What Is Spiritual Direction?
Thanks for your interest in connecting with a trained spiritual director who has completed the “Ministry of Spiritual Direction” two-year online program, a partnership with the Center for Spiritual Formation of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Before the Innovation Center makes this connection, please carefully review the following information to answer your questions about the purpose and expectations of spiritual direction. You will want to make certain this is the specific type of assistance you feel you need.
A spiritual director is different than a local church pastor. A person trained in spiritual direction does not counsel, advise, coach, or provide career path assessment. A spiritual director is also different from a practical ministry leadership coach who teaches and advises on best practices for your congregation.
Persons often seek a spiritual director’s companionship when they want to discern a new choice in life, are not sure how God is leading in some aspect and desire to discern more of the Holy Spirit’s clarity—or to establish/re-establish communication with God, when God seems distant or absent.
“Spiritual direction provides an “address” on the house of your life so that you can be “addressed” by God in prayer. When this happens, your life begins to be transformed in ways you hadn’t planned or counted on, for God works in
wonderful and surprising ways.”
Richard Foster shares more and gives thanks here.
While the phrase “spiritual direction” may sound a bit lofty, it is simply a relationship through which one person assists another in attending to the presence and call of God in all of life. Though not always called by this name, spiritual direction has been a vital ministry in many streams of the Church for hundreds of years.
Spiritual direction is for anyone yearning for God. Sometimes this desire appears as a sense of longing for something greater or a sense of discontent with the status quo. For others this pining is more focused, rising from a clear understanding that a sense of God’s presence is missing from particular parts of life.
Of course, an underlying assumption and basis for spiritual direction is that God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is actively drawing us into the Eternal Presence. God is the one, true “director,” working constantly, actively, powerfully in the very midst of our ordinary, everyday routines and life circumstances. A spiritual direction relationship is one way to help us pay attention to this Divine work. It interrupts our typical routine long enough to help us notice God’s wooing of us and become more deeply aware of God’s presence with us.
The spiritual direction relationship includes a director and directee, with the director often being called a “spiritual director.” While different directors have different approaches to their practice, typically they take an active/passive role, simply creating the environment for the direction to take place. The director intentions to do more listening than talking, asking leading and, sometimes, probing questions as needed and appropriate. Times of silence are apropos and welcomed. There is very little actual direction given as this is commonly understood. Rather, the spiritual director convenes a conversation during which a direction will be determined by the directee and director together, co-laboring with God. Both directee and director explore together what God might be doing in the areas being discussed.
While the lines may be blurry at times depending on the style of the spiritual director or present circumstances, spiritual direction is different from pastoral counseling. People usually enter a counseling relationship because something is wrong with life. Counseling tends to be crisis-oriented or problem-driven. Solving particular problems or handling specific crises is not the goal of spiritual direction. The spiritual direction relationship takes the long view. It looks for how God is working, calling, prodding, and inviting us to new ways of being with Jesus amid our circumstances. It focuses on building an intimate relationship with God over a lifetime, through all the problems, crises, joys, and blessings.
“The call of the spiritual director is to be a conduit of God who assists directees in recognizing the activity of God’s holy presence. The spiritual director must be mindful that the ultimate director is the Holy Spirit; God sees fit to use human directors in connecting his omnipresence to their directees. Without a doubt, a key element undergirding spiritual direction and soul care is prayer.”