When it comes to discernment, we are and should be like the mysticeti. What are the mysticeti? Some sort of mystical magi? Not at all… that’s just the technical name for our friends, the baleen whales. I believe that with those great baleen strainers of theirs, they have the corner on discernment and we might learn from them.

They do not swim around looking for a particular fish to bite, hoping that they don’t
accidentally get something yucky in our mouths. And neither do we, really. Life doesn’t work that way. You
can’t pick up a Time magazine and only read good news or turn on a television
and only see good pictures or go into town and only expose yourself to good sights.
Every time you read, look, experience… everything
in the magazine, movie, ads, and on the streets, in the malls, etc. enters your
ears and eyes and senses… I.e. the whale opens its mouth and it all goes in. In
fact, when a whale wants to eat, it doesn’t just open its mouth… it dives to
the ocean bottom, opens wide, and scoops gargantuan amounts of water, shrimp,
mud, fish, sticks, weeds into its mouth… We do this from morning until night
just by living in the world, leaving our house, engaging with people. Then the
whale begins to push everything back out of its mouth, straining it
through the baleen apparatus: the strainer doesn’t keep bad stuff out…
it PUSHES bad stuff out while keeping even the most microscopic bits of
nourishment… and it keeps so MUCH krill, plankton, shrimp, etc. that these
meals can nourish and grow the greatest mammal in history. From somewhere on the
internet:

Baleen
whales (also known as Mysticeti, or mustached whales) are filter feeders that
have baleen, a sieve-like device use for filter feeding krill, copepods,
plankton, and small fish. They are the largest whales and have two blowholes.
Baleen whales include blue, gray, humpback, minke, bowhead, and right whales. Many
baleen whales species are endangered. [yes, they are]

What we have here is not “garbage in, garbage out,” but rather, ”everything
in, garbage out” with an understanding that even the whales develop a sense of
where the best feeding routes are and that it’s wise to avoid oil slicks. As my
friend, Colleen Taylor, wrote in a recent email:

I don’t think "everything
in" works if you’re going to include ENTERING places like the porn store
as a potential source of nourishment. However, walking by the porn store is
another matter and fairly unavoidable. Of course there are people who are
CALLED to enter porn stores, red light districts, etc., looking for Christ the
way Mother Teresa did. Does that mean it is okay for everyone to go there? Does
everyone have the same spiritual baleen capacity to sift and spit? No. Even
that is part of the discernment process.

The question is what our own spiritual baleen consists of and how
effective it is. But the big point here is that you don’t strain by not eating for fear of getting something
bad. Rather, we take it in and then begin to sift outwards, holding on to the
good (as per 1 Thess. 5).

This reminds me of the spiritual exercise that I tried for myself: trying
to discern my way through the Nag Hammadi Library (the famous Gnostic
collection). Some won’t read the library for fear of getting mud in their
mouth. Others just scan it looking for every error (as some do with my books). But
the baleen whale type of Christian is straining for nourishment… what is the
truth here? What seems like delicious? What is only edible? What is poisonous? As
I read the library, I encountered a spectrum of writers ranging from
Spirit-filled to delusional. I found that with God’s help and sound mind, one
could distinguish small-r revelation from capital-H heresy.

I
also noticed this perspective alter my approach to preachers: instead
of waiting to pounce on the two or three little errors that I supposed
I was
hearing (and needed to protect others from believing), I changed my
question
to, "What did God say through this messenger?" I was straining for
truth, not error, and it helped me to hear others, engage others, and
sometimes
win others just by hearing the truth in them. This is why I can enjoy
(without swallowing everything), not only
the Gospel of Thomas, but the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna… which is the
same
process that Solomon used in compiling the Proverbs. He allowed himself
to strain
other streams, cultures, and even religions for truth and included the
“best of”
in his collection… a collection now recognized as Scripture. Yet he was
not
regarded as a syncretist because he knew that Truth and Wisdom are
sourced in God
and he endeavored (with varying success) to spit out the rest.  With
God’s Spirit as our reliable Guide into all truth (John 16), so might
we.

bj