I was talking with a friend the other day about spiritual direction, and the conversation continued in my head long after I walked away. In fact, our conversation was an overflow of a conversation she had with another friend the day before. Words, thoughts, questions sometimes linger long after we leave the presence of another.
This conversation provoked me to sketch out a few thoughts on spiritual direction. There is a certain mystique around the art of spiritual direction and the role of spiritual directors. I would hope these thoughts could benefit someone at some point, and quite possibly they might spark another conversation here or there. And they might even prompt a turning toward the One who alone is Beautiful.
While my intention is to write a series of posts on spiritual direction, my track record suggests that I might write only this one.
What is spiritual direction and what is a spiritual director? These words might convey some mystic guru that can lead us into heights of spiritual ecstasy. For others, they may sound heavy handed like someone threatening to interfere with my prayer life.
There are a range of words associated with spiritual direction and spiritual directors: confessor, mentor, spiritual father, advisor, coach, parent, therapist, and soul friend. These titles have different meanings and are worked out in different contexts, but they circle around the idea of a person who listens, addresses, guides, comforts, and directs another person. There are secular and spiritual forms, and these roles may be complementary or even conflicting. As we walk through life, we need other people to walk alongside us, to listen to our stories, to hear our confession, and to speak wisdom into our path.
Torah offers a picture of fathers and mothers teaching their children how to remember God’s grace and how to follow God’s call. In the family, I see the initial experience of spiritual direction and the call to spiritual formation. We are shaped in relationship with parents, siblings and spouses. These three roles expand into cultural roles of authority (leaders, teachers, etc), peers (friends, colleagues, enemies), and confidantes (lovers and others who guard our secrets). As long as we breathe, we participate in various relationships that echo these three roles of parent, sibling and spouse. I would suggest that each of these roles play a formative aspect in our lives, and most likely we need healing in one or all of these three relations.
Metropolitan Vlachos has suggested that spiritual direction is a lifelong long process of healing the nous (the center of our thoughts and emotions). We are growing up in our call and capacity to love God and others. Sin has damaged our emotions and our understanding, so spiritual direction involves the process of exposing the damage and deception of sin and recovering from that damage in God’s grace. Even apart from sin, Scripture reveals the process of formation and development (child to parent) in the life of a person. Spiritual direction also involves the process of growing up into love, this includes words, actions, memories, dreams and more.
This process of growing up into love must be personal. We are created as persons in personal relations of family (that extend outward into culture and cosmos), and so we turn to others to help us in our own journey toward fullness of love. Dumitru Staniloae writes that we exist because of God’s love and we are created to move in love toward God and other persons.
We are created and called to grow up into love. This love will be translated in our lives, in our words, in our actions in a range of particular ways. The people who walk alongside us in this path toward fulness of love might play a role of spiritual direction or spiritual friendship. Some may play a direct and intentional or formal role and some may be used of God to point me afresh to the love of God revealed in Christ.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.