What is Spiritual Direction?

"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."

William A. Barry, SJ and William J. Connolly, SJ

Spiritual direction is about soul care. It is about journeying together, listening to the Spirit, to each other and to ourselves, to pay attention to and grow in awareness of the movements of God in your life in order to grow in intimacy with the One who calls you beloved. The focus of this work is your relationship with God. We will seek to discern together what God is saying through the circumstances of life with the goal of expanding our terrain of freedom and God’s goodness.

Spiritual direction has been a part of the Church for centuries. In historic communities of faith, a spiritual director was an anam cara, or committed soul friend offering spiritual accompaniment, who helped the fellow believer pay attention to their soul and to the movements of God in their life. In short, a spiritual director is a soul companion on the way, relying on the Holy Spirit to be the One who directs.

Spiritual direction is not therapy. It is not about fixing an immediate problem or addressing an issue. It is about growing in openness to, awareness of, and participation with what the Spirit of God is doing in you. It’s a long journey paying attention to the rhythms of grace through times of consolation and desolation*. It is about living in the center of your relationship with God.

As the focus of this work is your relationship with God, it is largely about your prayer life. How do you communicate with God? How does God communicate with you?

My favorite image for this work is that of the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35. They are in a place of desolation and confusion as the one they’d put their hope in has been executed. But they’d heard strange rumors of him being alive. In this place of desolation, Jesus comes to walk with them, unrecognized, and interacts with them bringing their hearts back to life through his interpretating the scriptures to them. We are the disciples walking in the terrain of your relationship with God, looking for the often-unrecognized Jesus there and inviting him to open the eyes of our hearts to see him there.

*Consolation and Desolation are terms coined by Ignatius of Loyola to describe the ebb and flow of our affective experience of our relationship with God. Consolation is an experience of the interior movement of the soul characterized by peace, joy, contentment, and the love of God where we feel attracted to, drawn to, and in some manner connected to the presence of God. Desolation is an experience that is the opposite of consolation.