Matthew van Maastricht

Almost every explorer who set out into an unknown land was accompanied by a guide. When Hiram Bingham went into the Peruvian jungle to search for a lost city of the Inca, he took Melchor Arteaga with him. When Lewis and Clark set out on their famous expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase (and beyond), they were accompanied by Sacagawea, who was indispensable to the success of their expedition. When Henry Morton Stanley went in search of David Livingstone on the African continent, he was accompanied by Sidi Murbarak Bombay to guide them. And when Edmund Hillary became the first known human to summit Mount Everest, he did not do it alone, but was accompanied by Tenzing Norgay, who was a partner and without whom Hillary would not have made it.

To set out into the unknown and live, or at least succeed, one needs a guide. Why would it be any different for an expedition of the soul?

As a pastor, the core of my role is to be the spiritual guide for the congregations entrusted to my care. Which means that my main function is to help keep God and the spiritual dimension before the church in all matters, including the most mundane. But there’s also a dimension of personal spiritual guidance that has also always existed in the pastorate, and remains important, though it tends to have lost some emphasis. After all, while a congregation is far more than just a collection of individuals, we cannot forget about the individuals, and the particularities of our spiritual journeys are our own.

And this is where spiritual direction comes in.

Spiritual guidance is: “A covenantal friendship between Christians in which one helps the other to discern God’s presence and to live contemplatively according to God’s calling.” The term covenant friendship implies the importance of relationships as the core of the Christian life. We all need help from others to listen to and respond to God. Without help, we often misunderstand and misinterpret our deepest experiences. Caught in the whirlwind of events, we forget about God or push the spiritual pilgrimage to the corners of our lives. That fact emphasizes the importance of understanding spiritual guidance as a relationship, a “covenant friendship” between two Christians.

Howard Rice, from The Pastor as Spiritual Guide

What is spiritual direction?

Spiritual direction is a way to journey with intention in ones spiritual life. It is very deep within the Christian tradition and generally finds its recognizable genesis when people traveled to visit the desert fathers and mothers–monks who took up residence in the desert, primarily in Egypt, though also in Syria and Palestine. People would make pilgrimage to see a monk, and ask for a piece of spiritual guidance. “Abba/Amma, give me a word” was a common refrain of these pilgrims as they sought a piece of spiritual guidance and edification. Today, spiritual direction looks very different, but the essence remains the same–seeking to grow in the spiritual life by seeking guidance with someone who is experienced with the terrain. A guide of sorts.

Nowadays, spiritual direction looks like sitting with a guide–a spiritual director–for one hour once a month to explore your spiritual life. In spiritual direction, it is not the director who does most of the talking but the directee. It is a time for the directee to share their experiences of the Divine, prayer, mediation, and similar matters. While this happens, the director listens deeply to that which the directee is sharing and seeks to ask guiding questions or make brief observations that might help the directee to make sense of their experiences and to grow in their experience with the Divine. A spiritual director can help us to see things in a way that we might not otherwise be able to see.

Much like a guide on an expedition does not make the expedition easy and effortless (after all, climbing Mount Everest is still climbing Mount Everest), similarly, spiritual direction doesn’t take the work out of the growth in the spiritual life, the expedition of the soul, it helps direct our work.

What spiritual direction is not

Spiritual direction seems to overlap with other things, but is yet distinct from them.

Spiritual director is not an all-wise person who will dispense spiritual wisdom for the directee, and all the directee has to do is to passively receive that wisdom. Hopefully there will be some wisdom that will come from the director-directee encounter, but it is a result of the dialogue between the two and the work of the Divine in the encounter.

Spiritual direction is not counseling. Counseling or psychotherapy is primarily concerned with emotional and psychological health. Spiritual direction, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with one’s spiritual life. Counseling and spiritual direction complement one another quite well since spiritual matters and emotional and psychological matters interact with one another in the totality of the human. Spiritual direction, then, is not a replacement for counseling or vice versa.

Spiritual direction is not about right or wrong answers. It’s not about the director insisting on one having particular religious convictions or thoughts. That is, the director listens and holds your story and helps you to engage your story, not to form you into the particular orientations of the director. Every spiritual director comes from a particular background and approaches things from a particular perspective, but the point of the encounter is not about “right” or “wrong.”

A spiritual director is not a life coach or an advice giver. They’re not going to tell you what to do, or lay out a “seven steps toward deeper communion with the divine” plan. Rather, the spiritual director listens deeply to the directee and to the Spirit to engage in a sacred conversation about one’s life with God.

A spiritual director will not criticize you or judge you or have particular expectations other than honesty. Often we can have fears about not meeting expectations or not “measuring up” but in a spiritual direction relationship, none of this matters. Honesty and a desire to grow deeper in one’s spiritual life is the only expectation and the only thing that matters.

Who might benefit from spiritual direction?

There are many things that might draw someone to spiritual direction. Perhaps there has been a change in one’s life–a loss, a gain, a transition, &c–and one is seeking to find God in the midst of all that. Perhaps one feels as though God is distant, or perhaps God feels newly close. Perhaps one feels a desire for a companion who can help them make sense of the journey. Or maybe one just wants to grow in the spiritual life.

Or, perhaps something has shaken the foundations of your faith or spirituality. Perhaps you find yourself taking that part of your life apart, piece by piece, and examining it anew. Perhaps you want to deconstruct something and reconstruct something new and beautiful and life-giving.

There are all sorts of things that might draw one to spiritual direction and for whom spiritual direction might be fruitful.

Why am I telling you this?

I promise I’m not trying to sell you anything. At least insofar as selling implies money, and money is not part of this. I am offering something, however, an extension of my existing ministry. I am beginning a two-year spiritual direction training program at the Spiritual Renewal Center in Syracuse, New York. An integral part of this program is the supervised practice of spiritual direction and, after all, this is not an entirely new area for me.

Does this sound like something you might be interested in exploring? Let’s talk!