A Spiritual Compass

Every explorer on his or her journey needs to check the settings, the sense of direction. One can find oneself in new or strange territory. There is something unsettling. It can be difficult to feel centred and stabilised. For the Christian, this can be resolved and should be resolved by prayer, studying the Word of God, embedding oneself in a community of faith, listening to what the Holy Spirit might be trying to speak into one's life.

But there is an additional aid that Christians through the centuries have found helpful. It is the Spiritual Director. This article is a simple outline in answer to the question: Should you have a Spiritual Director?

Then there is the Companion in The Way - a fellow Christian who is not in the same relationship to oneself as a Spiritual Director; someone who is an equal, a fellow traveller, a confidante, an encourager.

My own experience - with one exception - has been that my spiritual direction has come from books, my own reading pursuits, and from God-given Companions in the Way.

The spiritual direction which has impacted my life in radical, transforming ways has had its origins predominantly in Catholic and Quaker writings.

Catholic writers:
The Cloud of Unknowing (Author unknown); William Johnston; Thomas Merton, Dom Cuthbert Butler, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich; Carlo Carretto

Quaker writers:
George Fox, Howard H Brinton, Hannah Whitall Smith, Rufus Jones, Thomas Kelly, William Barclay

Orthodox:
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (Anthony Bloom)

This does not mean that other writings have not been influential in my life. I am an avid reader and read widely on spiritual matters. The writers I have mentioned are ones who have affected my spiritual thought and practice so thoroughly, so radically that their influence is with me on a daily or weekly basis.

My Companions on the Way have had the same seminal effect:
Father Albert OFM, Cap; Aunty Alice with her bible and picnic basket; David, the Toowoomba Bible Teacher; Joan, a true sister in Christ; Richard, the radical Catholic priest - now former Catholic priest; Jim, from the Full Gospel Businessmen's Association and great lover of God; Pat, the Jesuit; Des, who taught me about citizenship in heaven - to name but a few.

And then there is the person who was my Spiritual Director for approximately two years. He came into my life in a Spirit-led way in early 1996. He is a man of international stature in his field, very well-known in his home town of Melbourne. He is a writer, a speaker, a counsellor, and long before anyone heard of blogs, he began his huge and popular website which is still forging on to-day. His influence on me was great. This was a stimulating and creative period in my life which, I feel, brought about a renewal, a new conversion. A country girl from Northern Australia had a whole new window on life opened to her.

Now, there is a possibility of another Spiritual Director in the offing. I was at an informal gathering of women in ministry last Thursday. This woman came late and sat down beside me. She is an elderly woman - even much older than I. She spoke about herself just a little and I felt in my spirit that this woman was to be my Spiritual Director. In spite of this, I might have left this intuition remain unspoken but at the end of the lunch we were conversing and she told me more about herself. Included in her verbal resume were the words "spiritual direction". So I spoke up. She was taken aback but open to the idea. The outcome, in short, is that we will meet for coffee to see if we "click" - an all important point in selecting a Spiritual Director/ee - and go from there. I believe that we will click. I will be surprised if we don't.

And why do I think I need a Spiritual Director?

I feel isolated in my community of faith. This says as much about me as it does about the dynamic of my faith community. People are always a bit stunned by the things I've done in my life and the places that I have lived. For those who have always lived a suburban life-style in a major city, my life does seem different and unusual. It has been lived at the coal face of much of the human condition. This tends to give one a very different set of priorities from those prevailing in white middle suburbia - and, in my circumstances, it is isolating.

My health is a destabilising influence in my life. I don't have what I would consider "big ticket" items - but I have a few chronic illnesses which are sufficient for my GP to make up a care plan. I go well for a month or two and then come crashing down and I'm out of action for a while. Then, I crawl out of my hole, try to make up for all that lost time, and get myself back into a routine of normalcy once again.

This, I'm sure, is all tied in with the ageing process which I liken to adolescence. Full of ups and downs and all over the place while you are on your way to somewhere but you don't know what the outcome will look like.

So what do I hope for in this possible Spiritual Director?

I want a Companion in The Way; a sounding board; someone to help me towards a more centred and stabilised life; someone to help me to keep my compass pointing True North; someone to nurture and nourish growth in my spiritual life and to help me get rid of that nice crop of weeds I have tucked away on the back block.

Carlo Carretto and the Sahara

On Adoration...Silence....


Carlo Carretto (1910-1988)




Carlo Carretto was a leader in Italian "Catholic Action" and served as National President of Catholic Youth from 1946 to 1952. At the age of forty-four he heard the call of God to go into the desert. There he joined the Little Brothers of Jesus of Charles de Foucauld.

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The great joy of the Saharan novitiate is the solitude, and the joy of solitude - silence, true silence, which penetrates everywhere and invades one's whole being, speaking to the soul with wonderful new strength unknown to men to whom this silence means thing.

Here, living in perpetual silence, one learns to distinguish its different shades: silence of the church, silence in one's cell, silence of work, interior silence, silence of the soul, God's silence.

To learn to live these silences, the novice-master lets us go away for a few days' "desert."

A hamper of bread, a few dates, some water, the Bible. A day's march: a cave.

A priest celebrates Mass: then goes away, leaving in the cave on an altar of stones, the Eucharist. Thus, for a week one remains alone with the Eucharist exposed day and night. Silence in the desert, silence in the cave, silence in the Eucharist. No prayer is so difficult as the adoration of the Eucharist. One's whole natural strength rebels against it.

One would prefer to carry stones in the sun. The senses, memory, imagination, all are repressed. Faith alone triumphs, and faith is hard, dark, stark.

To place oneself before what seems to be bread and to say, "Christ is there living and true," is pure faith.

But nothing is more nourishing than pure faith, and prayer in faith is real prayer.

"There's no pleasure in adoring the Eucharist," one novice used to say to me. But it is precisely this renunciation of all desire to satisfy the senses that makes prayer strong and real. One meets God beyond the senses, beyond the imagination, beyond nature.

This is crucial: as long as we pray only when and how we want to, our life of prayer is bound to be unreal. It will run in fits and starts. The slightest upset - even a toothache - will be enough to destroy the whole edifice of our prayer life.

"You must strip your prayers," the novice master told me. You must simplify, de-intellectualize. Put yourself in front of Jesus as a poor man: not with any big ideas, but with living faith. Remain motionless in an act of love before the Father. Don't try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach him in love; that is possible.

The struggle is not easy, because nature will try to get back her own, get her dose of enjoyment; but union with Christ Crucified is something quite different.

After some hours - or some days - of this exercise, the body relaxes. The will refuses to let it have its own way it gives up the struggle. It becomes passive. The senses go to sleep. Or rather, as St. John of the Cross says, the night of senses is beginning. Then prayer becomes something serious, even if it is painful and dry. So serious that one can no longer do without it. The soul begins to share the redemptive work of Jesus.

 Related reading:

God's Name is Love

 
Letters from the Desert 

 
The God Who Comes 

 
Carlo Carretto: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters) 

 
I, Francis 

Why O Lord? The Inner Meaning of Suffering 
The Desert Journal, 1954-55 
 In Search of the Beyond