Cite
Guenther, Margaret. Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction. Cambridge, Mass: Cowley Publications, 1992.
Jeremy
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Contribution::
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Md
FirstAuthor:: Guenther, Margaret
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Title:: Holy Listening: the Art of Spiritual Direction
Year:: 1992
Citekey:: guentherHolyListeningArt1992
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Cowley Publications
Location:: Cambridge, Mass
ISBN:: 978-1-56101-056-1
LINK
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Abstract
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Notes
Annotations
Yellow highlight | Location: 36 In some ways, the art of spiritual direction lies in our uncovering the obvious in our lives and in realizing that everyday events are the means by which God tries to reach us.
Yellow highlight | Location: 48 True spiritual direction is about the great unfixables in human life. It’s about the mystery of moving through time. It’s about mortality. It’s about love. It’s about things that can’t be fixed.
Yellow highlight | Location: 52 If someone implies that he or she has anything approaching a disciplined spiritual life, some of us get a sinking feeling inside. We either compare ourselves unfavorably with the other person, or we look for the flaws that must be hiding under the veneer of piety.
Yellow highlight | Page: 3 Whatever we do as spiritual directors, we are neither to mess with them nor push them further into the mud. Yet the hunger is there, and some of us—lay and ordained—find ourselves asked to respond.
Yellow highlight | Page: 3 Spiritual direction is not pastoral counseling, nor is it to be confused with the mutuality of deep friendships, for it is unashamedly hierarchical. Not because the director is somehow “better” or “holier” than the directee, but because, in this covenanted relationship the director has agreed to put himself aside so that his total attention can be focused on the person sitting in the other chair. What a gift to bring to another, the gift of disinterested, loving attention!
Yellow highlight | Page: 5 To be asked by someone to serve as spiritual director is an expression of great trust and my immediate reaction is almost always, “Am I up to this? What makes this person think that I am worthy of his trust?”
Yellow highlight | Page: 9 Like all of us, the person seeking spiritual direction is on a journey. Since the expulsion from Eden, we have been a people on the move, despite attempts at self-delusion that we have somehow arrived, We follow in the footsteps of our peripatetic Lord, always on the way, our faces turned resolutely or reluctantly toward Jerusalem. Mobility is our way of life.
Yellow highlight | Page: 9 the harsh circumstances of the desert or the frontier, hospitality offers more than comfort: it also ensures physical survival. Spiritually, too, we cannot make it through the desert or across the frontier alone, but must depend on the kindness of strangers. Yet those strangers upon whom we depend are not really strangers, but our sisters and brothers in Christ. They are the hosts, the givers of hospitality, who sustain us on the journey, our spiritual friends and directors.
Yellow highlight | Page: 10 Perhaps English speakers have devalued the word “host.” Certainly it lacks the freshness and immediacy of the German Gastgeber—the guest-giver, the one who gives to guests—and Gastfreundschaft—guest-friendship, the special friendship shown by hosts to their guests. The spiritual director is a host who gives to her guests, the bestower of guest-friendship.
Yellow highlight | Page: 11 greeted graciously. Guests provide a helpful discipline. Left on our own, we can walk endlessly around disorder and uncleanness, vowing to do something about the state of our house some time, but not now. We may even come to love our untended garbage, to treasure it or at least to take it for granted.
Note:ADHD baby!
Yellow highlight | Page: 11 it is also for spiritual directors. The first task is one of housecleaning, of creating our own inner order.
Yellow highlight | Page: 11 I must be willing to be the needy, vulnerable, weary traveler as well as the generous host. It is easier to be the host, as Abba James of the desert knew, when he said, “It is better to receive hospitality than to offer it.”1 Having a spiritual director keeps me honest, makes me aware of the corners of neglect, and helps me keep the house reasonably tidy.
