What is Spiritual Direction?
Spiritual
direction is
“.. help given
by one Christian to another which enables that person to pay attention to God’s
personal communication to him or her, to respond to this personally
communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God, and to live out the
consequences of the relationship.”
(William A. Barry and
William J. Connolly, The Practice of Spiritual Direction)
§
Spiritual direction focuses on religious experience. It is concerned
with a person’s actual experience of a relationship with God.
§
Spiritual direction is about a relationship. The religious
experience is not isolated, nor does it consist of extraordinary events. It is
what happens in an ongoing relationship between the person and God. Most often
this is a relationship that is experienced in prayer.
§
Spiritual direction is a relationship that is going somewhere. God is leading the
person to deeper faith and more generous service. The spiritual director asks
not just “what is happening?” but “what is moving forward?”
§
The real spiritual director is God. God touches the
human heart directly. The human spiritual director does not “direct” in the
sense of giving advice and solving problems. Rather, the director helps a
person respond to God’s invitation to a deeper relationship.
This
is a very useful and concise description to be found at http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/making-good-decisions/spiritual-direction/
From
own experience I would like to add the following in some instances and expand a
little in others:
-
Within the Celtic Christian spirituality they talk of
an Anam Cara or “soul-friend”. In the
words of Daniel O’Leary such a soul-friend is a true mentor - “one who loves you without being jealous,
who guides you without being judgemental, who walks beside you without trying
to change your pace.” It is pure gift when you have such a spiritual
director or anam cara in your life –
I only have to think about my own spiritual director - and it is quite common
for such a spiritual direction relationship to span over a period of years.
-
Barry and Connolly refer to the spiritual director’s
role in the “paying attention to” the
communication of God in a person’s life.
In The Contemplative Pastor
Eugene Peterson puts it thus: “The assumption of spirituality is that always
God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do
something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so
that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.” In an interview with Richard J. Foster, Peterson says the same in different words: "Spiritual direction is an intentional form of paying attention to the everydayness of our lives." The
spiritual director has an important role to play in helping the directee in that
process of becoming aware of what God is doing in the directee’s life.
-
The “communication of God” is described as being “personal”.
More and more my conviction grows that a very important aspect of my task as
spiritual director is to help people discover their own unique language and
vocabulary in their communication and relationship with God. One of the very
first directees that came to me formulated it beautifully: “I want to talk to God in my own words.” God does not have a
one-size-fits-all language. His is a personal language. It therefore doesn’t
come as a surprise that as we grow in our relationship with God, we also grow
in our relationship with ourselves. It is as if God is saying, “Do you really want to know me? The only way
for that to happen is that you also get to know yourself. You can’t get to me
by leaving yourself behind.”
Against such a background there is a
deeper appreciation of the Jesuit wisdom: “Pray
as you can, not as you can’t.” Do you find it easier to pray while walking
in the garden, preparing a meal, sitting quietly, listening to music, or
writing in a journal? Become familiar with your way of praying and your
vocabulary instead of trying to live up to some form of prayer ideal that
everybody has to follow.
-
Barry and Connolly states: “The real spiritual director is God.” Quite often my experience in
the spiritual direction session is something in the order of: “Mrs X, this is God. God, this is Mrs. X.”
And then I lift my knees to my chest, put my feet on the chair, get out of the
way and somehow become a witness to an extraordinary exchange between directee
and God. I experience God quite literally as the wise, compassionate, ever
present Director who opens up perspectives and facilitate growth in ways that I
never could have imagined.
-
On a very personal level - along with all the aspects
that I’ve just commented on, I deeply value spiritual direction as I practice
it and have an ever-growing appreciation for the training that I’ve received, because
of its roots within a specific tradition. I’ll always be very grateful that I
got to know it as a very important aspect of Ignatian spirituality. To this
matter I shall hopefully return in more detail at a later stage.
George
Comments
Post a Comment