In Matthew's Gospel Jesus says to "love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind; you shall love your neighbor as yourself." As Christians we know we can live this Great Commandment only to the degree that we are connected with Jesus and our connection with Jesus is through the Holy Spirit.

St. Ignatius was acutely aware of the Spirit's role in living the Great Commandment, and, in his Spiritual Exercises, gave us guidelines to help distinguish the movements of the Holy Spirit in our hearts from other inner movements. These guidelines, which he called the Rules for Discernment, are at the very heart of Ignatian spirituality.

Over the years I have developed an uncomplicated criterion flowing from Ignatius for recognizing the Holy Spirit and, consequently, for living the Great Commandment.

First, we must understand that to the degree our hearts are moving toward the desire to love and serve God, we are under the influence of the Spirit; to the degree they are moving away, we are not. This desire to love that arises within us is the basic criterion for recognizing the Holy Spirit. The theological reasoning behind this truth is uncomplicated: we can make no movement toward God or others in love by our own initiative. God must be present - "without me you can do nothing!"

However, we must also be aware that not every movement within our hearts can be trusted, because all of us have spontaneous inclinations both toward and away from the desire to love. Traditionally the fonts of our unloving inclinations are called the capital sins: pride, envy, anger, greed, gluttony, sloth, and lust. Sometimes we experience our hearts as more inclined toward selfishness than toward love. The key to Ignatian discernment is separating our unloving desires from our loving ones, the good desires from the bad. By doing so we can choose to respond only to our desire to love God and others.

A shortcut for discerning the absence of the Spirit is to be aware of our bad moods and attitudes. I have found that normally when I am moving away from the desire to love and serve God and others I experience inner restlessness and anxiety - a bad mood. Thoughts and actions flowing from this mood lead me away from the desire to live the Great Commandment.

The following three steps help me handle these bad moods. They can also help you. First, be aware of situations causing bad moods. What daily activities or relationships do we approach without the desire to love and serve God and others? These situations may relate to our family, our job, our neighborhood, our parish, our country. Take note of the situations causing the bad moods: forewarned is forearmed!

Second, replace bad moods with good desires and then respond to the good desires. Recall that the most reliable sign of the presence of the Spirit in our inner experience is the desire to love and serve God and others. We want our actions to flow not from the bad mood but from this good desire. When we replace the bad mood with a good desire and respond to the good desire, we are doing all in our power to align ourselves with the Holy Spirit.

Third, examine the causes of the bad moods and resolve to deal with them appropriately on the physical, psychological or spiritual level. We all know the effect our physical dimension (exhaustion, pain, and illness) can have on our moods. But our psychological dimension is equally powerful. Ask yourself: Am I preoccupied and anxious over some personal, family, or work problem?

Finally, does my mood flow from a spiritual need? Perhaps I have not been faithful to my rhythm of spiritual activities and am not living in tune with God's presence. Dealing with bad moods and attitudes may require examination and readjustment of one's daily rhythms in all three areas.

But be comforted: grace in us is stronger than sin in us - we have been redeemed!