literally a quote from the Catechism. This is in paragraph. I believe it’s 801. It could be 800, but I believe it’s 801 that says it is in that sense always necessary to discern our charisms. We are going to be responsible for making an accounting to God at our personal judgment of how we have used what he has given us. And so if this is not teaching that someone had access to, that obviously changes things a little bit. But you having the burden of knowledge now, knowing that you have gifts from God, there is a real weight that you need to be aware of in knowing your gifts and how you use them. And this comes straight out of the parable of talents, straight out of the words of Jesus Christ himself. You see those three different people in that parable who are given varying gifts, right, for them to steward. And we see two of them steward those things effectively and bring them with a return to their master and we see one person going and burying that thing, that gift out of fear. And so that’s what I want to caution against. I think that’s where the danger lies if we don’t do this is if we are not discerning our charisms out of fear or out of a feeling like we are not really going to use them because that scares us. That is just the reality. I guess I’m just telling it like it is that we will be responsible to God for accounting for what he has given us. Just like any good parent, right? You send your kid with a $20 bill, you ask them what they spent it on when they get home. This is not out of some kind of like God being this tyrannical thing. This is just good parenting. This is just being faithful stewards of what we’ve been given. All right, lots of preamble. So now let’s get into what is charism discernment. Very simple, clear basis for charism discernment is that you have charisms and you can know what they are. And that is essentially what charism discernment is. Going from not knowing your charisms to having a clear as possible idea of what the Holy Spirit has given you. The path of this can be a variety of things. I think that it’s helpful to start with an assessment. We have a great one that’s all online. We don’t have the only one. There’s other assessments that you can take and basically the role of an assessment, what it does is it just takes the list of 24 and narrows it down to a list of 3456 of your most likely ones. So now instead of having a list of 24 that you’re trying to actively discern from all at one time, you have a short list to discern from. And that is helpful for a lot of people. A lot of us get overwhelmed by huge swaths of things that we could have access to and there’s only a few. And make sure you guess right. Have a good day. That’s overwhelming to a lot of people. So we want to narrow it down, make it less overwhelming to look at the possibilities and to empower people to begin to have targeted conversations with our Lord about these things. So prayer is obviously very important and some people want to skip the assessment phase. That’s fine. You don’t have to take a charism assessment. I want to be on record saying that this is not some kind of exclusive path to knowing what the Holy Spirit has given you. This is just a tool. This is something that is so helpful, a tool that is very empowering to a lot of people, but it’s not exclusive in any way. You can sit down in your prayer time with your Bible and the list of all 24 charisms and begin a beautiful fruitful charism discernment process. And I care a lot more about people discerning their charisms than people taking my specific iteration of the assessment. Because ultimately that’s what matters. That’s what I feel I will be accountable to God for at my personal judgment is, did you share this with as many people as possible using all the many that you had at your disposal? And I want to tell you right now that there is not any person, any ministry, anything that is the one and only path to what God has already given you. You already have your charisms. God has already given it to you. And there is tons of roads you can go down to discover it. Some people go through a 100% organic, totally unaware charism discernment process where they end up in their middle aged fifty s. Sixty s and they are walking 100% in their charisms and they have no idea that that’s even what they’re called. I see this all the time. I will never forget this wonderful woman that was in her ninety s at a charism discernment seminar I was giving. And she raises her sweet little shaky hand and is like, I think I did this wrong. And I come over to her, look at her assessment with her. She has twelve no, ten. She has ten that are at which on our assessment are the highest. 25 is the highest that you can have. So she has ten that are 24 or 25 and she’s like, I’m pretty sure I did this wrong. I’m so sorry. Do you have another copy? And so I talked with her for a little bit. I was like, well, let’s wait a second. You tell me about your relationship with Jesus. You tell me about your walk with God. And she goes on to outline this just amazing relationship intimacy with God in all three persons of the Trinity that has been the thread through her entire life, that has just sustained her and guided her every step of the way. And she knows an inherent intimacy with God that I just pray for. Like, I pray to experience that in my own life because God knows I am not there. And I was like, I think this is probably right. I can’t read hearts or anything like that. But I think, given what you’re telling me, you are walking with God at an intimacy level where it makes great sense that you would have received a ton of gifts out of just that closeness of that relationship. Never knew the word charisms. Never knew what she was specifically doing. But all ten of these that she ranked so highly for were things that were a part of her everyday life. Things she was doing every single day and never had put words to it. So I want to encourage you. If you have never had this language before, you know other people that don’t have this language that is okay? The Holy Spirit is not held back by our knowledge, but we can intentionally open new doors for him when we do gain knowledge. And that’s a great principle from St. Thomas Aquinas that grace builds on nature. So when you build your knowledge, you build your personal aptitudes. Grace cooperates with that and expands upon it. All right, I keep getting off on tangents. So this is getting much longer than our quick intro