Yellow highlight | Page: 12 The unofficial patron saint of spiritual directors, Aelred of Rievaulx, wrote in the twelfth century: A man is to be compared to a beast if he has no one to rejoice with him in adversity, no one to whom to unburden his mind if any annoyance crosses his path or with whom to share some unusually sublime or illuminating inspiration… He is entirely alone who is without a friend. But what happiness, what security, what joy to have someone to whom you dare to speak on terms of equality as to another self; one to whom you can unblushingly make known what progress you have made in the spiritual life; one to whom you can entrust all the secrets of your heart and before whom you can place all your plans.2
Yellow highlight | Page: 12 While we rarely pray together, our talk is always God-talk as we “speak on terms of equality as to another self.”
Yellow highlight | Page: 13 Once I decided that no one would read it or, if they did, it wouldn’t matter since I would be dead, I have been able to write candidly. In the journal, you can be as repetitive as you wish; it is a place to wrestle with angels and struggle with demons.
Yellow highlight | Page: 13 For those of us who get trapped in crowded schedules and fall into the dangerous and sinful delusion that we, the administrative assistants of a well-meaning but inefficient CEO God, are really the ones who hold up the world, even a brief retreat is a powerful corrective.
Yellow highlight | Page: 14 At its simplest, hospitality is a gift of space, both physical and spiritual, and like the gift of attentive listening, it is not to be taken lightly.
Yellow highlight | Page: 17 No matter how inviting the physical space might be, I have inner preparations to make before I can offer true hospitality.
Yellow highlight | Page: 17 We Begin in Silence It helps to begin with silence. If nothing else, the time with the directee is thereby set aside as a time of prayer, not as a conference or a friendly chat.
Yellow highlight | Page: 17 I had invited her to break the silence when she was ready.
Yellow highlight | Page: 18 I have read that physicians can make extensive and accurate diagnoses merely by shaking hands with the patient, and silence shared with the directee is in some ways such a diagnostic instrument. Although we are not clinicians, it can tell us a great deal. With our eyes closed and our hearts centered in prayer, we can pick up fear, anxiety, fatigue, rage, hope, and yearning—the whole spectrum of human feeling.
Yellow highlight | Page: 18 asked to pray, I phrase this request in general terms: “Let’s be quiet together for a few minutes, and then you begin whenever you are ready.” I have learned to say this very clearly and with sufficient volume: prayerful silence is out of the question if either of us is unsure of the ground rules.
Yellow highlight | Page: 19 The person sitting opposite me is always a mystery. When I label, I limit.
Yellow highlight | Page: 21 The director who is convinced of God’s love and mercy, even when the directee is not, is able to accept any disclosure with equanimity. Through her loving acceptance she is able to model and reflect the love of God so yearned for’ by the directee who despairs of his own worthiness.
Yellow highlight | Page: 21 The gift of hospitality in this time is the gift of myself, which may not be much, but it is all that I have.
Yellow highlight | Page: 21 As someone who likes to talk and who enjoys human company, one of my hardest lessons in spiritual direction has been that less is frequently more.
Yellow highlight | Page: 21 I pay attention to my hands. Grantly Dick Read, in his seminal book on natural childbirth, stressed the importance of a relaxed face: if the birthgiver was able to relax her facial muscles, she was able to relax totally. I can’t watch my own face, but hands are another matter. So long as they are open and receptive in my lap or resting easily on the arms of my chair, I am able to convey a sense of leisure because I myself feel unhurried.
Yellow highlight | Page: 22 The directee needs to value our time together and make optimum use of it. So I usually say something like, “That seems significant. Let’s start with that next time.”
Yellow highlight | Page: 24 Simple, direct questions that cut to the heart of the matter are part of the spiritual tradition. Jesus had a way of sweeping distractions out of the way with a trenchant question.
Yellow highlight | Page: 26 To be able to say what one truly wants or where one is in pain is a great step toward achieving order in one’s spiritual household.
Yellow highlight | Page: 27 Order is not synonymous with cleanliness.
