Spiritual Direction in My Life

It is with a sense of awe and gratitude that in two weeks I will join a gathering of former and current members of the Spiritual Directors International (SDI) Coordinating Council.  The meeting is part of a year-long strategic planning process.

Some people are already friends, such as the current Council members in this photo from our meeting last November.  We get to know each other well by working hard, sharing our personal life and spiritual stories, and embracing periods of contemplative silence.

In preparation for the upcoming meeting, we were all asked to write an essay about what spiritual guidance we are receiving to be a person of contemplation, a person of action, and a person who builds community.  Here is what I wrote:

A few years ago my spiritual director noted I was experiencing the longest dark night of anyone she had known.  Any sense of God was fleeting and nebulous.  My work at a national association had become poisonous to my emotional and spiritual health, and I focused on surviving. I saw no alternative, while yearning to be in ministry as a spiritual companion for more than a few people.

Like many middle managers, a corporate restructuring two years ago eliminated that work, and I was handed a three month severance package.  Within weeks I followed a newly emerging curiosity about being a hospice chaplain.  Doors quickly opened to my starting Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) as a volunteer chaplain.  Within the first two units of CPE, I moved through my grieving the loss of a career, while learning to be with those at the end of life.  My time with Kathy, my spiritual director, turned from the desert of the dark night to surprise and hope, mixed with anxiety and fear.  As Kathy wryly noted one time, God gave me what I wanted, though not the way I expected.

Weeks after losing my job I was also invited to join the SDI Coordinating Council, after being turned down just months earlier.  It was affirmation in the middle of desolation.  I began integrating two parts of my life that had been kept separate, applying over two decades of experience as an association manager to a new and very different organization, SDI, which has been central to my growth as a spiritual director.  

Taking a third unit of CPE last autumn I explored the differences and overlaps between the roles of chaplain and spiritual director.  Dan, my supervisor and I had numerous discussions about when and how my responses pointed to one or the other role.  Dan challenged me to stop asking questions because they led the other person to move into his or her head.  My image of how to be a spiritual director has been deepened and challenged.

After that third unit Dan invited me to apply for a CPE Chaplain Resident position for a 15 bed hospice facility.  My first response was “Yes!” followed by an immediate “Oh Shit!”  Taking that to my spiritual director, Kathy pointed out my resistance to the call, which I had been unwilling to admit.  I did apply and will start in August, earning money after two years using up savings.

Now I am able to be more fully available and vulnerable to those whom I companion.  I am aware of how much brokenness I experience with each person, each one seeking in her or his own way, to know how to be in service to the broken world around us.  The two years of deepening into my own vulnerability, pain, and brokenness allows me to offer a safer place for those I companion to express, name, and begin healing their own brokenness and pain.  I am full of gratitude to be God’s presence for them.