I have a dear friend I try to walk with once a week in the mornings. We talk about all sorts of things on those walks. We regularly have great spiritual conversations (he’s a hippy convert to Protestant Christianity from the Jesus Movement … way back in the day).
He shared with me this post written by Danielle Strickland shortly after the assassination that occurrect in September 2025 which resulted in political and ’evangelical’ spectacle that needed to be seen to be believed.
The title of her post is “Our Desperate need for Discernment” and it’s a piece of writing that I appreciate and can relate to.
In it she says things like:
As a guiding “spiritual compass,” discernment helps to separate good from evil, identify spiritual forces, and ensure actions and teachings align with God’s character.
She also says:
We have never needed discernment more than right now.
As a matter of fact, you could just go read it, because it’s a good piece of writing and it’s worth pondering.
I really appreciate Danielle Strickland, and at the same time, my challenge with this piece is that discernment (in her view) seems to rely heavily on ‘cognitive dissonance’ and ‘intuition’, while not seeming to offer a more… concrete source.
She asks good questions and has some solid things to say, but doesn’t really offer us a solution or a place to test whether or not something rightly divides the word of the Truth
This ended up being another reason why I eventually left the Protestant Church and converted to Orthodoxy. Where is the source of truth? How can we find it, how can we test it? My finding was that we were offered the answer of ‘prayer’ or ’the holy spirit’ as places where we can have truth and discernment revealed to us – and I don’t disagree. The challenge comes when you have a million different people praying a million different things asking a million different things, and no proper anchor or cornerstone to test whether what someone claims has been ‘revealed to them by God’ actually has any basis for reality based on the historical teachings of the church (Tradition + Scripture).
In the Orthodox Church, we have two thousand years of the lives and writings of the early church fathers, the writings of the saints and those who recorded the lives of the saints, monastics, and more.
During the Divine Liturgy, it is prayed (in particular for the Metrpolitans and Archibishops, English translations may vary slightly):
Grant them for Thy holy churches in peace, safety, honor, health, and length of days, rightly to define the word of Thy truth.
and shortly thereafter:
Again we entreat Thee: Remember, O Lord, all the Orthodox Episcopate, who rightly teach the word of Thy truth; all the priests, the deacons in Christ, and every order of the clergy.
Any time you have people who claim to be Christians who are spewing hate (to any person or any people group), or clinging to power, or talking health and wealth – we have to go back to the writings and the example set for us by the early church and early church martyrs and followers of Christ to see that power, hate, health and wealth do not pass the sniff test. And I’m not talking about the sniff test of ‘I had a word from the Holy Spirit’ – I’m talking about the sniff test of basically every holy church Father and Mother from the time of Christ ’til now. From John Chrysostom to Basil the Great to my beloved Paisios of the 20th century.
As a matter of fact, the teachings of the saints in this regard seem so utterly clear that one might say in many cases discernment is not even necessary, because the teaching is so clearly laid out for us.
A Christian must not be fanatical; he must have love for and be sensitive towards all people.
- St. Paisios of Athos
It reminds me of the tagline of Shane Claiborne’s book Red Letter Revolution:
What if Jesus really meant what he said?
The Early Church martyrs and fathers believed that Jesus really meant what he said, and they lived their lives as such. Today, this is something we seem sorely lacking as followers of Christ, myself included (Lord have mercy).
In this political moment where many self-proclaimed Christian’s are rabidly pursuing their ideas of power and freedom, we ought to be reminded that following Christ requires giving up both.
We give up our power because we have no need for it, as the servants of all, we should strive to be last. We give up our freedom in order to attain it. Such is the paradox of the Kingdom of God.
I came across a short essay recently, written by Julian R. Munds about Tom Bombadil, and it couldn’t feel more relevant. I share a few excerpts:
In our political moment… one defined by saturation, immediacy, and moral overexposure; Bombadil reads less like an eccentric footnote and more like a rebuke. We live in an age where every issue demands instant alignment, where silence is interpreted as betrayal, and where attention itself has become the most contested resource. To step away is to be accused of privilege or cowardice. To refuse the fray is to be read as unserious.
Yet what if Bombadil is serious in precisely the way we no longer know how to be? Politics today is theatrical to the point of exhaustion. Everyone is performing urgency. Everyone is clutching a ring. The language of apocalypse is deployed for municipal bylaws and streaming-service cancellations alike. Power has become omnipresent, and therefore irresistible. We cannot imagine a position outside it, which is why Bombadil feels unreal. He represents a mode of being that modern life has rendered nearly impossible: sovereignty without domination.
Importantly, Bombadil is not a hermit in the contemporary sense. He is not bitter, alienated, or resentful. His withdrawal is not a sulk. It is rootedness. He knows the land, the trees, the seasons. He names things without owning them. His authority is not administrative but ontological. He belongs, and because he belongs, he does not need to rule.
This distinction matters. Our culture confuses power with control and control with relevance. Bombadil offers a third option: presence without possession. He does not disengage from the world; he declines to be consumed by its abstractions. The Ring is an abstraction. Pure will. Pure domination. Stripped of context. Bombadil remains embedded in the particular. Abstractions cannot touch him.
There is, of course, a danger in romanticizing this stance. Tolkien himself was careful to limit Bombadil’s domain. Middle-earth cannot be saved by Bombadil, and he cannot be trusted with the Ring. Withdrawal cannot substitute for responsibility. The world still requires Frodo, Sam, and the long, bloody business of moral effort. Bombadil is not a solution. He is a reminder.
A reminder of what power looks like when it is not frantic. A reminder that not all strength announces itself. A reminder that some forms of resistance do not shout slogans or march under banners, but simply refuse to be hypnotized.
Rowan Atkinson’s comedian steps back to see the whole picture. Bombadil steps back far enough to see that the picture is not the world. In both cases, the act of holding back is not passivity but discernment. It is the ability to say: this matters, but not in the way you think. Or more radically: this does not own me. … Power fears nothing more than being treated as a joke. And Bombadil, quietly, laughingly, teaches us exactly how to do that.
(all emphasis mine)
In conclusion, we are in desperate need of discernment, however, the discernment of how to treat power, how to treat others who are different from us, how to submit and how to give alms has already been given to us. That is why this story is sadder than we can possibly imagine. We have the answers, but we don’t like them. And so American Evangelicalism and many other forms of ‘Christianity’ continue to scramble for and cling to power.
The irony is not lost on me, that I write this only days after we celebrate the coming of the one we call our Saviour, born into the stench of a barn, here to lay his power down and give himself up for the life of the world.