Session II Brian McDermott SJ
Introduction
Good morning and welcome to the second session devoted to Spiritual Direction as an Ecclesial Ministry
In the first session we considered the Church as the context within which the ministry of spiritual direction takes place. We began with the most fundamental considerations: that God’s creating the cosmos is for the sake of God’s giving Godself away to the cosmos and signally to those who are able to consciously receive that communication. Within the human race God chose the Jewish people to witness explicitly to that divine self-communication as members of the First Covenant with God. Jesus emerged from within the Jewish people as the fulfillment of the First Covenant and as the inaugurator of the definitive phase of salvation history. Reversing the disgrace of his crucifixion, the Easter event consisted of his personal consummation in God, the divine validation of his ministry, and the sending of the Spirit whereby the Risen Jesus could have ongoing embodiment in history in the community of faith called the Church. In the early Church, Christians reflected deeply on their religious experience of worshipping Jesus and their realizing that this was not idolatry. In this connection I offered some reflections on religious experience with the help of Karl Rahner. In the post-Easter period, the Church developed ministries and authority structures so as to continue its existence through history and to be able to distinguish authentic interpretations and ways of ritualizing the divine self-communication from those that would lead believers astray. Next, consideration was given to the four marks of the Church in their positive significance and in the way many people experience those marks today. This was followed by exploration of the Church in terms of models. Lastly, we reflected on the notion of sensus fidei and how Pope Francis’ invitation for us to become a synodal Church connects with that underdeveloped notion from Vatican II and then considered the role that spiritual direction can have in helping the Church become “synodal.”
In this session we will explore various dimensions of spiritual direction as part of the living tradition of the Church.
At the very beginning I want to raise up loud and clear what I believe is unique about this ministry in the Church. There is no other church ministry in which the central concern stated in the 15th annotation of the Spiritual Exercises is realized so well. As you know, there Ignatius asks the giver of the Exercises to remain in the center like the pointer of a balance, allowing the Creator to deal directly with the creature, and the creature to deal directly with their Creator and Lord. It is not only in the giving of the Exercises that this advice holds true; it also expresses the guiding spirit of good spiritual direction.
In every other form of ministry, from celebration of the liturgy of the Word to pastoral counseling, one human being offers interpretation of God’s word to another human being. This particular form of mediation is missing in spiritual direction. The good director helps the directee to get in touch with their experience, to notice where God or Christ may be present and active, to discover what they want to say to God, ask of God, how they want to listen for God and to God, bringing their experience, interior and exterior, to God, not to communicate information to God but for the sake of deepening the intimacy with, and trust in, God. When God is silent the director does not fill in the silence, but lets it be. When God seems to be speaking to the directee or prompting something in their interior space, and there are questions about the authenticity of the movements, the director helps the directee discern whether they are indeed authentic and trustworthy. But the director’s word does not substitute for God’s or represent God’s. The directee is regularly sent back to God as the primary partner in this triangular relationship.
The fact that this ministry serves this direct relationship between the directee and God distinguishes this ministry from all others, as I’ve mentioned. It is also the characteristic that, over the centuries and even in our own time, makes some bishops very nervous.
Part I Benefits Offered to the Church
The approach I want to tell in addressing positively spiritual direction as ecclesial ministry is to I would name some of the fundamental benefits offered the Church by this ministry. This listing will not be exhaustive but, I hope, it might prompt you to think of additional benefits. Some of these benefits flow from Christian spiritual direction as such and some benefits flow specifically from spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition.
First of all, when spiritual direction is being properly offered, a member of the Body of Christ is being contemplatively listened to. By contemplative listening I mean several things: the spiritual director is relating to the directee with reverence, with attentiveness, and with the desire to appreciate how God is acting in the directee. The director is not bringing an agenda to the meeting. The two individuals have agreed early on what the focus of their sessions will be, namely, to offer the opportunity for the directee to receive help in his or her relationship with God. Their coming together is grounded in faith and in the commitment to allow God to be the primary agent in the relationship with the directee and the director. Unlike ordinary conversational relationships, the director will not engage in associative speaking about their own experience. The focus is thoroughly on the directee and what they are expressing and what they are sharing and how that might communicate something about how God is working within their life and what God might be desiring for this directee at this time of their life.
