A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

January 2015

Classically it is understood as a conversation between two people in which one helps the other to recognise God’s presence in their life, and then supports them in responding to it. Today that tends to be a matter of regular meetings every couple of months. But I’m sure that most spiritual direction doesn’t take place like that!  My sense is that it most often takes place between people who have never heard of the term, and who have no idea that that is what they are offering each other.

For example, I find it difficult to imagine how you could to be a member of any religious group without being party, from time to time, to conversations of this sort. Indeed, I seem to recall that Ken Leach used to argue that every Christian church will have at least one wise person to whom others informally go to seek advice on spiritual matters. It doesn’t need to be named as spiritual direction for that to be what is happening.

Many of Jesus’ encounters with men and women recorded in the Gospels fit my definition but they seem to have been just one-off meetings. So diaries and ongoing meetings are not obligatory!   I reckon that there’s a strong Christian tradition of spiritual direction being offered in groups. I belong to a couple of such groups, and the old Methodist class system used to work very much in that way I think. So it doesn’t have to be a one to one conversation.  And I think that the majority of church goers get their spiritual direction from the ethos of Sunday morning worship and the collective assumptions of the group, and usually don’t feel the need for anything more personal.

A lady who used to come to me for spiritual direction once told me that she had two spiritual directors. I was a bit taken aback. ‘Yes’ she said, ‘I value coming to talk with you…….but I often simply climb this big hill near our home because God has always felt very real there, and I’ve come to think of the hill as my other spiritual director!’  She taught me that places may act as spiritual directors. Cats and dogs often make good spiritual directors too in my experience, if we will but hear the wisdom that they offer. So human beings aren’t essential either!

So while there is a place for regular one to one spiritual direction conversations, most spiritual direction takes place as a part of ordinary everyday life without anybody thinking that anything special is happening and without recourse to overtly ‘spiritual’ language: such is the graciousness of God.  

In this sense Jesus must have been on the receiving end of spiritual direction: how else could He have learned of the Jewish tradition within which He grew up? Somebody must have taught Him? And there surely must have been people to whom He talked as He developed the confidence to trust what He believed the God He came to know was calling Him to? Who might they have been?