What we talk about in spiritual direction
Not always spiritual, never direction
Every spiritual director I know wrestles with the same problem: that is, that the words for what we do very often feel like misnomer1.
In spiritual direction, what we might talk about very often doesn’t fall under the heading of what you would normally consider “spiritual”, and as a spiritual director, if anything, I go out of my way to not direct you. Although I suppose you could say I am always directing you back to yourself, and to the voice of the Love.
There will be whole hours I sit with directees (again, another vocabulary word all my spiritual director friends are always looking for an alternative to) within which we never once say the word “God.”
“God comes to you disguised as your life.” -Paula D’Arcy
I once talked about this with Julia Mourant, my course leader at Sarum College, where I trained as a spiritual director. We lamented the compulsion to “bring God into the conversation” in a spiritual direction context. We agreed that doing so can be clunky, and can often snap us out of conversations that are already inherently spiritual, without us feeling the need to throw God a bone by mentioning his name outright. “Bringing God into the conversation” goes against what I personally believe about how the divine is already present in every moment, infused into every living thing.
I became a spiritual director because, when my foundation crumbled beneath me, there was nowhere safe to say out loud all the scary things I was thinking. I needed a safe place, and I couldn’t find one, so I became one.
One thing about me is I’m pretty hard to shock.
I think this has something to do with the things I’ve survived, and the way I’ve learned the necessity of embracing our shadow sides. That’s not something I’m always awesome at, but it is something I’m aware of. I realise how human we all are. As a side note, we’ve gotten very bad as a society at allowing each other to be human in our own specific ways, and we love to project our own ideas of what is acceptable onto each other, watering down and homogenizing humanity, as it were. But our weirdnesses - the ways we are both good and terrible in equal measure, and in our own unique expressions - are what make us human. It’s no surprise then, really, if we all think about it, that the further we get into artificial intelligence and the more dependent we become on technology, the worse we get at accepting each other in all our human complexities.
Anyway, that wasn’t really what I was going to talk about, except that maybe it was. You see, I have a guiding belief that what makes us human is what makes us spiritual. Which is why, I suppose, I find the way we are hurling ourselves at a more robotic future to be existentially threatening. The less human we become, the less spiritual we become.
The beauty is that we can become more and more deeply human by exploring the hidden corners of ourselves and our connection to God, to the world, to each other2.
That is all a long, maybe a little stream-of-consciousness, way of saying that that is why spiritual direction matters to me. It is a safe container in which you can explore your human-ness, and your connection to all things and all people, and to the divine - with no pressure to be anywhere but exactly where you are on your human journey.
Distraction has become a way of life for us - I see it in myself when I am afraid and I find myself scrolling, subconsciously looking for something to attach my wayward attention to - anywhere but at the thing that calls me. Sometimes the pull to look anywhere but at the thing feels overwhelming. But we can look at the thing. Because we cannot befriend the thing until we can behold it.
Beholding alone, can feel like frightening. So maybe, what spiritual direction is, really, is beholding together.
Anyway, here is a non-exhaustive list of things we might talk about in spiritual direction3.
Your pet.
The book you’re reading.
The way the sunlight hit the water on your walk this morning.
The way your mother-in-law makes you feel.
The anger you feel rising when you least expect it.
The rude joke you heard last weekend.
The things you’re scared to say you don’t believe anymore.
How you feel in your body.
What you’re most afraid of.
The ritual of making coffee, of washing your face, of preparing your children’s lunches.
How your marriage feels after five, ten, 30 years.
Your resentment over sacrificing your career to be a mother.
Your resentment over not becoming a mother.
The dream you had last night.
The dreams you sometimes can’t dare to dream.
The date you went on last weekend.
The things you used to believe in that you don’t believe in anymore.
The things you believe that you never would have thought you would believe.
What to teach your kids about God.
What your kids are teaching you about God.
A couple of weeks ago, someone in my Substack chat asked me to talk about the difference between talking to a pastor or a spiritual director. Spiritual directors, like therapists, will all be a little different in their approaches, but here is my answer, as best I can articulate it on this day, in this year, in this country:
A pastor works for a church or a denomination, and within that role, there are specific beliefs and doctrines they will subscribe to. As a spiritual director, I am not trying to lead anyone anywhere specific. I am probably not going to quote scripture to you (I am definitely not going to do that if you have a background of religious trauma). I am not interested in you arriving anywhere, except maybe for the hand of your internal compass to alight slightly closer to your True North.
In her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor says this:
“Maybe that is the difference between pastoral counselors and spiritual directors. We go to counselors when we want help getting out of caves. We go to directors when we are ready to be led farther in.”
I spend a lot of time trying to explain spiritual direction to people who aren’t familiar with it (which is okay, because I wasn’t either until about five years ago), but I don’t know if there’s a better explanation than that.
Everything that takes us further in, takes us closer. Everything belongs.
xx
Faith
For the record, a few other words spiritual directors use: spiritual companion, holy listening, deep listening, sacred listening, anam cara (in the Celtic tradition: soul friend)
This is also the heart behind the Sanctuary retreat - it is nothing if not a container for exploring all our human corners so that we can inhabit the world more fully, more lovingly, more whole.
Inspired by actual spiritual direction conversations I’ve had.