This contemplative presence can contribute to the “thinning” of the directee as a recipient of God’s self-communication. As you know, in the Celtic tradition you find the conviction that some people and places are more open to God’s presence than others. These people and places are called “thin places.” The membrane between God and God’s world is more porous here. (We Christians believe that Jesus the Christ was the thinnest place that has ever occurred on earth.)
We cannot trace the benefits for the whole Body of Christ that this contemplative presence provides but I believe that we need to be open to this possibility. Contemplative presence, offered and received, opens up the Body of Christ to the influence of the Spirit in ways that are mysterious but not to be denied.
Closely connected to this benefit is a second. Spiritual direction holds the space when members of Christ’s body can personally experience God’s love, name that experience, and explore ways to respond to that love. Every time an adult member of Christ’s body surrenders trustingly to God’s or Christ’s love for them, their autonomous self is nudged away from any unhealthy dimensions of that autonomy and they are nudged toward becoming a more healthily self-transcending self. This means that the individual is being webbed by the Holy Spirit into deeper membership in the Body, and they are able to say a bit more than previously: “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.”
Love is the energy that unites while distinguishing. This is the peculiar power of love. So growth in loving means growth in being “oned” with other members of Christ’s Body while being deepened in the unique contribution this particular member can make to the Body.
It is authentic love that builds up the Church as the Body of Christ and the People of God. Even mustard seeds of love can make their contribution.
Yet another benefit to the Church of spiritual direction is the central role it can play in helping individuals grow in intimacy with Christ.
It has struck me for a long time now how many people enter the direction relationship with a relationship with God but not with Jesus. They are exposed to stories about Jesus regularly at Mass or at the Protestant services they attend, but they admit in direction to not connecting with him very much. Sometimes the reason given for this lack is their sense that Jesus is not really human as they are. While it is important for the director not to make a relationship with Christ an agenda for the directee it can be hoped that deepening relationship with God and deepening engagement with their own humanity in their prayer life will lead them to begin to appreciate Christ. The more they bring their full reality into the relationship with God, seeking deeper union with God and growth in their own authentic humanity, they are enacting a kind of implicit Christology, so to speak, for Jesus Christ is the unity of the holy Mystery we call God and authentic humanity. (I say “authentic humanity” and not “perfect humanity” because we tend to have a very imperfect understanding of true perfection and then put that onto Jesus.)
When Jesus begins to be related to it can be as the teacher and exemplar. There is still some distance between Jesus and directees. But as they come to recognize his humanity, e.g., the finitude of his ministerial efforts and his culturally conditioned knowledge, they can become more comfortable with relating to him. And in time the prayer relationship with him can become much more familial, colloquial, with an ease of communication that can be deeply reassuring, and trust-building.
The more the directee grows in relationship with the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of Paul’s letters, the more he or she is being webbed into the Body of Christ. Unity with the Head spells growing unity with the Body. But as soon as I say this, I want to complicate the picture a bit. That growing unity with the Body of Christ can include a more troubled relationship with certain aspects of the empirical Church. I will address that a bit later in this presentation, but I want to mention it now. The more the directee grows in union with the real Christ and is connected more with the grounding holiness of the Church, the more acute the individual’s sense of the Church’s failures can be.
Another very significant contribution of spiritual direction to the flourishing of the Church is in the area of interior freedom.
At this point it is crucial to recall a fundamental truth about the dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises. Recently I was watching the first talk in the series called “The Jesuit Anti-Racism Retreat,” which is available on YouTube. The speaker, referring to the Exercises, said that the first reflection will be about sin, seeming to imply that the Exercises themselves begin with sin.
Some could demur and say that the Exercises begin with the Principle and Foundation, but that would be missing the point as well. One of the most salutary innovations in offering the Exercises since Vatican Council II has been the introduction of Disposition or Preparatory Days at the beginning of the full Exercises. This innovation is the result of students of Ignatian spirituality asking what Ignatius might have been doing with prospective makers of the Exercises during the months in which he initially met them for conversation. It is surmised that he probably introduced them to various forms of prayer, encouraged them to develop a habit of daily prayer, and invited them in get in touch with how God had been at work in their lives up until this time of preparation.
