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Spiritual Direction Quotes

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Spiritual Direction Quotes

“In carrying out his mandate, it is evident that, in addition to being a man of prayer, Dr. King was a contemplative, Dr. Ruth Haley Barton, founder of the Transforming Center, affirmed the inclusion of contemplation and prayerfulness in his life when, in honor of Martin Luther King Day in January 2010, she wrote that Dr. King’s “life was characterized by a powerful integration of prayer and contemplation with a profound commitment to decisive and loving action in the world.’ Barton’s insight is extremely valuable in the discussion of the power of prayer and spiritual direction from an African American perspective. In identifying Dr. King as a man of contemplative action, she included a clear definition of that term: ‘Contemplative action is action that emerges from our real encounters with God. It is doing what God calls us to do when he calls us to do it - no matter how afraid we are or how ill-equipped we feel. Contemplative action is the willingness to go beyond being primarily concerned for our own safety and survival to the place where we know that our real life is hidden with Christ in God no matter what happens to our physical life. Contemplative action is doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right Spirit, completely given over to a Power that is beyond our own - even, and perhaps most especially, when the risks are very great. This kind of action is impossible without being radically in touch with the Source of our life through prayer and contemplation.”

JusticeSpiritual Direction
Book:Soul Care in African American Practice
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“When we pray "Let your kingdom come," we aren't asking God to bring history to an end and whisk us to realms of glory, or to wave a magic wand and solve all the problems we face in our life. Rather, we are making a radical commitment to live our life in the world ("on earth") in such loving abandonment to God that the values and principles, the perspectives and dynamics of God's realm of life and wholeness become incarnate in and through our being and doing. Here too we are utterly incapable of actualizing the kingdom in this way. We can, however, through loving abandonment, allow God to incarnate kingdom life in and through us in the circumstances of our daily life.”

PrayerKingdom Of GodIncarnationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self
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“In spiritual direction, however, there has to be an ongoing awareness that anything can happen; that the Holy Spirit is already affecting the person; and that one must participate in this work through careful discernment and support. here again, it is necessary to walk the fierce path of free will and dependence. We must always claim the freedom we have been given; to do otherwise would devalue our humanity. But at the same time, we will increasingly recognize the extreme inadequacy of personal will and knowledge in figuring out what life is or how we should live it. As we grow in wisdom, we also grow in the realization of our utter dependence upon the Lord in all things. it seems to me, then, that in its purest human form spiritual direction is a journey towards more freely and deeply choosing to surrender to God.”

PrayerObedienceDiscernmentSpiritual DirectionSelahListening Prayer
Book:Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spirtual Direction
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“Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him who has no voice, and yet who speaks in everything that is, and who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are words of his. But we are words that are meant to respond to him, to answer to him, to echo him, and even in some way to contain him and signify him. Contemplation is this echo. It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which our very life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One. He answers himself in us and this answer is divine life, divine creativity, making all things new. We ourselves become his echo and his answer. It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation he answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer.”

PrayerContemplationSpiritual DirectionSelahListening Prayer
Book:New Seeds of Contemplation
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“The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and, second, awareness of the answer. Though these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are in fact an awareness of the same thing. The question is, itself, the answer. And we ourselves are both. But we cannot know this until we have moved into the second kind of awareness. We awaken, not to find an answer absolutely distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its own answer. And all is summed up in one awareness - not a proposition, but an experience: "I AM".”

PrayerContemplationDiscernmentSpiritual ExperienceSpiritual DirectionSelahListening Prayer
Book:New Seeds of Contemplation
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“God does not give his joy to us for ourselves alone, and if we could possess him for ourselves alone we would not possess him at all. Any joy that does not overflow from our souls and help other men to rejoice in God does not come to us form God. (But do not think that you have to see how it overflows into the souls of others. In the economy of his grace, you may be sharing his gifts with someone you will never know until you get to heaven.)”

ContemplationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:New Seeds of Contemplation
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“The temptation to pretend we know God's plan is a strong one. All of us have succumbed to it in one way or another. The point is not whether or not we are rightl we may be. The point to remember is that it is God's job, not ours, to speak inner truth to our friends. In our companionship of those who are suffering we can say we love, "We don't understand why you are experiencing this difficult situation, but we are here for you. God is faithful. We will support you as you try to believe, even when that seems impossible.”

LamentSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:Seeking God Together: An Introduction to Group Spiritual Direction
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“The environment of spiritual direction, then, is affirming and encouraging, but it is also a place of authenticity. In spiritual direction we look at the truth of our present situation and experience. The question asked is not "What should be happening in my life?" but "What is happening in my life?" We look for God here, now, because the place where we are in our lives is the place where we find God. Our souls, our lives, are the dwelling place of God. We are God's temple (2 Corinthians 6:16). God names himself the "I AM" (Exodus 3:14) - not the I-will-be, the I-was, the I-could-be, but the I-am. The present moment, the present set of circumstances, the present relationships in our lives - this is where God lives. This is where God meets us and gives us life. This is where spiritual direction occurs.”

PresenceSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:Seeking God Together: An Introduction to Group Spiritual Direction
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“It was the recommendation of John of the Cross (in a manner similar to that of Gamaliel) that one should not pay particular attention to any phenomena or experiences. If an experience were truly and directly of God, he felt, its truth would become evident naturally in one's life. If it were of something "else," it would certainly not be worthy of attention. Therefore, no special attention was necessary.”

PrayerDiscernmentSpiritual ExperienceSpiritual DirectionSelahListening Prayer
Book:Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spirtual Direction
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“At the same time [the contemplative] most earnestly wants everybody else to share his peace and his joy. His contemplation gives him a new outlook on the world of men. He looks about him with a secret and tranquil surmise which he perhaps admits to no one; hoping to find in the faces of other men or to hear in their voices some sign of vocation and potentiality for the same deep happiness and wisdom. He finds himself speaking of God to the men in whom he hopes he has recognized the light of his own peace, the awakening of his own secret: or if he cannot speak to them, he writes for them, and his contemplative life is still imperfect without sharing, without companionship, without communion.”

WritingContemplationVocationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:New Seeds of Contemplation
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“It must be emphasized here that this movement of detachment and centeredness is not a flight from the world. Such a false asceticism is merely another means by which our religious false self identifies us over against the world. The detachment and centeredness is at the heart of a life of loving union with God is never a world-denying spirituality. It is only the detachment from our manipulative and possessive abuse of the world that enables the world to be the place of life with God, and our centering enables our lives to be in the world all that god has created them to be.”

PrayerSpiritual DirectionSelahListening Prayer
Book:The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self
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“Spiritual direction is a way of companioning people as they seek to look closely, through the eyes of their hearts, at the guidance and transforming work of God in their lives. It's a practice that began in the early years of Christianity when people followed the desert mothers and fathers out to the wilderness to ask them how to know God. Over the years, spiritual direction has appeared in many faith traditions. It was kept alive in the Christian faith mainly through the Roman Catholic Church, but today the Protestant church is rediscovering it. People throughout the Christian church, including those of an evangelical orientation, are experiencing again the gifts that God gives to his people through the loving listening and the gentle guidance of spiritual directors. This gift is usually offered in the context of individual spiritual direction, but the potential for spiritual direction in small groups is a growing and promising expression of the ministry of spiritual companionship.”

Spiritual DirectionSelah
Book:Seeking God Together: An Introduction to Group Spiritual Direction
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“When I heard about spiritual direction, I felt as if I was seeing an old friend I had never met. Spiritual direction (this new old friend) led me deeper into the love of God. Spiritual direction helped me experience more intimately the God of love. And spiritual direction equipped me to be in relationship with others where I could love as I was loved.”

VocationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:Seeking God Together: An Introduction to Group Spiritual Direction
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“While I haven’t yet reached this state of detachment, I have spent too long with the day-to-day realities of mothering to be sentimental about it. If I am now perceived as a motherly person, I would prefer to be seen as desert amma rather than a Hallmark mommy. Most important, for good or ill, I know that my own experience in mother colors the way in which I do spiritual direction. And lest it sound as if I am excluding a large segment of the population, Meister Eckhart reminds us that we can all be mothers. While the experience of bearing nurturing a child is unique, maternal ways of being are available to all of us, men and women.”

Spiritual Direction
Book:Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction
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“The Wall, a dark and sacred place, reeks of God. In the Wall we are vulnerable enough to listen to what God says - whether it is in the guise of other people’s voices, God’s voice, or serendipitous experiences. Once we believe that God is in the midst of the darkness with us, it can be a transforming place. We don’t necessarily get cured or erase our pain or become saints, but we learn how to embrace our pain, how to stay with it and learn what it is trying to teach us, how to look fear in the ace and keep moving into it. The Wall invites us each to heal.”

