OPINION - Spiritual direction

the sorts of questions people have always been exploring - meaning, purpose, faith and doubt

Here was a wonderful practice built around exactly the sorts of questions people have always been exploring - meaning, purpose, faith and doubt, decisions, the good life, longing, spirituality and experiences of God - but unless you knew the right person inside a church you were unlikely to know that it existed. I remember thinking: why are we keeping this to ourselves? I became a spiritual director in my late twenties to offer the service to anyone.

Spiritual direction is a slightly misleading name, because a good spiritual director does a lot of listening and surprisingly little directing. Many practitioners prefer the term spiritual accompaniment.

At its heart is a particular quality of attention. Most of us have thousands of conversations but occasionally somebody listens to us so attentively that we begin to hear our own life differently. Spiritual direction creates space for that sort of conversation. What is happening in your life? What keeps returning? Where do you feel alive, resistant, disturbed or drawn? What might God be doing in all this and how might you respond?

a good spiritual director does a lot of listening and surprisingly little directing

My own Christian life was developing outside some of the usual patterns. I was involved in alternative worship - late-night, creative, experimental gatherings which had more in common with ambient club nights than a Sunday service. And underneath all that experimentation I was also drawn to mysticism, God, and my own, individual experience. I needed someone I trusted who I could talk to - who could hold those experiences and bring wise questions and a loving presence, to enable me to continue to explore, what is sometimes, uncomfortable territory. Spiritual direction gave me that.
You do not necessarily look for spiritual direction because something is wrong, sometimes the opposite is true; something is becoming more alive. Maybe you’ve had a vivid dream. Perhaps prayer has become important. Perhaps a transcendent experience in nature has challenged your usual explanations. Perhaps you find yourself thinking about God after years of not doing so. Perhaps you are grieving, changing career, entering midlife, leaving a relationship, questioning an old belief, or simply discovering that success has not answered the question you thought it would.

Continued below...

God may already be seeking us before we think we are seeking God.

Spiritual questions have a habit of arriving regardless of their convenience in our busy lives. We sometimes talk as though spirituality is a lifestyle accessory we choose to add. Christian faith makes a more interesting claim: God may already be seeking us before we think we are seeking God.

One of my favourite Gospel images for this is the road to Emmaus. Two people are walking away from Jerusalem, after Jesus’ crucifixion, bewildered by what has happened. They don’t recognise the stranger (Jesus) who joins them, but rather than immediately delivering the answer, he first asks what they are discussing. There is something familiar about about that pattern: accompaniment, attention, conversation and then recognition emerging along the way.

Christians are good at inviting people to services, courses and events. Those are valuable, but they are not the only ways someone might want to explore God. There are people who would happily sit down for an hour with one thoughtful Christian and talk honestly about what is happening in their lives, but who are nowhere near ready to walk into a church.

You are not looking for somebody to give you an answer; you need somewhere to listen.

This is why I’ve helped create Spiritual Direction UK. It isn’t an attempt to reinvent spiritual direction but it is an attempt to make the doorway easier to find.

Perhaps you already have somebody with whom you can talk honestly about God. If so, treasure them. But perhaps you have a question you cannot quite shake. Something has changed. Prayer has become difficult, or unexpectedly important. You find yourself wondering whether God is present in something happening to you. You are not looking for somebody to give you an answer; you need somewhere to listen.

I’ve had times in my life when I’ve had a spiritual director and times when I haven’t and even if I’m only seeing my director six or seven times a year, something about the quality of the rest of life feels easier.

You can find out more about Bruce's work, and start to explore spiritual direction for yourself at spiritualdirection.co.uk