Yellow highlight | Page: 28 I am struck by the overlapping of spiritual direction and sacramental confession. In both it is essential that the story be told candidly, that sins and shortcomings be named, that the directee see himself clearly. St. Anthony in the desert knew the importance of recognizing and naming the demons. Exposure is salutary.
Yellow highlight | Page: 29 This is perhaps the ultimate act of hospitality, epitomizing the generous mutuality of the direction relationship. Like Abba Bessarion, the director knows that he, too, is a sinner: “A brother who had sinned was turned out of his church by the priest; Abba Bessarion got up and went to him, saying, ‘I, too, am a sinner.’”6 Director and directee are united in the glory and sinfulness of their humanity; they are part of the same family.
Yellow highlight | Page: 30 In our culture it often seems a mark of professionalism to be impervious to others’ pain. Sometimes this is a good thing: I would prefer that my surgeon operate with eyes not blurred with tears! Yet in some areas we have gone too far, and, along with their own woundedness, our healers deny the reality of others’ suffering. Spiritual directors are not professionals, but amateurs who aspire to reflect Christ’s love. So we take sin and pain upon ourselves, not in grandiose self-promotion, but because the assumption of such a burden is one of the risks of hospitality.
Yellow highlight | Page: 30 We can let it go in holy forgetting, remembering that God was managing nicely before we joined the firm and will continue to cope after we have returned to dust.
Yellow highlight | Page: 31 As spiritual directors, we have the authority to assure our directees of God’s love and forgiveness, and those of us who are ordained can declare absolution. While I like to know what I’m doing and therefore prefer to keep spiritual direction and sacramental confession distinct, there are times when I can say, “What you have just told me is a confession. I am convinced that you are deeply sorry for these things in your past, indeed contrite. So I would like to offer you absolution.”
Yellow highlight | Page: 31 Lay directors and those from traditions lacking the sacrament of reconciliation need to remember that all baptized persons can declare God’s forgiveness to those who are truly contrite.
Yellow highlight | Page: 32 For me, spiritual direction is always storytelling. I don’t mean that we move doggedly through the directee’s life, year by year and decade by decade. The story moves around in time, gliding or leaping from present to past, from present to future. Without the story, there is no flesh, no blood, no specificity. But I find that it doesn’t matter where we begin. It is always a story of a journey, always a story about relationship with God—whether the directee is fleeing the Hound of Heaven, or lost, or yearning, or living among the swine and eating their husks.
Yellow highlight | Page: 32 The director’s task is to help connect the individual’s story to the story and thereby help the directee to recognize and claim identity in Christ, discern the action of the Holy Spirit.
Yellow highlight | Page: 34 If spiritual direction is about hope, it is also about death.
Yellow highlight | Page: 34 It is no longer fashionable to talk about preparing for a “good death,” yet that is what spiritual direction is all about. The journey does have an end, and our physical death is one of its markers.
Yellow highlight | Page: 35 Directees tend to set extremely high standards for themselves and expect, in their new state of self-awareness, that they will not become impatient or succumb to petty maliciousness. A director’s shared humanity can be a valuable corrective.
Yellow highlight | Page: 35 This willingness toward self-disclosure is one of the primary distinctions between spiritual direction and psychotherapy, where the mutuality of the former is an essential characteristic of the relationship. The director should always be aware that she too is a traveler, neither an authority nor a guru.
Yellow highlight | Page: 38 Gentle, nonintrusive humor has a way of restoring perspective, or reducing our inflated selves to manageable proportions. Laughter makes and keeps us childlike.
Yellow highlight | Page: 38 The fact of being entrusted with someone’s soul, of being allowed to enter the story, however layered and convoluted it might be, is staggering.
Yellow highlight | Page: 43 So what does the spiritual director teach? In the simplest and also most profound terms, the spiritual director is simultaneously a learner and a teacher of discernment. What is happening? Where is God in this person’s life? What is the story? Where does this person’s story fit in our common Christian story? How is the Holy Spirit at work in this person’s life? What is missing?
