Cite
SDI Learns From…The Rev Mary Earle, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zvU2eIjBbM.
Jeremy
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FirstDirector:: SDI - The Home of Spiritual Companionship
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Title:: SDI Learns From…The Rev Mary Earle
Year:: 2009
Citekey:: sdi-thehomeofspiritualcompanionshipSDILearnsFromThe2009
itemType:: videoRecording
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Abstract
Spiritual Directors International learns from The Rev Mary Earle, an Episcopal priest and spiritual director in Texas. Mary talks about learning to pray and listening with more than the ears. For more information and to find a spiritual director in your area, http://www.sdiworld.org .
Notes
Transcript
I’m Mary Earl. I live in San Antonio, Texas, and I’ve offered the Ministry of Spiritual Direction since 1987, and it began through my life as an ordained Episcopal priest. And in those days, in our neck of the woods, there weren’t any certification programs. So what I did was ferret out Continuing Ed through Oblate Seminary in San Antonio, Oblate School of Theology, and take Continuing Ed here and there. But I don’t have any kind of certification because I go back to the old days in the Episcopal Church. And mostly, I’ve offered Spiritual Direction through the setting of an office in a parish. I had to take a disability retirement in 2004 because of some illness issues, and so since then, I’ve offered direction from an office at my house.
And it’s a very different setting. I love the shift in offering direction from a domestic space because it’s not at all unusual that the Board of College, Maggie, and the kiddies, Leftovers, and Cuthbert, decide they’re going to co-direct. I have been teaching as Associate Faculty at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, offering primarily electives in their degree track in spiritual formation. So I’ve had that somewhat formalized way of doing it. In San Antonio, in the last several years, we’ve been able to gather together a really wonderful, diverse group of directors, and we try to invite people as soon as they are beginning to offer the ministry or even just be attracted to the possibility vocationally. We’ve had this attempt to create this community in San Antonio several times, and we’ve tried and it would die on the vine. But most recently, it began about a year and a half or two ago, and this time it’s really holding, and I think the diversity is a huge factor.
We’re diverse in terms of faith tradition, age, social location. To a certain extent, in terms of ethnicity, and that’s, they’re probably about 60 different people, and I would say I’m as much formed by them as, I just co-facilitate. So I, and then I have several directees who are also directors, and so in a very one-to-one focused kind of way, from time to time, we will explore issues that they're experiencing in their own practice. Spiritual direction is at its most essential listening. Listening with not just your ears, but I have a border collie, and when she is attempting to be obedient, she listens with her whole self, so it’s as if her entire being is listening. And early on, I used to think spiritual direction was primarily an audio kind of thing. The older I get, and the longer I practice it, the more I realize I’m picking things up all the time that are not necessarily verbal, and I’m realizing how deep that aspect of spiritual direction is.
Change in facial color, sometimes someone will actually, as an emotion comes forward, their complexion will change, or their body posture will change, and all of those things go into it, but it’s a form of listening in the deep sense of listening from the heart. The other metaphor I have is that it’s like gardening, and waiting to see what comes up. I am a gardener, and so I often think about the fact, reflect on the ways in which what happens in the garden, it has a lot of resonance with what happens in spiritual direction. I think that years ago, I was on a panel discussion in San Antonio with a hermit named Kelly Nimick, who's a Roman Catholic member of the Order of Mary Immaculate, and he lives at a retreat center in South Texas called Lep Shomea, and someone put to Kelly the question about direction, and he said, God is directing us all the time, and all of us need to be open to that direction, and that was really a formative moment for me, because I've been thinking kind of in more restrictive, if that's the right term, certainly more clearly delineated notions of what direction is about. I think in some ways, for example, parenting has a directive capacity. I think friendship in its deepest way is often directive, and I’d be lost without my spiritual friends. I truly would be lost.
In the formal sense, I sense it’s something that all of us in this society and the U. S. are really yearning for, because there’s a degree of anonymity and disconnection. The deeper question is, am I really a human being? What is it to be a human being?
How am I to be a person? What does that look like? I think it’s pretty rare that there’s anybody out there for whom that question, it may have been pushed way down deep in the psyche, in which case it’s probably rumbling around causing all sorts of disruption, but it’s who we are, and for some people it comes early, and some people it waits a while to mature and ripen, but it’s there. Well, following Thomas Martin, this is not my own wisdom by any means, and from the desert tradition, often I ask people to just begin to do two things. One is a practice of stopping when you move from one activity to the other, so instead of rushing out the front door and getting in the car, starting the car, going to work, to intentionally get in the car, stop. Just stop. Don’t do anything with it.
Just notice that you’re in the car. Get to the office. Sit at your desk, or get to the classroom, whatever the case may be, to pay attention to those transitional interstitial moments, because right now, to quote Sammy Hagar, we live eight miles a minute for months at a time. Just go right, that’s Bob Seger. I can’t drive 55 in Sammy Hagar, but it’s this speeded up existence that refuses us to allow us to be present to our lives. So first, develop the capacity to pause, and then second, in the pausing, to notice connections, and those two very ordinary practices allow us to begin to wake up.
In a way, our American-U. S. tendency toward over-stimulation, we're just spiritually exhausted, and the desert elders from the fourth and fifth centuries considered exhaustion to be one of the most dangerous spiritual states. you