Last week I was in the car with our three children, ages 10, 12 and 14. Our youngest is an uncommonly sensitive, thoughtful young man. He has – I don’t know how else to say it – a different kind of prayer life than his dad. When he prays, it’s just different – how he prays, how he hears. So, I asked him to pray about something for me.
“I have a special prayer request for you, buddy. I’ve been praying with Mommy, each night, very deliberately, ‘Lord, we want to be completely surrendered to your will, your calling for our lives. So, would you please lead, guide, and direct us? Show us what you have for us?’ And because I know your prayers are so special, buddy, would you join us in praying for that specifically?”
He paused before he responded. Then said (and this is not hyperbole – here were his words best as we can recall):
“Dad, I’ll pray with you for that. Because that’s a good prayer. But I feel like you might be asking me to pray for this because you feel like you have something to prove, like you still want to prove yourself to somebody. And what I want to ask you to think about is, ‘What do you really want?’”
With my 12-year-old and 14-year-old as witnesses, that’s what he said. I just about wrecked our car.
That’s a picture of spiritual direction – listening beside someone in prayer, co-listening if you will, helping them discern, through their wants and desires, what God has for them and where God is leading them. And yes, even a specially gifted 10-year-old can do it.
People of all ages sooner or later need a wise friend, someone who knows how to pay attention to what is said and what is unsaid, someone who knows how to listen, someone who knows how to pray. Which is to say, at some point in our lives we all could use some spiritual direction.
A Season of Life
This is part of a series on “Five Things Every Leader Needs.”
- A true friend.
- A wise counselor.
- A battled-scarred mentor.
- A field-tested rule of life.
- A spiritual director.
That list is not comprehensive. But if we want to keep on what the earliest followers of Jesus called “the Way,” each of those five is important. We won’t need all of them all the time, but at some point along the Way, most of us will need each of those.
If we’re honest as we learn what each one entails, many of us might admit that we only have one or two at the most. And if we were to take a poll, probably the least likely box to be checked would be spiritual director. Even if you’ve heard of it, the practice of spiritual direction remains shrouded in mystery and misunderstandings. You might even think it’s trendy or faddish, though the roots of it are quite ancient. You might think it’s esoteric, reserved for certain types, not for you.
And yet,
- If you’ve experienced the rare gift of someone really listening to you…
- If you’ve ever had someone create and hold a space for you to pay attention…
- If you long for a haven where you can sit down in stillness, and let the muddy river water – that is the inner turmoil you feel – settle to the bottom of the glass…
- If you are seeking a refuge where you feel safe to be vulnerable, where the questions you’ve been afraid to ask can surface and the longings you’ve been reluctant to name can emerge…
- If you’ve ever wished to have a sacred companion alongside you to listen with you and help you hear Jesus’ calling for your life in the present moment…
… then you might be interested in learning more about practicing spiritual direction. Let’s look at what it is, how it differs from other types of soul care, what makes for a good spiritual director, and how to find one.
Spiritual Direction – What is it?
To start with what it isn’t – spiritual direction is not a cheap form of therapy or an alternative to counseling. Despite the name, spiritual direction is not intended to be directive. A spiritual director is not there to hear all your problems and then tell you what to do or how to move forward.
“You don’t go to a spiritual director to care of your spirit the way you go to a dentist to have him take care of your teeth,” Thomas Merton once put it. “The spiritual director is concerned with the whole person.” Merton is describing that the spiritual life is not a part of our life; it’s about becoming more aware of God’s presence in all of life.
A spiritual director is not a mentor or a coach. He or she is not a conduit between you and God. I like how one writer (Mary Guenther) describes the relationship:
“It is unashamedly hierarchical not because the director is somehow better or holier than the directee, but because, in this relationship the director has agreed to put himself aside so that his total attention can be focused on the person sitting in the other chair. What a gift to bring to another, the gift of disinterested, loving attention!”
Have you ever had someone really listen to you? A skilled, compassionate counselor might do that. What makes a spiritual director different is that he or she not only listens to you but listens with you.
I’m more convinced than ever that the art of spiritual direction cannot be learned from books, but only from personal experience and prayer. And yet if you’re interested in further study, here are some resources and definitions that might be helpful.
“A spiritual director is just a person who holds prayerful space for someone else, to help them discern what God is up to in and around them,” says Emily P. Freeman.
Holding space and making room – in that sense, it’s a specific form of hospitality.
“A spiritual director is one who helps another to recognize and to follow the inspirations of grace in his life in order to arrive at the end to which God is leading him,” writes Thomas Merton.
In this swirl of emotions you’re feeling, where is God in this? In the confusion you are feeling, what is God saying?
“Spiritual direction is holy listening. Not that the listener herself is holy, but that the listening is,” writes Mary Guenther.
It’s been said that the first duty of love is to listen, and yet, so few of us have ever had someone really listen to us. We are starving, our soul is parched, longing to be heard and understood. Recognized.
“It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out for yourself. This is what spiritual direction is,” writes Eugene Peterson.