Yellow highlight | Page: 44 The first step in discernment is perception. The director is deeply attentive to the person sitting across the holy space, open and permeable to all that is said and unsaid, revealed and hidden. More importantly, by example and by judicious interpretation, she helps the directee toward equal openness and attentiveness.
Yellow highlight | Page: 44 When we seek to discern the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we expect the dramatic, even the spectacular.
Yellow highlight | Page: 44 The second step in the work of discernment is judgment: what does one do with the perception?
Yellow highlight | Page: 44 One of the major teachings the director can offer—and offer again and again—is the value of the present moment. The fruits of discernment may be enjoyed far into the future, but the material of perception and the attendant judgment are to be found in the here and now, in the everydayness of the directee’s life.
Yellow highlight | Page: 45 To know in truth, then, is to allow one’s self to be known. This is the truth that became incarnate in Jesus Christ, a truth known not in abstraction, but in relationship. The shared commitment to truth ensures that the spiritual direction relationship is one of true mutuality, for both director and directee must allow themselves to be known. This marks one of the major differences between spiritual direction and psychotherapy: the director must be willing to be known—not just by her credentials, affiliations, and titles, but known in her vulnerability and limitations as a child of God.
Yellow highlight | Page: 46 A friend once likened working with them to coaxing a deer out of the forest: you watch it peering out between the trees, occasionally venturing into the meadow, but a sudden move on your part can send it dashing back into the woods. Yet only by letting ourselves be known to each other and to our deepest selves can we have the assurance that we are known by God.
Yellow highlight | Page: 48 From the gospels we learn that teaching is a dangerous activity: while Pilate finds no crime in Jesus, his accusers “were insistent, and said, ‘He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place’” (Lk. 23:4-5).
Yellow highlight | Page: 50 we may find our most receptive directees among the outcasts, those who live at the economic, social, or ecclesiastical edges. These are people who have little to lose and everything to gain. Perhaps they are outcast by birth, chance, or choice. But when Jesus asks the Samaritan woman to give him a drink, he is telling us that there are no outcasts, that the label itself is artificial and unreal.
Yellow highlight | Page: 52 Most of the spiritual directors of the desert were men, but one of the few women, Amma Theodora, writes about teachers in words directly applicable to twentieth-century spiritual directors: A teacher ought to be a stranger to the desire for domination, vain-glory, and pride; one should not be able to fool him by flattery, nor blind him by gifts, nor conquer him by the stomach, nor dominate him by anger; but he should be patient, gentle, and humble as far as possible; he must be tested and without partisanship, full of concern, and a lover of souls. 6
Yellow highlight | Page: 54 Strict observance of confidentiality can help us toward impartiality. If we cannot be open to the directee and even find ourselves taking sides, it is past time to refer her to someone else, taking full responsibility for the deterioration of the relationship.
Yellow highlight | Page: 54 There are many questions in spiritual direction—asked, implied, answered, and unanswered—but as the story gets told and the extraneous stripped away, it is clear that one question lies at its heart: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mk. 10:17) It is rarely phrased so boldly, and the person seeking spiritual direction may not be aware that it is the central question. The director knows, of course, that the yearning for God and a relationship with God—eternal life—underlies everything in the work of direction and knits the disparate parts together.
Yellow highlight | Page: 55 One of the hard tasks of spiritual direction is to learn to speak the truth in love. We may spare the very fragile, those who have already more reality than they can bear and are not yet ready to hear the truth. It is sometimes hard to sit with an insight, yet we may say nothing, or we may measure out manageable bits of truth. But with the strong and spiritually mature, we need not be so cautious.
Yellow highlight | Page: 57 It is hard to let go of carefully maintained identities, especially clerical and “spiritual” ones. (Perhaps this explains why so many clergy are unreliable as directees.) It
Yellow highlight | Page: 58 It is hard to let people go and hard to entrust them to God’s care—which might mean that our time together will bear fruit decades into the future, but they will wander in a far country and eat husks until then.