to charism discernment was supposed to be. But after you have narrowed the list in some way, whether through personal prayer or taking some kind of assessment, a really helpful second step is to go to other people, because what we see is that we can know that we did the action. I can know that I was in a leadership role or that I tried encouraging someone, but I don’t know if that was effective unless people tell me. And so that’s why it’s always inherent in Charism discernment to have a feedback stage. I think that this is most powerfully realized in the people that know you. So a lot of times people will come to me for feedback like that, and I am happy to hear people’s stories and basically share what I hear in them talking. But that is always going to be less beneficial than your spouse and the people that you do ministry with and your best friends. And with the little addendum that it is vastly preferable that the people that you are looking for feedback from are also on their own path with the Lord. Now, that is not a we need to throw out every atheist opinion kind of statement, but we do want to take it with a grain of salt if someone is not also aware of the movement of the Holy Spirit. Said another way, people that are not in a state of grace are going to be less naturally attuned to the expressions of grace. And so if someone has never been baptized, has fallen away, et cetera, they are absolutely capable of receiving grace when that is something that the Holy Spirit brings about it’s just less naturally what we would organically expect. I say that only to say if you are getting this feedback from all of the people in your church and all the people that you do ministry with, that your music is just so uplifting and so helpful for prayer. But maybe there’s some fear around the fact that you’re not necessarily the technically best musician ever getting feedback from an atheist person you’ve played in a band with to say, like, oh, I don’t think you have any kind of special gift for that. It seems like you kind of struggle with it. I would put less weight on that than the people who say that you have really assisted them in prayer because they’re responding to different realities. Okay, hopefully that’s helpful and clarifying. Once we’ve talked to other people in our lives about the expression of the charisms then it’s great to go back to prayer. We want to have prayer all throughout the process and if you do take our assessment, which I guess this is kind of another plug for it but this is sort of a unique benefit that we offer. You will get a customized PDF report that has your top possible charisms and it also has the scripture citations for where you can read about instances of that charism being used or showing up in the course of scripture. So that is something that’s just a lot of people find helpful as they are praying through the discernment process to just sort of know where to go. Because again, if you don’t have that kind of context you can absolutely open the Bible and find it and the Holy Spirit can still move but sometimes it’s really helpful to have that kind of native starting point. And so as we go through this time of prayer with the Lord it’s really helpful to sort of test it out to go ahead and bring your intention and your effort to an instance of testing out that charism. So it’s important that we’re clear about the terminology here. We don’t want to test God, right? That is something that the Bible specifically cautions us against. We don’t want to test God in that means, but we do want to bring our attention to God in a situation and let him know that that’s what we’re doing. So here’s the kind of difference between those two things. Let’s say that you are trying to discern if you have a charism of administration. For example, we’ll just take the very first one that is specifically around being able to plan and execute things with supernatural effectiveness and that’s something I haven’t mentioned, I don’t think enough in this episode use of charisms expressions of charisms are always going to be supernatural. So it’s not just going to be you saying a nice thing to someone and oh that was a nice thing and that’s encouragement. No, the person who you say the nice thing to will be supernaturally encouraged. And so we see this with administration, it’s planning and execution and we’re going to see supernatural fruit from the implementation of that. Now people will ask me what does that look like? And I say could be all kinds of things. There’s a million different ways that that could be supernaturally fruitful. But you will probably know, I think you will know if you are in a state of grace and looking for it when that happens. So you’re wanting to test out this possible administration charism and so you can undertake a specific project, you can join a specific ministry or take on a specific role within a ministry. It doesn’t even have to be a ministry. It can be something in your secular job or maybe a charity that you’re a part of lots of different possibilities. But as you go into it, you can say, okay, Lord, I want to use this opportunity to really test out this charism. I’d love for you to give me feedback through the process to help me in this discernment. And I’d really love this to be something that helps me, going forward, know whether or not this is a gift that you are calling me to walk in. So this is done with a spirit of humility I don’t already know. I need your insight. I need you to show me and tell me what it is that you want me to do. And so I’m creating this space specifically for you to do that. Now, what’s the difference between doing that and just going into the project without any context like that? The difference is your awareness. You’re going to be aware of when people come up to you throughout the course of that project and say, wow, there was this crazy thing that happened because of what you did and you’re going to ascribe a different source to that. When you have this context of I am creating space for the Holy Spirit to give me feedback on this possible charism, then you look at that feedback from other people or maybe from the success of the event and say, okay, this is from God. God is showing me that this is something he wants to invite me into. Whereas if you just enter into it, no context of really surrendering it to God and really offering the whole situation to God. If somebody comes up to you, your charism can still be active. I