What is Spiritual Direction?
“It is a place where you know someone will pay attention, ask, “What’s going on?” and explore it with you. It is a place where we can journey into divine space that we wonder about but would not dare to go alone”
When I think of the essence of Spiritual Direction, three stories come to mind:
The first: When I was four or five years old, my family and I lived in what I call a “desert suburb” in Texas. In our backyard, there was a longhorn skull, a good number of snakes, scorpions, and GIANT centipedes. Behind the bushes that lined the farthest part of our backyard, there was also a cliff. A little way down the side of the cliff was a place where the rock jutted out, creating a platform where you could see the whole valley. One day, when my Mom wasn’t looking, my oldest sister convinced me and my other sister to climb down the cliff with her. I was four or five at the time, and my sisters were two and four years older. With our short limbs, we climbed down, sat looking at the valley, and climbed back up again before Mom knew anything! Though this was dangerous, the comforting part of this memory is that it was a time when I engaged with something so big and beyond me because I was beckoned to do what I never would’ve never done alone.
The second: When I was a teenager, I sang on the youth praise and worship team in my church. Even in rehearsals, when we were singing songs, we wouldn’t just sing. We were expected to be in the Spirit as we would be if the rest of the church was with us. One rehearsal, we were really deep in worship, and while others were fully opening themselves up to it, I was constricting myself, even though I was moved. Miss Yvette, our ministry leader at the time, walked up to me in the middle of all of this and said, simply, "What's going on?" Though I can think of many times in my youth when I was seen for not doing what I was "supposed" to be doing, this was a moment where someone saw what I wanted to do – how I wanted to respond to the Spirit – and was curious about what was keeping me from that. I don't remember the exact details, but we had a conversation (maybe a little coaching, too) and I was able to release what was holding me back and open up to the Spirit.
The third: When I was in my early 20s, doing an internship with the video production company of a ministry I was working for, I met one of the former interns of that company who shared what her life had been like since her internship days. At one point she said, “I had to let go of everything I knew about God to receive back what's real.” I unfortunately can’t remember the woman’s name, but I held that in my heart with wonder, not knowing that over a decade later, I'd be going through the same thing. When that time came, it served to give me the language to what was happening for me, to remind me that I wasn’t the only person to experience this and that there was nothing wrong with me for experiencing it.
None of these are actual examples of Spiritual Direction, of course. Spiritual Directors often share minimally about our lives, don’t coach (unless we have a separate practice for that), and are (hopefully) way more careful in our beckoning than my oldest sister was when she convinced us to climb down a cliff at elementary school age! But I want to name the commonplace ways we are offered a moment to see and be seen in all of our sacred sides and sacred experience – the scary, the vulnerable, the emboldening, the abundant, the wrestling, the weary, the harmonious, the dangerous, the tepid, the sublime. As someone who did not grow up knowing or even hearing about Spiritual Direction, I’ve come to know Spiritual Direction as an intentional space for this.
It is a place where you know someone will pay attention, ask, "What's going on?" and explore it with you. It is a place where we can journey into divine space that we wonder about but would not dare to go alone. It is a place where we can let go of what we think we know of the Spirit (and ourselves) and receive back what's real. And it is important to say that it is a space where we take the time and the care to do all of this in a way that honors our resilience and preciousness.
Those of us who have the role of Spiritual Director create this space with care and draw on resources that help us do that, including from peers and more experienced spiritual care practitioners who hold us accountable. In one-on-one sessions and in group spaces, we facilitate, we invite, withhold judgment, ask, wait, and ask again, share stories, literally see, sense, and hear together. We may move, sing, dance, draw, pray, laugh, cry, and just breathe together. We attest to the resources we have in our lineages for all these expressions of the Spirit, and we engage new or forgotten resources within the capacity of those we accompany.
In this way, Spiritual Direction, as I understand it, is an intentional touchpoint to both honor and grow our collective capacity to hold space for all of life.