Spiritual Direction
Book:The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith
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“The literature of apocalypse is scary stuff, the kind of thing that can give religion a bad name, because people so often use it as a means of controlling others, instilling dread by invoking a boogeyman God. ... [Apocalyptic literature] is not a detailed prediction of the future, or an invitation to withdraw from the concerns of this world. It is a wake-up call, one that uses intensely poetic language and imagery to sharpen our awareness of God's presence in and promise for the world. The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek for "uncovering" or "revealing," which makes it a word about possibilities. And while uncovering something we'd just as soon keep hidden is a frightening prospect, the point of apocalypse is not to frighten us into submission. Although it is often criticized as "pie-in-the-sky" fantasizing, I believe its purpose is to teach us to think about "next-year-country" in a way that sanctifies our lives here and now. "Next-year-country" is a treasured idiom of the western Dakotas, an accurate description of the landscape that farmers and ranchers dwell in - next year rains will come at the right time; next year I won't get hailed out; next year winter won't set in before I have my hay hauled in for winter feeding. I don't know a single person on the land who uses the idea of "next year" as an excuse not to keep on reading the earth, not to look for the signs that mean you've got to get out and do the field work when the time is right. Maybe we're meant to use apocaly[tic literature in the same way: not as an allowance to indulge in an otherworldly fixation but as an injunction to pay closer attention to the world around us. When I am disturbed by the images of apocalypse, I find it helpful to remember the words of a fourth-centry monk about the task of reading scripture as "working the earth of the heart," for it is only in a disturbed, ploughted0up ground that the seeds we plant for grain can grow.”

SpiritualityApocalypseSpiritual Direction
Book:Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
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“We cannot escape most of the crises in our lives, nor should we. In fact, these events frequently provide the energy for movement on our spiritual journey, even when we are stuck along the way... we ask questions about our own life. We wonder about meaning. Our present view may become inadequate. We ask deeper questions. Even joyful experiences can propel us forward.”

GriefSpiritual Direction
Book:The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith
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“A crisis can knock us off balance, making us afraid, vulnerable, and ripe for change. This also happens in our spiritual journey. We have a crisis in our faith that causes us to reconsider. It might frighten us, at least make us vulnerable. If we become bitter or too resistant, we can get very stuck. But if we let the change or crisis touch us, if we live with it and embrace it as difficult as that is, we are more likely to grow and to move eventually to another stage or spiral in our journey [of faith]. When we are most vulnerable, we have the best chance to learn and move along the way. In the midst of pain there is promise.”

HealingSpiritual DirectionJourney Of Faith
Author:Janet O. Hagberg
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“But for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.' The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others...At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. it is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.”

FriendshipCommunitySpiritual Direction
Book:The Four Loves
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“In the unfixables of our lives we are invited to keep company with Jesus and take a risk that God's intentions toward us are good. Day after day this is what Jesus did. It is called trust. He calls us: 'Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly" (Matthew 11:30, MSG)”

Intimacy With GodSpiritual DirectionSpiritual Diciplines
Book:Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us
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“Excessive preoccupation with psyche and evil - either from supportive or antagonistic standpoints - fosters a degree of self-consciousness and self-importance that is very likely to eclipse the ever-present mystery of God's truth. Discernments are essential, but it is not at all necessary or helpful to become attached to making them. If possible, it is best to see psychological phenomena such as dreams, fantasies, images, and thoughts as manifestations of God's potential in the same way that nature, art, relationships, and all other phenomena are. Gazing into an empty, blue sky, kneeling in prayer in a cathedral, and recalling memories associated with a dream can all be worthwhile spiritual explorations. The can also all be distractions from spiritual exploration. The beauty of the sky or the cathedral can create an absorption with sensate experience, just as dream analysis can create ego-absorption.”

PrayerSpiritual ExperienceSpiritual DirectionSelahListening Prayer
Book:Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spirtual Direction
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“The importance of experiences lies not so much in their precise nature as in one's response to them. In part this represents a harkening back to an old principle of discernment...of evaluating an experience in relation to its fruits. More deeply, however, we are speaking of remaining attentive to the mystery and reality of God behind> all phenomena, refusing to allow superficial appearances to distract us from this central concern. We do a disservice to ourselves and others when we allow our interest in the nature of a phenomenon to obscure the mysterious wonder of the very existence of that phenomenon.”

