Spiritual Direction
Schedule Your Appointment
If you are interested in recieving spiritual direction you will first have a interview with one of the directors to clarify what to expect in the spiritual direction sessions.
What happens in Spiritual Direction?
People experience and respond to God/Spirit, or the Divine, in different ways. This is influenced in part by their life experience, their personality, and their cultural and religious backgrounds. The focus of spiritual direction is discerning the movement of the Spirit in the life of the “directee.”
Spiritual directors listen carefully to the unfolding of their directees’ lives to help them discern how the Divine is leading them. A director and directee have regular one-on-one meetings (usually about 45 Min, once a month) to more deeply explore the directee’s spiritual journey.
The term spiritual direction has a long, rich history, and it is still used today, even though the practice of spiritual direction consists much more of “holy listening,” rather than “direction” in the sense of offering guidance or direct advice.
THE GOD WHO DIRECTS
God, who is the primary director, speaks in many ways. We are surrounded by God, immersed as in an ocean. At the same time, God is also in us, in our bodies, our consciousness and unconsciousness, and in our deepest center. God is intimately present to each of us, and a relationship develops as we begin to pay attention to that Presence. Sometimes we don’t recognize God, or know how to name the experience. There is in each of us an eros for union, a basic human drive which may be channeled into lesser (never fully satisfactory) desires, but it consistently moves us to reach out for the “more than” what we experience. Usually a decision to seek spiritual direction comes out of an awareness of a relationship with God and a desire to deepen it. The person feels an invitation, however subtle and unclear, that has a persistent, recurrent strength, and finally leads to seeking help in the journey.
DIRECTEE
The directee has either experienced God in her or his life, or at least desires that experience. Even in cases where a particular problem is the immediate cause of seeking help, the choice of spiritual direction for that help is an expression of faith that God is acting in the person’s life, and will reveal the way, and that another human being can aid that revelation. The directee needs to be open and trusting, i.e., to have the stance of a learner. One does not know the outcome, but comes in search of what life and prayer will reveal as God’s will for them. The trust required is trust in the God always and forever present who gives us life and leads us through our own history. It includes as well, trust in oneself and in the director, with the understanding that oneself and one’s life is the arena in which God acts for us, that others also mediate God to us, and that it is the one Spirit who, in us and in the other, is seeking to be revealed.