Givers of the Exercises know well the potentially fruitful effect of guiding the retreatant in Preparatory Days in which the individual asks for the grace of God’s unconditional love and who spend time praying over their graced lives, allowing God to reveal God’s labor on their behalf in the various phases of the person’s life. When it is time for the First Week to be entered into, the focus shifts from the retreatants coming up with the familiar litany of shortcomings of which they are already much too aware, to allowing God to show them what, God’s eyes, is presently ripe for avowal, for contrition and for the beginning of transformation.
One of the great gifts of spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition is that it recognizes that interior freedom of any depth proceeds from God’s love revealing the unfreedom and providing the will and the energy to move from unfreedom to some degree of freedom from disordered attachments to freedom for Christ and for greater participation in his project in the world. This developing interior freedom can take the form of a destabilizing of a sinful or addictive habit, or a lessening of self-preoccupation and an increase of attention to others, or a healing of some fundamental numbness or fear that has prevented love from taking the commanding lead in the person’s life.
Any increase of interior freedom in a directee is not only an instance of personal growth but is a development in the Body of Christ as such. In matters of grace, the personal is the communal as well. We may not be able to trace the connections empirically, but we know enough about systems to say that any change in the direction of greater health in one member of a system has an impact on other members, it changes the context of their living and choosing to some extent.
Another great benefit to the Church is a directee’s growing ability to discern spirits. Ignatius teaches us how to interpret how the good and evil spirits work on a Christian if they are regressing or progressing in the spiritual life. And he instructs us about how progressing Christians can learn to identify spiritual consolation and spiritual desolation from their non-spiritual forms and how to act when we are experiencing spiritual desolation and how to distinguish between trustworthy spiritual consolation and its deceitful variety. If the directee is a maturing seeker, they will develop a habit of noticing their interior movements and learning from them, as distinct from being had, or run, by those movements. And they learn how to assess the movements that are spiritual, that is, are experienced as encouraging or discouraging the seeker in their love for, and trust in, the God of their lives.
This growing attentiveness to the various interior movements can help the directee grow in noticing social spiritual consolation and social spiritual desolation. The Holy Spirit and the enemy of human nature work not only in the spirits of individuals within the Church but also among and between persons as they exist in communities and systems within the Church. On this level what is noticeable are force-fields of authentic or misleading energy, which need to be named as carefully as personally interior movements are named and related to. We speak of groups having a good spirit or a bad spirit and this language need not be engaging only with the psychological tone of the group but can be trying to name something about the fundamental directionality of the group in relation to God’s project in the world.
Discernment of spirits can be a communally relevant exercise, and not only a personal imperative on the spiritual journey.
Closely allied with this benefit of spiritual direction to the Church is learning how to seek God’s will. Ignatius has performed a signal service in gleaning from the Church’s spiritual legacy and from his own experience a set of guidelines for seeking God’s will. He has taught us that God desires that we choose among morally good alternatives that alternative that will contribute more to God’s glory. To put this in other language, God invites us to choose among possible courses of action the course that will contribute more to my true flourishing in relation to God and to all creatures in God and to the true flourishing of other creatures in their relation to God and in their mutual relations in God. (I am presupposing here that when Ignatius speaks of God’s greater glory he is referring to God’s external glory, creation, which is always expandable. God’s intrinsic glory, God’s own being, is actually infinite and cannot expand.)
The further service Ignatius provides is his insistence that our choice-making when seeking God’s will needs to be grounded in as much interior freedom (“indifference”) as possible. We need to ask for that grace of interior freedom and cooperate with it.
The next service is Ignatius’ describing three types of evidence that God offers to help us in our search for God’s will. I don’t have time to spell these out here but I simply recall that the evidence can be (1) the gift of intuitive religious certitude; (2) the gift of authentic spiritual consolation out of which emerges, as from a root, a spontaneous inclination to a course of action, and that a number of times; (3) the conclusion arrived out by Holy Spirit-guided reflections on the cons and pros of doing or not doing specific courses of action, in a spirit of Ignatian indifference.