PrayerDiscernmentSpiritual ExperienceSpiritual DirectionSelahListening Prayer
Book:Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spirtual Direction
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“It is a good rule of thumb for spiritual directors to ask themselves, What truly constitutes our spiritual concern here? Am I really being attentive to the Lord in this? What things are getting in the way of our simple, humble intention towards the working of the Holy Spirit in this person's life? All human experience can be said to be spiritual in the largest sense, but spiritual direction should deal primarily with those qualities that seem most clearly and specifically spiritual, those that reveal the presence or leadings of God, or evidence of grace, working most directly in a person's life. This becomes increasingly important as spiritual direction progresses over time with any given individual. In the course of spiritual maturation, concern with superficial psychological experience must give way to a much more basic concern for the discernment of good and evil.”

Holy SpiritDiscernmentSpiritual Direction
Book:Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spirtual Direction
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“Spiritual direction, therefore, explicitly acknowledges what is often only implicit in other forms of pastoral care: that the directees' desire for more life, more integration, more union with God is grounded in the indwelling Spirit and that God is an active Other in the relationship. The working alliance is thus grounded in mystery and explicitly acknowledges that the way, too, is mystery.”

Spiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“Unitive experiences often occur spontaneously, and often outside of obviously religious contexts. Many times they are quickly repressed or denied. Still, they constitute the basic form of spiritual experience,... It is possible to increase one's openness, receptivity, and responsiveness to unitive experiences, but it is not possible to make them happen. An experience of union, of course, does not imply that an individual is really any more at one than before or after the experience. Rather, it must be understood that the experience constitutes a realization (in the literal sense) of an aspect of life that is constantly true but that goes unrecognized most of the time. In this regard, unitive experiences can be seen as one kind of contemplative state. In classic language they are a form of "infused" contemplation, that which comes solely as a gift, as compared to "acquired" contemplation, that which comes partly from personal effort and intention.... In practice one can examine the self-losing aspect of unitive experience by asking What was your sense of yourself during the experience? In the true experience, there will be no sense of self; self will be forgotten.”

Spiritual ExperienceSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spirtual Direction
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“It is easy to mislead people into thinking that they can move themselves to the next stage by just ... setting their mind to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The journey of faith is our personal journey, and movement on the journey is the place of mystery, holy ground. Moving from one stage to another reverences timing. It involves bringing our response in sync with God's grace in our lives. God does not make us move. God's grace allows us to move.”

Spiritual DirectionJourney Of Faith
Author:Janet O. Hagberg
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“The opportunity to tell our story unhindered, uninterrupted is rare. Most of the time people are so involved in their own concerns they do not listen with complete attention. It can be quite startling, therefore, to feel another person fully attending to you, present with you and for you, setting their own struggles aside in order to be available to God an dyou. Sometimes this is wonderfully freeing and at other times it is paralyzing. We find ourselves listening to ourselves, weighing our words, and considering if we speak authentically or frivolously. ... But telling our spiritual director is often a pure gift. As we spekk we begin to see connections that were hidden. Insights arise or our perspective about circumstances or ourselves may shift. There are Divine and human affirmations and confirmations. Sometimes the words we needed to hear come from our own lips. ... Interior developments arise out of silence that are beyond our clear view. We just know that something has moved or changed and that God is active... The opportunity to tell our story opens us to hear God's story more deeply - God's presence and participation in our lives and in the life of the world. In God all human stories connect and when we participate in spiritual direction, we seem to notice more of the connections.”

StorytellingSpiritual Direction
Book:Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction
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“The gospels indicate a development in the apostles' attitude toward Jesus. They first see him as a person of power and only later come to accept him as the Messiah. They are depicted as reacting with horror to his initial descriptions of how his Messiahship would be lived out. Only after the resurrection do they come to recognize his betrayal and death as the way God was willing to have salvation achieved. Thus the disciples are described as people in the process of experiencing and of developing conviction on the basis of that experience. Christianity rests on that bedrock." (p. 23)”

