A therapist, coach and spiritual director walk into a bar
Spiritual direction for a new era: what direction are you going in?
It is my firm conviction that the ministry of personal spiritual accompaniment will be the crucial pastoral role of the Church in the forthcoming afternoon of Christian history, and the one most needed.
There is a growing interest in spiritual direction, within and without the Church. I believe something is happening within this that is related to our cultural moment and what the Holy Spirit is doing. I am increasingly convinced that in the face of our civilisation level crisis, spiritual direction (accompaniment) is one of the most vital responses for the Church to engage in.
But what is Spiritual Direction, and why might my claim be valid?
Spiritual Direction vs Therapy vs Coaching
I was a pastor for twenty-five years. I often referred people to spiritual directors. I eventually undertook some spiritual direction myself. But only a few years ago did I enter more fully into what I think spiritual direction is and can be. I now find myself training as a Spiritual Director and overseeing the growth and development of a spiritual direction training centre.
People often ask how spiritual direction differs from therapy and coaching. We are more likely to have encountered therapy (counselling) and coaching, and instinctively know spiritual direction is adjacent to these. I used to try to explain the difference using the metaphor of someone falling into a hole.
With therapy, you look backwards, to understand how you fell into the hole in the first place and why you keep falling into holes? With coaching you look forward and think about how you will get out and where you are going. With spiritual direction, you explore where God is with you in the hole. Anyone who knows about coaching, therapy, and spiritual direction knows how rudimentary and incomplete that metaphor is. So let’s unpack it a little further.
Spiritual direction generally falls between coaching at one end of a spectrum and therapy at the other, like my person-in-a-hole metaphor above.
Coaching is a focused, forward-looking, thinking space that explores skills, development, goals, and performance.
Therapy is a deep looking backwards to resolve or reduce psychological distress and upset.
Spiritual Direction is a deep present space where you look for God and notice where He has been, is now, and is inviting you into the future.
A therapist is usually not focused on God, but insights in therapy can be profound places to encounter God. Meeting God in spiritual direction is not therapy but can be healing and therapeutic. And all three areas overlap in many ways.
Therapy, coaching, and spiritual direction can work together, and I’ll say more about that in a future post. But for now, I want to explore what spiritual direction distinctly is and how it might be timely and powerful for our present moment.
Movement: Towards or Away
Spiritual direction has many aspects and dimensions, but a few key top-level features. One of those is freighted within the term ‘director/direction’.
Some people prefer the term spiritual accompaniment to spiritual director, feeling the word ‘director’ is an inaccurate misnomer for what spiritual directors do, with connotations of telling and instructing people. A Spiritual Director is not that; anyone behaving that way should be avoided for spiritual direction. Likewise, we might talk about having had spiritual direction, but that does not mean someone has managed and instructed us.
But there is something inherent and integral to spiritual direction, no matter what you call it, and that is about direction, i.e movement.
Spiritual direction means making space and time to notice where we have been moving toward God or away from Him. We do that by talking with a spiritual director who is trained and experienced in helping us notice these soul movements. And we can learn to notice them more and better.
St. Ignatius Loyola called these movements the…
…“motions of the soul.” These interior movements consist of thoughts, imaginings, emotions, inclinations, desires, feelings, repulsions, and attractions. Spiritual discernment of spirits involves becoming sensitive to these movements, reflecting on them, and understanding where they come from and where they lead us.
The Gift of Spiritual Direction
Many of us go through life so busy that we often don’t notice how we are outside of being happy, sad, busy, and tired. It might not be until we sit down on a well-earned holiday that the condition of our soul becomes apparent, trying to catch up with us.
Spiritual direction is a gift of regular intentional space and time to reflect on life, its events, feelings, and our responses. It allows us to notice the movement of our souls, who we are, who we are becoming, and where we are with God. Where might we be hiding and avoiding God? Has God seemed absent from us? What has He invited me into? How does something that I felt/experienced/noticed reveal where God and I are with each other?
Spiritual direction involves talking with God about my deepest desires and fears, hearing and discovering his love, desires, and invitations for me, and noticing how I am responding and moving towards or away from Him.
All of life is about movement towards or away from God. We move through life, closer every day to the moment of our death, when we will all arrive before God. Spiritual direction lets us notice and explore our relationship and movements with the Lord before that moment.
Spiritual Direction as Thin Place and Space
I have described the current state of our world and extant identity crisis as being akin to a global mood disorder.
The affective dimension of human identity and life concerns moods, feelings, and emotions. This dimension of life has moved from being an underlying experience of human life to capturing and totalising human identity. We have reached a point where people's sense of self is increasingly in toto, about an inner psychological reality that often has to be asserted through dysfunctional emotional actions and behaviours. The affective dimension of life has become so disordered it is akin to a global affective mood disorder.
We live at a time and place where our world is permeated with calls to mindfulness, to pause and notice in the face of our growing mood disorders. Spiritual direction is a kind of mindfulness of our thoughts, hearts, feelings, and bodies. It involves noticing where we have, in whole or in part, been moving towards or away from God and why. It is a powerful remedy, response, and practice for our affective mood disorder.
Over the years, I have had therapy, to process emotional and psychological distress, and God has used that to bring healing to me. I have had coaching, which has helped me see the wood for the trees and find ways to move forward into who I believe God called me to be and do. But spiritual direction has been something else. It has been a thin space where heaven has opened over me.
I have found that I often start by talking about what has been happening, with me as an observer of my own life. Then, I move from a report of things to noticing and describing my sense of things. And sometimes, I have moved into an experience of God, in the present, in the moment, of a new encounter with him. By that point, my spiritual director had faded into the background, as they held space for me and delighted me in my meeting with God.
During one spiritual direction session, I shared with my spiritual director about an experience that happened earlier that week in prayer time. I had been reading the story of the prodigal son. As I entered into that story, I took part in it. I was in a far-off land and had come home to the Father, and his house. I was very distressed. I noticed that I was upset because it had taken so many years to get to this experience of the Father’s house. I regretted how long it had taken me to understand God as my Father. I had struggled for so long to know in my heart that God was my Father, after the experience of being abandoned by my dad when I was a teenager.
As I recounted that to my spiritual director, I was caught up again in the story. Jesus was with me on a dusty road, excited to bring me to the Father. I arrived before Abba. I cried, distraught that it had taken me thirty-six years to get to this moment of encounter since I was first saved. “Forgive me…“ I began to say.
And the Father stopped me, spoke something over me that undid me, and transformed me.
“You were the son of a prodigal son, who abandoned you in a far off land. I sent my son to rescue you and bring you home. Welcome.”
In that moment and with those words, healing came upon me—like a therapeutic insight that reached the core of my being and rewired my brain and sense of identity. And I notice now as I recall this, so much movement - of Jesus coming to rescue me when I was seventeen, the journey towards the Father was long and full of detours. Times when my heart was far from the Lord due to pain in my life, but he was close to me. All the time, Jesus moved me closer to this moment of meeting the Father.