NEWS FEATURE: Turning to spiritual directors to hear God’s hints

c. 1998 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ God has elbows, Priscilla Maumus believes. She felt them digging in her ribs, so to speak, as a vague and unnameable restlessness nudged at her a few years ago even in the midst of a happy marriage and successful career. So on the advice of a friend, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ God has elbows, Priscilla Maumus believes.

She felt them digging in her ribs, so to speak, as a vague and unnameable restlessness nudged at her a few years ago even in the midst of a happy marriage and successful career.


So on the advice of a friend, Maumus, a business consultant in suburban New Orleans, tried something increasing numbers of lay people are doing: She engaged a personal spiritual director.

Less than guru-masters dispensing mystery to neophyte students, but more than just a trusted friend, trained spiritual directors increasingly help people discover _ or stay in touch with _ what they believe are God’s hints and nudges buried in the noise of everyday life.

Many bishops, priests and nuns have long had them.

But now so does veterinarian Neal Faciane, 43, of Slidell, La., who believes spiritual direction has sensitized him to others and alerted him to the needs of the single mothers working in his practice.

And there’s Melanie Arnold, 33, a former geologist who says she once would have rebelled at the very thing that makes her happiest now _ raising two kids in Mandeville, La., as a full-time mother.”That’s not to say I’ll never have another job,” she says.”And it’s not that I insist that all women should be doing this. But I found that letting go of that career, which once would have terrified me, instead has made me incredibly happy, and I never would’ve forseen that.”It turned out this is where God wanted me,” she says.”I know that spiritual direction helped me discern that.” In fact, the idea of personal “discernment” is central to the practice of spiritual direction.

For most believers, a trusted minister or rabbi fills that role, often guided largely by his or her experience. More recently, however, centers around the country have begun to teach spiritual direction as a special set of skills, and it is no longer unusual for a pastor to refer a friend to a trained practitioner.

Secular psychology might say that spiritual directors put their charges in touch with their deepest appetites and encourage a thoughtful and patient approach to decisions.

But because they are people of faith, directors and those they work with _ the unlovely term is “directees” _ believe God is constantly at work in personal life, frequently illuminating the “right” decisions and offering personal solace, if only directees can filter out the hiss and static of their own preoccupations and tune into his frequency.

Thus, trained spiritual directors don’t teach doctrine; nor are they therapists, although they note that spiritual direction can be therapeutic.


Some, like the Rev. Steve Holzhalb, an Episcopal priest _ and Maumus’s spiritual director _ think of themselves as navigators.”The trip is not mine, but I have some experience reading the signs,” he said.

Rev. Gerald Fagin, a Jesuit priest and spiritual director, compares it to accompanying a companion down a darkened hallway occasionally studded with windows.

“Those windows may be moments of grace and revelation, something God wants to call to your attention. You pass them all the time, but you’re too busy to notice,” he said.”What the director does is call you back to the windows to say, `Look at that.’ It’s just helping people notice what God is doing so they can grasp it better.” Typically, a visit with Fagin or other spiritual directors will consist merely of conversation, with the directee doing most of the talking.

Directors want to know how a directee’s prayer life has been going, whether some sensation keeps nudging its way to the surface during Scripture reading or private meditation.

Sometimes, especially with beginners, they assign a fragment of Scripture or spiritual reading for meditation. They ask the directee to pay attention to the experience and bring back an account.

Sometimes they suggest new ways to pray.

Many ask their directees to keep a journal.

They are looking _ together _ for emergent patterns, said Fagin, signs that God is at work trying to show them a direction, or simply calling them into a deeper awareness of what they believe is his consoling presence in their lives.


Sometimes, Fagin said, a director will alert a directee that he or see seems to be hesitant or frightened of a certain area of spiritual growth.

But more often the director merely helps a directee identify and confirm what they both believe are movements of God in the directee’s life.

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Sometimes, Fagin said,”the person I’m directing may be much holier, much wiser, much more intelligent than I am. What I bring to it is the objectivity of someone listening to that experience and reflecting it back to them.” At one level, spiritual direction cuts across human experience in one form or another, from tarot card readers to Buddhist masters to Catholic confessors or Jewish rabbis giving counsel in a book-lined office.

But in Christianity the term has specific meaning. And the idea that one person can serve as a spiritual guide to another goes back centuries, especially in the Catholic and Anglican churches.

More recently however, the idea has gained new attention in Protestant circles.

The Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Bethesda, Md., trains directors from many denominations in an ecumenical setting. And in the last three years Spiritual Directors International, a global professional group based in San Francisco, has seen the proportion of non-Catholic members rise from 30 percent to slightly more than half now, said the Rev. Lyle Kesecker-Dotson.

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For years spiritual direction was reserved for clergy; it is still part of the training to help Catholic and Episcopal seminarians grow in faith. They are encouraged to remain in spiritual direction throughout their careers.


In Catholicism, especially, the discipline expanded after the Second Vatican Council seemed to de-emphasize the importance of mere ritual as a path to holiness and encouraged lay Catholics to seek a deep personal spirituality, said Fagin.

Spiritual directors frequently come to the work having already recognized certain natural gifts, said Fagin.

Some, like Bonnie Chase, 50, a Catholic laywoman who does spiritual direction at her home in Slidell, La., were always acute listeners _ people who for years received other people’s unburdened cargo anyway.

“I used to ask my husband, `Do I have a big “T” or something stuck on my forehead that says, `Talk to me?'” They come for lots of reasons. Sometimes a personal crisis is part of the story; sometimes not.

Twenty-two years ago Eileen Mitchell, alone, unemployed, sick with cancer and largely indifferent to faith, began to notice how small, uninvited checks from friends _ even the odd government rebate _ would arrive at moments of the greatest financial desperation.”Somehow, I made it. And that `somehow,’ I came to understand, had to do with God,” she said.

At the end of treatment she decided to “grow up” when it came to faith. She began a journey of education and prayer that now includes monthly visits with Holzhalb.


But other tales are ordinary.

Maumus, the business consultant, simply felt “a wanderlust, but without any sense of where I was supposed to be going. I thought plunging into another project would end it. It didn’t.”

And Arnold, having been laid off as a geologist, simply decided it was time to see whether her cradle Catholicism would always remain lukewarm.

“My attitude toward God had been, `I’m going to do it my way for a while; you just hang on. I know you’re there, but you don’t have a big place right now.’ He was patient with me.”

DEA END NOLAN

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