Spiritual DirectionGospelsFaith Journey
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“We remain free, however, to listen to God's communication or not to listen, and free to respond or not to respond to what we hear. When we speak of contemplative prayer, we are speaking at the same time of awareness of this communication by God and of a willingness to listen and respond. Conscious relationship begins when I choose to listen to or to look at what the other is doing. After I have made this choice, I then freely decide whether to respond or not. Thus, by contemplative prayer we mean the conscious willingness and desire to look at and listen to God as God wishes to be for me and to respond. I may accept or reject God's initiative. in either case I have responded. When this process occurs, the person has the 'foodstuff' for beginning spiritual direction." (p. 34”

PrayerSpiritual DirectionContemplative Prayer
Author:William A. Barry
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“The stereotype of the pale, emaciated ascetic who has developed total control of all his reactions and responses does not fit our description of the responsive hearer of the word. That controlled a person would be a poor candidate for the kind of spiritual direction that makes relationship a central focus. The best candidates are those who have lived life and not been afraid of its joys and pains. They have been able to develop close relationships with other people. And they have strong desires for something more in their relationship with God. " (p. 37)”

Spiritual Direction
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“Both of these attitudes -- unrelenting listlessness and dogged good cheer -- have to yield to the realities of prayer and life if the relationship with God is to grow and spiritual direction be helpful. Pointing repeatedly to discordant notes that sound in prayer will usually be the most valuable assistance directors can give. But sometimes people's defenses will be so entrenched that only a forthright confrontation will capture their attention. Such a confrontation would have to be focused clearly on the main issue: Are they willing to notice what is happening in prayer and in life, or are they screening out material that conflicts with a mood they feel they must maintain?" (Ch.5, p. 75)”

PrayerSpiritual Direction
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“Some of the most outstanding spiritual directors in Christian history - like Catherine of Siena and Ignatius of Loyola - either never had an office or orders, or did much of their work of direction before they held such an office. Generally speaking, effective spiritual directors are discovered by the Christian community; they do not put themselves forward without first having others seek their help. Because priests and ministers stand out publicly in the churches as spiritual leaders, most often it is they who have been sought out as spiritual directors. But ordination is not necessary (nor, as we shall see, sufficient) for effective spiritual direction.”

VocationSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“The more conscious directors are of the life of the Christian community and the more knowledgeable they are about the experienced relationships of that community with God and with all reality, the more helpful they are likely to be to directees. But their authority arises basically from the fact that they share in the faith-life of the Christian community as it experiences its dialogue with God. This makes the director first of all a brother or a sister of the directee and provides the basic ingredient for the informal, nonhierarchic - "just two people talking" - but creative atmosphere that seems to characterize helpful direction today.”

ChurchSpiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“The kinds of men and women most likely to engender trust in others are those described in the same study as developed persons. They are not perfect, but they are relatively mature. They show signs of having engaged in life and with people. They are optimistic, but not naive, good-humored, but not glad-handers. They have suffered, but not been overcome by suffering. They have loved and been loved and know the struggle of trying to be a friend to another. They have friends for whom they care deeply. They have experienced failure and sinfulness - their own and others' - but seem at ease with themselves in a way that indicates an experience of being saved and freed by a power greater than the power of failure and sin. They are relatively unafraid of life with all its light and darkness, all its mystery.”

Spiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“It needs to be emphasized that directees are real people, and as such they are just as varied, just as ambivalent, just as attractive and unattractive as are, for example, directors themselves. Real people can be scintillating, and they can be boring, often within the same hour. They can be banal, and they can be inspired. They can be concerned about momentous and serious issues and about trivia. They can be sunny, and they can be gloomy. In their prayer life they will show all these dispositions and more. Spiritual directors who want to foster a relationship between such people and their God need to have a "surplus of warmth".”

Spiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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“How does this "surplus of warmth," this love for people as they are, show itself in spiritual direction? It appears in three attitudes: commitment, effort to understand, and spontaneity. Commitment is the willingness of spiritual directors to help directees grow in union with God and to commit their time, their resources, and themselves to that end. Effort to understand means that spiritual directors try to maintain a contemplative attitude toward directees, try to perceive how the directees are experiencing God and life. Spontaneity means that spiritual directors are themselves, not controlled and inhibited by their role as spiritual directors, but able to express their own feelings, thoughts, and hopes when expressing them will be helpful to directees. Without spontaneity, "commitment and effort to understand will appear cold, impersonal, and stereotyped.”

Spiritual DirectionSelah
Book:The Practice of Spiritual Direction
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