The one and only criterion for choice-making for Ignatius is God’s will. And God’s will is always, as I’ve mentioned, that we seek the alternative that contributes more to God’s glory.
A Christian who regularly seeks God’s will, and, when finding it, chooses it, is engaged in a profoundly personal enterprise that is also communal, also ecclesial. How is this? Without the individual explicitly thinking about it, that choosing of God’s will each time connects the person to all others who are similarly seeking the divine will. There emerges on the planet a kind of grace-filled noosphere, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls the Christosphere. There is a thinking and praying envelope of love encircling the globe that serves as a vast force field, encouraging, but not forcing, human beings in their choice-making to choose what will make for the greater flourishing of humankind and the world that is its home. This is an envelope pulsing with life. This envelope isn’t simply the sum of all the individual graced choices made, but is constituted primordially by the active presence of the risen Christ universally present in our world and on our planet. This envelope shows empirical signs of its presence in all the deeds and words of justice and love that occur, but its presence is richer than those signs, just as the Risen Christ’s presence is richer than the signs of his presence.
Session II
I would like at this point to hold up one more benefit of spiritual direction as an ecclesial ministry.
This benefit is in the arena that we might call the evolution of human consciousness. By consciousness I mean that extraordinary reality of self-presence and of presence to the Other. Self-presence is the awareness of the I by the I, as distinct from the awareness of the me, that is grounded in that I-I awareness. I-awareness and me-awareness are different, but related. Of course, there is also the vast presence of the I to the world, that our self-presence makes possible.
Our consciousness is an evolving reality, it is able to grow in unity and in complexity.
One of the maps of this evolution is offered by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey in their book, Immunity to Change. They speak of three levels of evolution of consciousness that characterize pre-adult and adult human beings. They use the term three “minds” but they are referring to distinct stages of consciousness.
The first is the socialized mind. Individuals who are at this stage of consciousness derive their identity from their surrounding world, from significant people in their lives. We find adolescents at this stage, and aspects of it can continue well into adult life.
The second stage is the self-authorizing mind. This is the level characterized by a healthy sense of autonomy. Here individuals become accustomed to determining for themselves their beliefs and convictions and choose how to relate to others on their own terms. This signals a very significant advance to another stage of greater oneness of identity as well as complexity of consciousness.
The third stage retains the good advances of the self-authorizing stage. They call it the “self-transcending” mind. At this point of development, persons are able to move from their own acquired standpoint on things—the achievement of the second stage—to being able to enter into the standpoints of others with sympathy and empathy and are able to appreciate the viewpoints of others as worthy of attention and investigation. They move to being able to form a “We” with others, and not just an I juxtaposed to another I. But the “We” is not at all like the “we” of the socialized mind, but bears the marks of the healthy autonomy and self-differentiation of the second stage.
I have been privileged to witness—and no doubt you have also—how directees have found in Jesus a deep ally as they negotiated the transition from the socialized mind to the healthily autonomous mind. Often these are young adult women who come to direction with a sense of limitation or even imprisonment due to their efforts to please their family members, their significant other and their colleagues at work. These folks feel as though they are weighed down by an oppressive burden. The Holy Spirit and their own developmental needs start acting up, as it were, and they grow frustrated with the constraints under which they are living.
They draw encouragement from New Testament narratives such as the Annunciation story portraying Mary’s calm and discerning presence and the stories of Jesus’ sense of authority in his many encounters. They dialogue with Jesus, asking for help in growing into a new self, a new self-identity. The process is slow and there can be setbacks, but, overtime, they dare to act differently with those in their lives, asserting themselves in new ways and asking that their family members and others begin to relate to them in a new way.
The spiritual direction relationship gives them a safe space in which to share their struggles and their aspirations. And their love for Jesus grows as they discover how much he is rooting for him in their search for greater adulthood. Their growing ability of discern spirits and discern God’s will offer powerful resources as they walk this new path of healthy autonomy in Christ.