Yellow highlight | Page: 58 First, a good teacher encourages play. Our culture has made leisure an industry, but knows very little about play. Often what we call “play” is competitive or compulsive, because the aesthetic dimension of true play, its holy uselessness, goes against our grain. Yet as the German poet-philosopher Schiller wisely says, the human being is completely human only at play.
Yellow highlight | Page: 59 Play is at once intense (just watch a four-year-old with Matchbox cars and a few blocks!) and liberating. We are freed from our compulsion for right answers, freed from the need to acquire and achieve, freed from anxiety by the transitory nature of play. With imagination as the generous supplier of raw materials, we can be rich beyond belief. Everything matters tremendously—and not at all.
Yellow highlight | Page: 61 Directees who resist play in spiritual direction often combine a poor self-image with a tendency to “spiritualize” everything. In other words, they want to avoid the grittiness of everyday life and so come to see me expecting pious conversation divorced from all reality.
Yellow highlight | Page: 63 A good teacher demands accountability, which is why we usually learn better with a teacher than we do on our own, no matter what the subject matter. But this accountability is mutual, with no place in it for fear or coercion. I am accountable to the directee, to whom I owe my attention, discretion, and prayers, while she is accountable through taking the relationship seriously, honoring the director’s gift of time and attention, and bringing her best and truest self to the work.
Yellow highlight | Page: 64 How often directees look into the empty tomb, even when they “know” it is empty. This calls for patience on the part of the director and awareness that the directee is in the right place for now, even though it is painful to linger in a place that seems dead and fruitless.
Yellow highlight | Page: 65 I am learning to notice statements that cry out for a clarifying question, especially when the directee encounters painful material or stands on the threshold of a new stage of awareness.
Yellow highlight | Page: 65 In the ministry of spiritual direction, there are no right answers, only clearer visions and ever deeper questions.
Yellow highlight | Page: 66 To love the questions is to engage them ever more deeply, to let go, and to risk.
Yellow highlight | Page: 68 How do you know when you are ready to be a spiritual director? The best indication is that people begin to seek you out to talk about their deepest concerns and are willing to lay aside their masks when they are with you.
Yellow highlight | Page: 69 A good teacher (like a good parent) is educating for maturity. Parents have done their work well when they are no longer needed. In spiritual direction, a relationship that is initially hierarchical may turn into a rich spiritual friendship. This is not a sign that something has gone wrong, but it is important to acknowledge and celebrate the changed relationship.
Yellow highlight | Page: 70 While that consummate teacher of prayer, the author of The Cloud and The Book of Privy Counseling, is making a strong case for what we now know as “centering prayer,” he seems also to be acknowledging that there are different temperaments and needs, and hence no single right way to pray: Do not pray with words unless you are really drawn to this; or if you do pray with words, pay no attention to whether they are many or few. Do not weigh them in their meaning. Do not be concerned about what kind of prayers you use, for it is unimportant whether or not they are official liturgical prayers, psalms, hymns, or anthems; whether they are for particular or general intentions; or whether you formulate them interiorly, by thoughts, or express them aloud, in words.19
Yellow highlight | Page: 70 Books on prayer can be helpful, but should be prescribed cautiously because it is easy to substitute reading about prayer for the prayer itself.
Yellow highlight | Page: 71 Sometimes less is more. Spiritual gluttony is a danger, especially if the person comes to spiritual direction from a recent conversion experience or is addicted to what my English friend Janet calls “little books.” Filling one’s shelves with books about prayer is a poor substitute for prayer itself, and immersing oneself in other people’s recipes for the spiritual life is an effective delaying tactic.
Yellow highlight | Page: 72 If we are to be whole people, it must be more than a schedule for our visiting hours with God.
Yellow highlight | Page: 74 As directors, we work with timeconscious men and women who may already feel guilty about not having time to pray. While they may be responsible stewards of their substance, they need a workable rule of life to bring proportion to their stewardship of time and energy.