A good spiritual director has to work diligently to set aside any agenda, or an impulse to give advice or to try to fix whatever problem has surfaced. The director has to face their own temptation to feel useful or appear wise. They recognize this instinct has more to do with themselves than actually caring for the person in front of them. “It’s less about providing answers and more about creating space to ask important questions,” Emily P. Freeman says. She has this great image of not leading from ahead but walking prayerfully beside to describe the posture of listening with rather than talking at.
“Spiritual direction involves a process through which one person helps another person understand what God is doing and saying,” writes Richard Foster.
Spiritual direction is the practice of discerning the presence and activity of God in the life of another, in a way that is difficult or impossible to do all alone.
Maybe the most cited definition is this one from William Barry and William Connolly:
“We define Christian spiritual direction as 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.”
It’s a special type of friendship, which is why, toward the end of his life, Henri Nouwen preferred calling it spiritual friendship and a director as a “soul friend.” Nouwen defined spiritual direction as,
“A relationship initiated by a spiritual seeker who finds a mature person of faith willing to pray and respond with wisdom and understanding to his or her questions about how to live spiritually in a world of ambiguity and distraction.”
I like the breadth of that definition. It shows that spiritual direction is a vital part, of caring for another’s soul – and for that reason, it should be on the radar of any conscientious pastor. To help people become more attuned to God’s presence, we must become attuned ourselves (which is not a given for most church leaders).
A Kind of Spiritual Practice
Spiritual direction is a spiritual practice. As with other spiritual practices, there’s nothing inherently transformative about the practices themselves. Like with Bible reading, meditation, prayer, keeping the Sabbath or taking the Lord’s Supper, these deliberate actions put us in a position to encounter the God who is there. Sometimes called “means of grace,” these intentional habits are well-worn pathways for practicing the presence of God.
All the spiritual practices are about “becoming aware that God is everywhere and learning to practice his presence and yield to his transforming grace” (Gary Moon). Spiritual direction helps us become more aware of what’s always there, Who’s always with us, just beneath the surface of our hurried lives, if only we’d give ourselves permission to stop and let God love us.
As we said earlier, the spiritual director is not, in fact, directive. God, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ is the director. A spiritual director helps us direct our attention to the Spirit’s voice and leading.
The classic question of spiritual direction is Jesus’ question, “What do you want?” The same question my little boy asked me. Hidden in that question is one of C.S. Lewis’s most cherished convictions: that our desires are like shafts of light, and if we follow them they will lead us to our heart’s chief desire, which is communion with God.
My ten-year-old boy was exactly right. Behind my prayer request was my desire to have something outside of me, other than God’s voice, validate my worth. He saw right through my pious language and pointed out that I really didn’t know what I was praying for or what I needed. In this way, spiritual direction is a type of praying. It helps us purify our desires, simplify our wants, and realign our loves.
My son was probably a little more “directive” than most spiritual directors might be, but it highlights that we need the help of someone who is, we hope, listening better than we might be able to. Spiritual directors listen with us to help us hear what the True Director might be saying.
How did so many of us get to a place where, at least in the way we live our daily lives and face our decisions, that we doubt that the living Almighty God, our Abba Father, wishes to communicate to His children today?
Yes, he does this principally through His Word, the Bible. But that shouldn’t preclude us from believing that as the LORD did with Eli and Samuel so many years ago (an early picture of spiritual direction in the Bible – 1 Samuel 1) so God is still calling us today, leading us now, and desiring us to pay attention to what the Spirit is saying (Revelation 3:22). What do want me to do here, Jesus?
If our faith has become so intellectualized, so left-brained if you will, that we’ve ceased seeking God’s face, looking to Him in prayer and waiting for his direction, we should hear the psalmist warning, “They did not wait for His counsel” (Psalm 106:13). How often have we as leaders made painful mistakes, in the name of trying to help, because we presumed in our pride and did not wait for God’s counsel?
In today’s church, the need is great – both for leaders to be able to provide spiritual direction and also to know how much we need it ourselves.
It’s hard to read the Psalms and not conclude that one of the most urgent needs among all people today is learning how to bring our whole selves into God’s presence and wait to hear the voice of the One who said, “My sheep hear my voice…and they follow me” (John 10:27). So if we’ve forgotten how to hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, we may benefit from a spiritual director sitting beside us, listening with us, and helping us discern what our Good Shepherd is saying. “This is the way, walk in it” (Isaiah 30:21).
A spiritual director helps us learn (or re-learn) how to pray, which many of us, certainly I do, need a lot of help with.
How’s It Different From Other Soul Care?
A common question people have when they first hear about spiritual direction is “Ok, I think I understand, but how is that different from Christian counseling or pastoral care or mentoring, or being discipled?”
Counseling and therapy are often crisis-driven, helping us navigate something we’re going through, often by helping us look back to understand why we are reacting the way we are. Pastoral care is bringing God’s wisdom and promises to bear on our current circumstance, perhaps giving us permission from God’s word to voice the cries of our hearts. Discipleship and spiritual formation are shaping us into the men and women God created us to be and Jesus redeemed us to become. These are all aspects of soul care.