What am I talking about here is, first of all, about personal growth, personal evolution of individuals. But, once again, this growth is also growth of the Body of Christ. This is the case, first of all, because other people in her life need to learn to relate to her in a richer way. And this is also the case because someone who grows in healthy autonomy is able to send out to the Body of Christ, stronger frequencies of love and justice because, in Christ, they are becoming more of a Someone.
Part II Areas of Tension for This Ecclesial Ministry
I would like to move now from consideration of ways that Ignatian spiritual direction builds up the Church community to areas of tension that can arise in the exercise of this ministry.
I will not be offering a comprehensive overview—whatever that might look like—but four selected areas of tension. And I am simply offering my perspectives on these areas. Nothing canonical here!!
The first area, if you will, is the role of spiritual direction in the midst of the clergy sex abuse crisis.
Anyone who has been a spiritual director during the past twenty years and more has invariably experienced directees bringing this issue forth in one way or another. For some it comes into the direction conversation because they have themselves been victimized. They may have been explicitly dealing with this prior to coming to direction with you, or it might have surfaced during the time of direction. The director needs to be well informed about their responsibilities at this juncture, e.g., ensuring that the directee report the abuse to the proper authorities. Together with the directee, the director needs to explore the kind of help that the individual needs. In direction care needs to be taken that the care offered by the director is that proper to direction.
The temptation for an abuse victim to identify themselves as victim and become stuck in that identity can be very strong. Unlike many in our culture, I am comfortable using the term “victim” of someone who has been abused, provided it carries its original meaning of being the object of another’s violent action or actions. Many Americans have inflated the notion, combining the understanding I just mentioned with the experience of becoming stuck in the situation of victimhood.
The crucial contribution the director can offer in this situation is to help the directee stay connected with God and Christ, assisting them in their efforts to name and share with God and Christ the hurt, anguish, anger and whatever other feelings arise for the directee. And then, to invite the directee to remain with God or Christ, to discover how they are gazing upon the directee. The most fundamental source of identity for the directee, or for any of us, is our receiving existence and life from God every second, and being recipients of the divine life and love very second of our lives. The deepest healing for the abuse victim comes from divine source of creation and grace.
Sometimes the directee will need to take a break from direction and devote all their energies to the work of therapy, returning, one hopes, to direction, when enough healing has taken place that they can engage in contemplative relating with God and Christ.
The other huge dimension here, of course, is the directee’s relationship with the Church, especially with its official representatives. This can go in a number of directions, depending on the nature of the abuse and the experience of the directee about the responsiveness of authority figures to the victim when the victimization became known. For a shorter or longer time, the director might be the ecclesial link for the directee. There is no predicting what the upshot will be in terms of belonging to the Church, participating in the sacraments, and the like.
It can often be helpful to the directee to experience their wounds as realities to which Christ is present as the wounds of his body. These are wounds that are, of course, self-inflicted by members of Christ’ body, which makes them very different from wounds coming from outside. But, if the directee can grow in union with Christ as the one who is also, in his own way, suffering his Body’s wounds, this sense of solidarity in pain can be a source of healing.
The second area is the situation when someone is coming to the director as an avowed homosexual and has been open about this with the director.
It can be the case that the directee is very comfortable with being homosexual and does not make an issue of it. They may refer to their partner in a matter-of-fact way, and at times refer to their sexual relationship when appropriate. At times they might refer to an earlier period when they struggled with family and or the church community about their identity. The individual might even had been married to someone of the opposite sex sometime in the past. But, in the present, they are at peace with themselves and mainly bring other dimensions of their lives to the conversation with the director.
In situations like this is seems to me that the role of the director is to relate to the directee just as they are now, listening contemplatively and asking questions about the experience brought up by the directee, thereby helping them get in touch with more of their experience, with the hope that they will bring that to the Lord in prayer.
I don’t believe that it is the role of the director to bring up homosexuality as an issue if the directee does not bring it up. If If I were to raise questions about their identity and, for example, the position of their faith community regarding homosexual, those questions would have no connection to what is on the mind and heart of the directee. I would be revealing my own agenda, or concerns, and putting them onto the directee.