Yellow highlight | Page: 76 It is vastly freeing for directees to become aware of the range of human emotion in the psalms, often a liberating surprise for those who are fearful of expressing doubt, despair, or rage.
Yellow highlight | Page: 77 In our tendency to spiritualize we neglect our bodies. Particularly in my work with seminarians, I find myself inquiring about nutrition, exercise, and sleep habits, and I border on the authoritarian in discussions of self-care. Directees limited by chronic or debilitating illness need to be reminded that driving themselves to the limit of endurance is destructive, not heroic.
Yellow highlight | Page: 77 A certain bossiness on my part regarding self-care seems to be welcome, as if the directee were saying to himself, “If my spiritual director says I must, then I really must go for a run or play a game of tennis. And it’s a matter of holy obedience to get a sitter at least twice a month so that I can spend an evening alone with my wife.” There is a certain playful complicity: the directee and I both know that the “assignment” is really a permission, a permission that wouldn’t be necessary if he were able to honor and care for himself as a part of creation.
Yellow highlight | Page: 79 When people come to us for spiritual direction, we usually assume that-like the abba’s disciples—they expect a profound, even life-changing, word from us. But spiritual directors, like all good teachers, need to live with the silence, not merely to endure it but to be comfortable with it.
Yellow highlight | Page: 84 The maternal and birth imagery of Scripture, along with its stories of nativities both miraculous and ordinary, have become so much a part of our religious consciousness that they threaten to recede into the background like dull spiritual wallpaper.
Yellow highlight | Page: 84 It is all too easy to see the birth imagery in Scripture (and in the language of popular piety) as abstract, bloodless, remote from human experience.
Yellow highlight | Page: 91 As a spiritual midwife, the director’s task is to pay attention, to listen to what is not being said—or to what is being said but minimized.
Yellow highlight | Page: 91 When in doubt, I always assume that God is indeed at work. It cannot be said too often: first of all, we must take each person seriously and value that person as a child of God. Just as the good host observes Benedict’s admonition that each guest is to be received as if Christ himself, so the good midwife assumes that new life is germinating in the person who has sought her out.
Yellow highlight | Page: 92 Spiritual direction is not a crisis ministry, even though the initial impulse to seek out a director may arise from a sense of urgent personal need. The midwife of the spirit is not an expert called in for the dramatic moments, either a crisis caused by pathology or the final, exciting moment of birth. Like a midwife, she works with the whole person and is present throughout the whole process. She “has time”—unlike the tightly scheduled physician who is concerned with specifics, complaints, and pathology. Or, for that matter, unlike the tightly scheduled parish clergy, who are concerned with program, administration, and liturgy.
Yellow highlight | Page: 94 The greatest gift I could give her was not to play social worker or psychotherapist, but to quiet down and wait with her. Be with her. To do this, I had to recognize my discomfort at my own powerlessness.
Yellow highlight | Page: 96 Presence is one of our greatest gifts to the dying, whose loved ones and caregivers frequently discourage them from talking about their experiences. The spiritual director can wait and listen, accepting with the dying person the fact of death. We wait too with the bereaved, knowing that grief cannot be hurried but must be lived through. We sit with victims of all kinds, including the survivors of violence, abuse, and neglect.
Yellow highlight | Page: 97 nor are they physicians or community planners. We cannot and should not try to replace the professionals, programs, and agencies that work to alleviate suffering and promote individual and community wholeness. But we can offer what is inevitably absent from the best-intentioned activism: a willingness to wait with others in the face of their powerlessness, “to sit still, even amid these rocks.”5
Yellow highlight | Page: 98 In any event, it is important to leave the directee free to accept or reject our insights. Whether we are right, wrong, or premature, it is also reassuring to remember that we cannot do too much harm since people rarely hear what they are not ready to hear. At the very least, we may have planted a seed. As director-midwives, we then must be willing to wait for the seed to sprout and grow to maturity, perhaps long after our relationship with the directee has ceased.