Spiritual direction has overlapping interests with all of the above, standing alongside them as a part of soul care. Except it’s not typically sought out in a time of crisis, but more often in a season of indecision, where you feel stuck, adrift, unsure of what’s next and God’s voice seems silent.
Maybe you’re in a time of transition, a space between. You’ve lost faith in your old ways, or your old view of God, and maybe it was a naïve faith that needed to die. But you don’t want to jettison your faith altogether. A spiritual director can help. Maybe you’ve passed through a season of crushing disappointment and are wondering what’s next. That’s also a good time to sit down with a spiritual director.
It’s entirely possible (and this was my experience) that you might want to see both a counselor and a spiritual director, as well as talk to your pastor, because all three serve different functions.
Some of you might be thinking, “Isn’t that just what a wise friend would do?” Yes! And that’s exactly why Henri Nouwen preferred the term spiritual friend. He lamented that friendship like this used to be an expected part of community life. Has it ever struck you that we are the first known culture to pay people to listen to us? But a friend like this, who can find?
What Makes for a Good Spiritual Director?
In his book, Sacred Companions, David Benner writes:
Spiritual directors function like guides more than teachers. They accompanied others on the journey, not as experts but as companions. Having escorted others on similar journeys, they are sometimes in a position to offer assistance in selecting the best route. Furthermore, because they know the region where you and they are journeying, they may be able to help you put the journey in perspective to see where you are in terms of where you’re going, but the way they best facilitate the learning that’s important to the spiritual journey is by continually orienting themselves and you to the Spirit.
Many centuries ago, a monk named Aelred wrote one of the classic treatises on spiritual friendship, in which he gave a good summary of spiritual direction, “Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, is in our midst.”
A good spiritual director is a wise spiritual friend, a fellow wayfarer, a kind and attentive listener, a trail guide who’s been on a similar path, a sympathetic helper who, because he or she has received so much help themselves, now wants to help others on this journey of transformation and surrender.
How Do I Find One?
There are plenty of resources online to get you started. Here’s one and here’s another. Like finding a counselor, you have to be honest with yourself about some of your preferences – age, gender, theological background. And you have to be honest about your expectations and why you are seeking spiritual direction in the first place. They are not going to fix you or tell you what to do – and if they try, you’ve got the wrong person.
As with a counselor, fit and feel are important. You can ask yourself:
- Do they ask you great questions?
- Are they uncommonly good listeners?
- Do they abide the awkward silences?
- Do they unfailingly point you back to Jesus?
And you can ask them:
- What’s your understanding of what we’re doing here?
- What’s been your experience of receiving spiritual direction?
- How long have you been doing this?
- What does it mean to hear God?
You might want to start with someone around you who may not be formally credentialled, but whom other people are constantly seeking out to bare their souls.
Now that you have a sense of what a spiritual director does, is there anyone around you who this sounds like? If so, begin praying about this and then approach them. This does not necessarily need to be a paid service. And if they are the deep person of prayer you hope they are, then God will be leading them to you as well.
That’s how I found the man who turned out to be my first informal spiritual director. There was this older guy whom so many different people, from so many different walks of life, kept seeking out. I was his pastor. And yet, I knew he had a relationship with the LORD that was different, deeper, than my own. And the fruit of his life – his gentleness, even under criticism – bore that out.
He had a very accomplished professional career that had nothing to do with “church work,” and yet, in his secular vocation, he did more spiritual direction than any elder or pastor I’d ever met. I asked him if he’d be willing to help me.
It took some time to establish trust. I once asked him why so few of the people who approached him continued to work with him beyond a couple of meetings and I’ll never forget his answer. “It’s just too painful. Too hard. Most people don’t want to do that kind of work.”
Thank God I was desperate enough to keep seeking him out and he kept making time for me.
We met at least weekly (which is more often than most spiritual directors meet their charges, which is typically once a month, and only for a season). I knew he had a lot to say but most always he resisted giving me advice (even when I asked him to). But he unfailingly pointed me back to the gospel and we prayed together.
It was frustrating. I wanted answers. I needed spiritual direction but didn’t know what I needed until months after I’d experienced it. This friend was teaching me, by example, how to listen. I’ll close with this story from Henri Nouwen:
WHEN I taught academic courses on the spiritual life, I sometimes drew a long straight line from the left edge to the right on the blackboard, and I’d explain: “This is our eternal life in God. You belong to God from eternity to eternity. You were loved by God before you were born; you will be loved by God long after you die.” Then I would mark off a small segment of the line and say: “This is your human lifetime. It is only a part of your total life in God. You are here for just a short time—for twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty years—to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter. Life is just a short opportunity for you during a few years to say to God: ‘I love you, too.’”
And that’s my favorite picture of spiritual direction: someone helping us sit in God’s presence, where we can learn to surrender to God’s love.
Note: For futher reading on this topic, visit https://broomtreemedia.com/2024/02/02/further-reading-on-spiritual-direction/.