If the individual coming to direction has just recently gotten in touch with their identity or is trying to decide whether to “come out,” the situation is very different, isn’t it? The directee might want help from the director with regard to how to pray about his new-found self-knowledge. They might have strongly ambivalent feelings about themselves, and huge concerns about how God will regard them and relate to them going forward. Here the director needs to offer the directee a centered and calm presence, and be intent on helping the individual with their struggle to bring to God or the risen Jesus the welter of feelings they have and to help the seeker to know what grace or graces they want to ask for.
It may be very difficult for the director to stay poised before all that is going on in the directee. Here supervision, which itself is a dimension of the ecclesial character of this ministry, can be very important. The director’s great service at this juncture in the directee’s life will be, negatively put, not to add an opinion or evaluation to the directee’s store of opinions and evaluations coming from elsewhere about his sexual identity. His sole concern, positively put, is to assist the directee in growing in their relationship with God so that more and more of the directee’s experience can be shared with God and, in time, the directee can come to the courage to ask God how God regards the individual.
The third scenario here is offered by the homosexual directee who is deeply pained and angered by their Church community’s views on homosexuality. If the individual is a Roman Catholic, they might be particularly angry because the teaching Church moved from condemning homosexual acts—which was tough enough for this person—to naming the individual as intrinsically disordered. If this person had grown up taking Church teaching seriously and feeling that they were part of the community, their recent acknowledgement of their identity brings them into a state of rupture with the Church that affects the relationship with God as well.
Let us suppose that the director in this scenario is someone whose personal conviction is that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is wrong. The director is convinced that the teaching Church is caught at the level of classical consciousness, the level at which reality is interpreted as consisting of firm and clear essences and these essences are part of “natural law.” In this paradigm, human nature is easily defined as to its essence and all deviations from that essence are considered wrong.
This level of consciousness is to be distinguished by what has been called “historical consciousness.” This level of consciousness recognizes that there is such a thing as human nature but wants to distinguish dimensions of human being that are empirically divergent from human nature as such. This level would shy aware from identifying human nature with heterosexual identity, but rather accept that there are, empirically, a variety of ways of living out one’s sexuality that are human, without one way being made a normative criterion to assess the worth of the other ways of living.
I’ve spelled these two levels of consciousness—which I have borrowed from the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan—because it offers a good example of ways directors can come to the conversation with the directee.
But, of course, everything I have mentioned here needs to stay in the director’s mind and not move to the director’s lips!! His or her role is, once again, to help the directee get in touch with their honest experience, their feelings, thoughts, and desires, and find out whether the holder of those interior movements can get the courage to share them with God or the risen Jesus and the stay around, remain with, their dialogue partner in prayer, so as to find out whether some word or interior movement that might be given to them as response from God.
As much as the director might like to illuminate the directee about the two levels of consciousness—one being more complex than the other—the need here is for an abstinence, an ascetism, for the sake of the director offering the assistance that is uniquely proper to spiritual direction.
The third major area is that of Roman Catholic women directees who feel called to present themselves for ordination. I find, in this connection, the example of what Ignatius did in regard to the Pope and Francis Borgia very instructive.
You will recall that Ignatius heard rumors that the Pope was considering asking Borgia to become a cardinal. Ignatius prayed very hard for light from God about how God wanted him to use his freedom in this set of circumstances. He might have had his personal preferences about how he wished the Pope to choose, but he tried to leave them out of the process.
As the result of his prayer, Ignatius was given to believe that God wanted Ignatius to do everything in his power to supply the Pope with reasons for not proceeding this way. However, God gave Ignatius no light whatsoever about how God wanted the Pope to choose with regard to Borgia.
It could well be that God would ask others to provide reasons to the Pope for asking Borgia to become a cardinal. None of that was Ignatius’s business. He knew that all discernments of God’s will have to do with seeking to know how God wants the discerner to use their freedom in the here and now.
So Ignatius had cardinals approached the Pope to give reasons why he should leave Borgia alone. He himself may have proposed reasons to the Pope. I’m not sure of that.
But he also prayed for the interior freedom to accept the Pope’s decision, whatever it might be.
I find this story very enlightening when I am accompanying a woman who feels called to present themselves to the bishop for consideration for ordination.
Let pause here for just a moment. I am straining to frame the call the directee experiences in careful language.