Yellow highlight | Page: 104 As a faithful midwife, the director can see patterns and form in seeming formlessness. More importantly, he knows that the time of transition has a beginning and an end, and that the directee will emerge from it into a new level of clarity. This is a time to share his insights with the directee, who may be sceptical but should have sufficient trust to know that these are not words of cheap consolation.
Yellow highlight | Page: 107 There is both mystery and absurdity in raw new life, and only those who have not seen it in its newness and rawness can indulge in sentimental and romantic rhapsodies about it. A helpless little creature, dusky purple and rather bizarre, is the fruit of all this waiting, pain, terror, and hard work. Surely something more handsome and useful might be expected!
Yellow highlight | Page: 111 Most women know the stories and language of men. Just as I learned in graduate school to function well in a context and terminology that was not my own, most women know the accepted language of religious observance and traditional spirituality. Yet we cannot expect openness and sensitivity from men until they are equally acquainted with the spirituality and language of women. Some male directors may persist in an unconscious but arrogant assumption that their language, perceptions, and experience are the norm, and women who turn to them for spiritual direction will be patronized or dismissed outright.
Yellow highlight | Page: 112 I am convinced that many women feel the call to a listening ministry, be it a chaplaincy or spiritual direction, when they find others turning to them and trusting them in this way. Even when it meets unconscious needs, the call to ministry is often a valid one.
Yellow highlight | Page: 113 Maternal conversation is an appropriate mode for spiritual direction. The director is willing to listen and to be present to the directee where he is. By the very nature of the relationship, the director has been given tacit permission to ask questions. (This is in contrast to polite conversation, which forbids asking anything that really matters.) But they must be the right questions, asked in a spirit of attentive love.
Yellow highlight | Page: 114 Even the experienced director should not lose sight of the perils that accompany his or her gifts as a listener. It is gratifying to be trusted and heady to be relied upon. Human life and lives are infinitely fascinating; and, unless the director works out of a satisfying context of personal relationships, there is the danger of becoming a spiritual voyeur, of using and feeding upon the other.
Yellow highlight | Page: 114 Over the centuries, women have kept the church going by their faithfulness, but have lived their inner lives around its edges.
Yellow highlight | Page: 115 Women’s ministry has never been anything other than the personal service of one human being to another in the name of Christ.”5 His ministry provides the model for the director who is “other” and most at home at the margins and in the crevices.
Yellow highlight | Page: 117 Most important, for good or ill, I know that my own experience in mothering colors the way in which I do spiritual direction. And lest it sound as if I am excluding a large segment of the population, Meister Eckhart reminds us that we can all be mothers. While the experience of bearing and nurturing a child is unique, maternal ways of being are available to all of us, men and women.
Yellow highlight | Page: 119 In their instinctively murmured words of comfort, mothers do not deny the pain, uncertainty, even the terror of life. They simply remind the child—and themselves—that at the deepest level, it is all right. We can do this as spiritual directors, not in false cheeriness or denial, but by our own steadfastness.
Yellow highlight | Page: 121 When women come seeking spiritual direction, I sense in them a great yearning, regardless of their relative woundedness or health, their zeal or their passivity. They are yearning to be known, to be able to say with Jeremiah, “Yet you, O LORD, are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name” (Jer. 14:9). They are yearning to know that their voice will be heard, but their experience in the church over the centuries has created painful impediments.
Yellow highlight | Page: 122 While there are scriptural grounds in support of self-sacrifice, there must first be a mature self to sacrifice, and the spiritual director can assist in the development of that self.