want to make that clear. So it’s not like the Holy Spirit is going to use you in one situation and not in the other, but in the second iteration, where you don’t put yourself in the context of receiving from the Holy Spirit about that and whether or not that is your charism, it’s really easy to look at feedback and look at what happens and just say, oh, that’s just a coincidence. Or I’m just good at this thing. And ascribe that to either chance or to yourself, and both of those are going to be less than what it really should be. We should be ascribing that to the Holy Spirit who is actually carrying it out. And so when we create these test scenarios, we create space for the Holy Spirit to be clear with us. And I think that we already did an episode on expecting God to be clear. And so you can go back and listen to that, but really how much we just sort of expect God to not be clear. I think in a lot of situations, and I go at length in that episode into kind of the minutiae of that because it’s obviously not oh, the expectation is that God is going to give us a life syllabus and it just is linear and clear. But the expectation should be that it’s not like god is trying to keep secrets from you. It’s not like God is trying to make this hard for you. It’s not like God is playing games with you. That is not who he is. That is not a good father. And so we want to ascribe God’s motivations to the correct source. If there’s a time when we’re not getting information, when we would like to have it, then we want to recognize that that’s as a result of God really being in the goodness of His Fatherhood and not in God being withholding or God being unfair or whatever direction you take it. And so entering into the discernment process with this context that we should expect God to speak to us, we should expect God to be clear, is really empowering. Because then we open the door so that when God does speak to us, when he is clear with us, we are not plagued by the same kind of doubt. And like, oh, but was that really just me? Et cetera, et cetera, because we can trust, no, God is going to do what he said he would do. God is going to be straight with me. I asked Him a question and he has made the answer clear and many times that’s through other people, that’s not necessarily you sit down in your prayer time and you say, god, do I have this charism? And he says yes. It comes through different means. But when we’re looking for it so often, we experience a much higher level of clarity than we can expect. And that’s really something that we’re going to cover in a later episode, is really these lies that build up to make us think that God doesn’t want to talk to us. And a big one is the fact that everything is going to be frustrating related to God. It’s hard to discern from that place. When we feel like God is just always out to frustrate us, we’re probably going to be frustrated. I was listening to a book called Winning the War in Your Mind by Craig Rochelle, who is a Protestant pastor. Just about really a lot of just very basic biblical principles, neuroscience of really why we shouldn’t memorize scripture. In a huge nutshell. That’s what he’s talking about. And we obviously fully agree with that. As Catholics, there’s a huge benefit to memorizing scripture. And he was saying that what you look for, you find, this is true from the spiritual perspective. This is true from a neurological perspective. We have confirmation bias in our lives. And so when we go into our spiritual life expecting God to disappoint us and confuse us, it’s not very surprising that we feel disappointed and confused. And so shifting what we are expecting doesn’t change God. It changes what we are able to see God doing. So that is my soapbox around letting go of harmful images of God and really believing that he wants us to be able to discern our charisms and that this being hard and frustrating is not the hallmarks of the process. And then that’s really the end of discernment. It’s very important that you exit the discernment process at some point. Some people get very uncomfortable when I’m just like, here are my charisms. And they’re like, oh my goodness. That is just so confident and terrifying that you would just say that like that. And that’s not because I am confident in my own abilities. That’s because I believe God has been clear with me. God has really shown me, these are your gifts, please go use them. And so from that point on, it’s very much on me. I know that this is what he wants me to do. And so it is a real responsibility for me to do it. And that’s why I’m on this podcast. This is why I’m in this ministry, is because this is very clearly this expression of gifts that I’ve been given. I don’t have any pride about that. On my bad days, I do. Of course, I struggle with things like anybody does, but I’ve gone through a lot of work of really submitting these to God. So that by and large, most of the time today, for sure, because I’m so on fire and just want to talk to you about these things. My awareness is on the fact that this is just doing what I’ve been asked to do. And it’s not pride for a kid to go clean their room because their parent asked them to. It is doing what you’re supposed to do. And I use that analogy all the time is that your charisms are really like your chores in the family. You have the people that are like, oh my gosh, it’s so prideful and self focused for you to lead or to discern your charisms at all. And that’s just you’re really focusing on yourself when in reality this is the work that we’ve been asked to do. And it’s not humble for a child to say, oh, but parent, I just feel so inadequate to clean my room. Wouldn’t you do it for me? No. That kid needs to be like, no. Reassure them if they need it, but at the end of the day, you need to clean your own room. And that’s what we’re talking about here. These are areas where we haven’t been adequately empowered to do what God is asking us to do. And it’s our responsibility to do it. That’s why we want to take the time to really discern.
Jill Simons [00:31:30]:
Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode of Charisms for Catholics.
Jill Simons [00:31:35]:
If you would like to learn more.
Jill Simons [00:31:36]:
About your charisms or begin your own discernment journey journey. Head to our website@manypartsministries.com where you can download our free PDF guide to all 24 charisms and also begin your own journey by taking our Charism assessment.