Sometimes a woman will say that she has discerned that God is calling her to priesthood in the Catholic Church.
But this way of framing the discernment is not correct. To repeat what I said above: I am meant to discern how God wants me to use my freedom in the here and now.
In the Catholic Church bishops ordain individuals to the diaconate and priesthood. They must make their own discernment about proceeding with ordination or not.
A Catholic woman in the Roman Catholic church may discern how God wants her to use her freedom in relation to ordination in the Church. To express this in other words: how does God want her to discern her call to action in the here and now?
Framed this way, I as spiritual director can be supportive of her discerning efforts. Supportive in the sense of assisting her so that her discernment is based on the best evidence that God is giving her in the present. She is not discerning whether there ought to be women priests in the Church. And she is not discerning how God wants the Pope to use his freedom right now with respect to this issue.
She is discerning what God wants her to do here and now. And God could ask of her one action, or a set of actions, but they would all be actions she is taking as the fruit of seeking God’s will for her.
She might be asked to present herself to a bishop to share her prayer experiences with him. She might be asked to seek support from theologians. She might be asked to write letters to sympathetic bishops. She might be asked to remain in prayer that God’s will in this regard be done in the Church. She might be asked to do research on this topic. She might be asked to let go of the issue for now. This is just the beginning of a list of actions God might ask of her.
Session III (15 minutes)
The fourth area of tension I have selected has to do with matters of faith. Suppose that someone is coming to you for direction, and they make clear early on that they feel they are living very much on the margins of the Church because they have a real problem with affirming Jesus’ divinity. They find that considering him divine compromises his humanity for them and they value Jesus as a friend, teacher, exemplar. They ask you whether they are being hypocritical calling themselves Christian if they are thinking this way.
Let’s explore for a moment a way of relating to such an individual precisely within the spiritual direction relationship.
It occurs to me that it would help the director to consider within themselves how belief in Jesus’ divinity emerged in the early Church. I touched on this in the first session. I raise this not to suggest that the director necessarily talk about this with the directee, but to help the director sense a way forward in assisting the individual with whom he is meeting.
Early Christians found that they were prompted in liturgical situations and in personal prayer to bring more and more of themselves to the risen Jesus. They felt inspired, as well, to surrender themselves in loving trust to him, and it became evident that they were more and more relating to the risen One in the way that only God may be related to. This was their religious experience; this was not theoretical speculation! This surprised them and caused them to engage in extended exploration to find the right language to protect this religious experience, which they recognized as hugely life-giving.
Might it not be possible to invite this directee onto an analogous path?
What I am thinking is that it is possible that the directee is understanding or even imagining Jesus’ divinity in a way that would necessarily block appreciation of his humanity. But if the individual can be encouraged to relate to Jesus as friend, teacher and exemplar, to find out, by venturing, how much of himself he wants to entrust to Jesus, it might turn out that, operationally or existentially, he is expressing belief in Jesus’ unsurpassable union with God while not be able to assent to his way of formulating or imagining his divinity.
I say this is a possibility. But there is, in any case, huge capital if he or she is comfortable with Jesus in his prayer. The Holy Spirit is one who prompted the early followers of Jesus to pray in a way that led to the affirmation of his divinity. It’s not a bad practice for spiritual directors to allow the Holy Spirit to do for the directee what the director is not able to do!!
Part III
Two Concluding Considerations
Now I offer two concluding considerations. They seem disparate on the face of it, but they each address the question of the breadth of spiritual direction.
Beyond Ignatian Spirituality
An important realization for spiritual directors in the Ignatian tradition is the need to recognize the limits of this spiritual tradition. Our directees come to us with the expectation that we will try to help them in their relationship with God and Christ in terms of their actual religious experience at this time in their lives.
If they begin to find that they are not able to continue praying with Lectio Divina or Ignatian Imaginative Prayer, the director needs to make inquiries to determine whether this is the ordinary dryness that prayerful people can experience or is it something else. If they discover that the directee is also growing in their dissatisfaction with the elements of their life that previously were sources of joy or at least good support, they need to take that seriously. This dissatisfaction is neither depression nor spiritual desolation, but a kind of weaning from micro-idolatries.