Yellow highlight | Page: 123 Women who wish to be taken seriously have to become bilingual: they become fluent in the language of the dominant group and suppress their natural speech, at least in “important” conversations. More pervasive and usually unconscious is a verbal tentativeness, an unwillingness to take responsibility for what is said through the frequent use of qualifiers like “rather,” “perhaps,” or “some.” Statements of conviction lose their strength when introduced with “I believe” or “I think instead of “I know.” In order to involve the listener in statements, thus securing his agreement, women may end a sentence interrogatively, either in actual words (“Isn’t it?”) or by a rising inflection of voice.14
Yellow highlight | Page: 123 The director can and must help by holding a woman responsible for her statements; this means, first of all, assuring her that it is safe to be responsible. I am convinced that much of women’s tentative speech arises from fear of her own anger, that somehow there will be terrible retribution—divine or
Yellow highlight | Page: 124 It is common for the dominant group to assume that it understands the experience of an oppressed group. Thus white people are surprised when they realize they do not understand the lives of black people; if they
Yellow highlight | Page: 125 Mindless segregation has no place in spiritual direction, indeed would be a step backward. Men can serve as directors for women!
Yellow highlight | Page: 126 Taking everything seriously, the director never condescends even when the story is told haltingly and without theological sophistication. It is important for director (and directee) to understand that one can talk about “spiritual” matters without a theological vocabulary. The raw material is there: all that is needed is for the directee to trust her own voice.
Yellow highlight | Page: 127 Important as this is in all aspects of a woman’s life, it is especially critical in the area of spirituality. As she begins to answer the question candidly, she may reveal—to her own surprise—years of denial and suppressed pain. The cost of faithfulness has been high, as the woman finds herself able to articulate in religious language and imagery her grief at her exclusion.
Yellow highlight | Page: 128 Far from being pride, women’s distinctive sin is self-contempt. This self-hatred is symbolized by and centered on the body.
Yellow highlight | Page: 130 Denial of a woman’s own authority inevitably manifests itself as passivity, not the passivity of a healthy self open and empty to receive the Holy Spirit, but a leaden inertia.
Yellow highlight | Page: 130 It is important not to minimize the sin of self-hatred and self-contempt. It is a sin, for at its heart is a denial of God’s love and the goodness of God’s creation.
Yellow highlight | Page: 131 Even when a sense of sin is misplaced or misguided, it is a sign that something is wrong.
Yellow highlight | Page: 135 presence. While it is important to maintain detachment, a deep emotional involvement is also inevitable and desirable. I have already told of Linda’s response to my tears, which I had hoped to whisk away before she could see them. As memories come flooding back, the director may
Yellow highlight | Page: 137 It is not surprising that she and other survivors would be ill at ease with a male director, although gay men, who themselves have received societal abuse, often have surprising rapport with survivors of incest. It must be difficult for compassionate men not to take this rejection personally. At later stages, their supportive male presence can greatly advance healing, but until then they must be content to wait.
Yellow highlight | Page: 138 If the Psalmist could urge God to wreak terrible vengeance on his adversaries, the survivor of abuse can permit herself a little anger. She can write it, speak it, or shout it.
Yellow highlight | Page: 138 The wound of abuse is like any other deep and infected wound. If the surface is allowed to heal over too quickly, poison remains to spread sickness deep within. So I counsel the directee to pray to want to be able to forgive—some day.
Yellow highlight | Page: 142 Spiritual direction is about entertaining these troublesome and unpredictable angels who turn up at surprising and rarely convenient times and places. More importantly, spiritual direction is about recognizing those angels and helping our sisters and brothers who entrust themselves to us to be joyously attentive to those small annunciations that don’t always seem like good news.
Yellow highlight | Page: 143 In a way, not to be heard is not to exist. This can be the plight of the very young and the very old, the very sick, the “confused,” and all too frequently the dying—literally no one in their lives has time or patience to listen. Or perhaps we lack courage to hear them.
Yellow highlight | Page: 144 When both director and directee are mutually obedient and engaged in holy listening, the story gets told.
Yellow highlight | Page: 145 Separated from our stories, we lose our identity.
Yellow highlight | Page: 145 Above all, the holy listener is open to anything the directee might bring. She is willing to hear about darkness and desolation, the times of God’s seeming absence and neglect. She is not frightened by another’s anger, doubt, or fear, and she is comfortable with tears. This ministry of presence is a living out of intercessory prayer, as the holy listener waits and watches.