One day Megan, a seven- year-old girl, called excitedly to her mother: “Look, Mom, look Mom!” For a time her mother was distracted and failed to turn around. When the mother did take notice, she saw that her child had blown her bubble gum into a large bubble, the first time she had accomplished this feat.
Immediately, and unaccountably, the woman burst into tears. Of course, they were tears of joy, prompted by a sudden feeling of the beauty of her child and her own heightened appreciation of the world’s splendor.
This ordinary human event had become a spiritual experience. The woman had received an unexpected vision of the wonder that surrounds everyone and of the God who created it.
This story comes to me from Jan Gough, a deeply expressive middle-aged woman who practices the ministry of spiritual direction. She judges the mother’s experience a good introduction to what the spiritual life means. For her, it is a fine instance of what it signifies “to feel one’s heart suddenly on fire.”
This spring, Jan completed a year’s training at the Jesuit-run Center for Religious Development in Cambridge. This internship proved to be an intense and wonderful experience for her. She found the people at this center open to her, a Presbyterian in a Catholic environment. They showed themselves flexible as if accepting a truth that Jan expresses in these words: “God hasn’t read all the rule books we have written about God.”
Jan learned spiritual direction by two methods: first, by actually doing it (Jan had ten people who came to her each week); and second, by receiving supervision from a veteran spiritual director. The supervisor, in reviewing her work, did not focus on what she might have said wrong, but helped her “identify where you are getting in God’s way.”
That phrase comes close to what spiritual direction is. In Jan’s view, it is “the opportunity for a person to help another person discover how God is trying to speak to them in their life.”
This activity may seem elitist, if only because most people, even those serious about the spiritual life, do not have individual directors. Whatever direction most of us get comes in a group setting, especially in church or in some other formally religious place.
But Jan feels strongly that almost everyone can profit from having an individual director. To her, spiritual direction should not be an activity reserved for the a privileged few, but something that remains accessible to almost everyone.
When I asked her if you must have faith in God, she replied: “Spiritual direction presupposes an openness to the possibility of God or some supreme being that wants to be in relationship with us.” “When spiritual direction works,” she adds, “it’s because people let themselves be loved by God and experience the presence of God.”
In taking on the direction of others, Jan got off to a dramatic start. Her first directee was a 49-year-old woman who was dying. For the last nine months of the woman’s life, Jan helped this woman remain open to God. “It felt like a pregnancy, like giving birth to something sacred,” Jan told me.
“Was it hard?,” I asked of this experience. “It wasn’t hard,” Jan said, “because it was so grace-filled. People who choose to live until the day they die, who choose to be open to where God might be leading them, the gift that they give the rest of us is extraordinary.”
Before her death the woman made Jan and her colleagues promise to get together regularly for a year after her death as “a resurrection group.” Commenting on this experience, Jan says: “The opportunity to think that, even in death, your life can be generative, is an incredibly important concept.”
Jan tells of another woman who felt drawn to God because her husband was dying. But the woman felt scruples about returning to church. “It doesn’t seem fair to go to church now in the hard times when I haven’t been there in the good times to praise God.” As her spiritual director, Jan helped her see that God welcomes everyone when they turn to Him, no matter what.
More detailed information about spiritual direction is available at retreat houses, churches, monasteries, and other religious centers.
Richard Griffin