And if, in addition, the directee finds that he or she is drawn to be with God more and more. Not because doing this leads to the experience of spiritual consolation—it doesn’t—but because they sense that doing this gives expression to their deepest truth, even if there no “satisfaction” in this “hanging out” with God.
These three characteristics of the directee’s experience are, of course, the three signs of the dark night of the senses according to St. John of the Cross. In this new interior place for the directee there can be commingled as well some spiritual desolation, for example, the temptation to lessen one’s prayer or distract oneself with futile phantasies.
I would like to assume that Ignatius experienced something like the dark night of the senses in his own journey with God. He entered into the depths of union with God but his spiritual doctrine, which is very practical in its intent, is geared to helping people who are either beginning an intentional spiritual journey or are developing a stable relationship with God. His guidance does not extend to those whom God is inviting into deeper waters by God.
St. Teresa of Avila has given classic expression to the experience of being seriously misguided by Jesuit confessors who offered her spiritual direction. Thank goodness, she also had Jesuit directors who were very helpful, even if, as is quite possible, her experiences of God transcended their own experience.
It is incumbent on all directors in the Ignatian tradition to have a basic understanding of Carmelite spirituality as part of their “repertoire.” The Roman Catholic tradition is rich in spiritual traditions and there is guidance available for Christians on their journey from one or another of the traditions.
The Personal and the Communal or Ecclesial
My second concluding reflection about breadth brings me back to a theme that I appealed to often at the beginning of this morning’s reflections: the unity of the personal and communal in spiritual direction.
I would like to refer to some fundamental notions from modern science and relate them to the theology of grace. Don’t worry, I am not equipped to get too deeply into the physics!!
First of all, there is the deep conviction that everything in the universe is connected with everything else in ways that far exceed our powers of imagination. Scientists deep discovering ways in which very distant regions of our cosmos influence each other.
Secondly, there is the sense that energy is at the root of what we perceive to be relatively stable material entities.
And thirdly, there is the phenomenon of emergence. Scientists refer to the phenomenon of the greater proceeding out of the less. This is the story of evolution. Hydrogen and oxygen come together and form H2O, which is not H plus O but a new reality, more than H and more than O. Every step of the way in evolution, what is less internally organized and less complex brings about the more internally organized and the more complex, which can’t be simply reduced back to the component elements, but which transcend what existed prior. Science cannot explain this, and by its methods it tries to reduce the more complex to the less complex in order to understand it.
The last notion I want to introduce is that of morphogenetic fields. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake postulated that repetitive behavior creates informational fields that can influence similar behavior in an unrelated area. These morphogenetic fields are formative fields that carry information and are available throughout space and time without any loss of intensity after they have been created. According to Sheldrake, these fields of habitual patterns link all people. As more and more people develop a habit or pattern – whether of experience, knowledge, perception, or behavior – the stronger it is in the field and the more easily it replicates itself in a new person (or entity). As more and more people learn to do something or live something, it becomes easier for others to learn or do it or live it. Each of us, everything we do, because of our quantum nature, our integral relationship with others and with nature, affects all the rest of us and the whole world of values directly and physically.
At the very beginning of the first session, I spoke about the divine self-communication to the cosmos and to human beings as the fundamental reason why God calls creatures into being.
The planet earth is saturated with God source-of-all, with the Risen Jesus, and with Holy Spirit. And planet earth is saturated with created grace, with the divine transformation of the human in habits and acts of faith, hope and love.
So we have (1) the saturation of planet earth and humankind with God’s life and love and the created transformations of human beings that we call created grace; we have (2) the extraordinary interconnectedness of all material realities; (3) the phenomenon of emergence, and we have (4) science telling us about morphogenetic fields: formative fields of information that are produced by repetitive activity in the cosmos, which, when produced, have the power to influence events at huge removes from the origin of the fields.
I think it’s helpful, and very encouraging, if we think of these scientific and theological considerations when we are considering spiritual direction, that meeting of two persons of faith in a room somewhere, or on Zoom, as ecclesial ministry, as ministry contributing to the communal flourishing of the Body of Christ, of other humans, and of planet Earth.
