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.

Being Compassionate about Compassion

Before attending the recent Spiritual Directors International conference with its theme of “Cultivating Compassion,” I was anxious about how the conversation would go. I have had a fairly negative attitude toward the word “compassion,” based in part upon one person telling me how she “felt compassion for me” while reeking of paternalism and projection.

One dictionary definition of compassion is “sympathetic concern for the suffering of another, together with the inclination to give aid or to show mercy.” That definition well describes my concerns. “Sympathy” often connotes a superiority to the one offering the sympathy. Even when sympathy is offered without that connotation, it still leans toward the passive, such as the “inclination to give aid” rather than a more active response. The word “mercy” carries a judicial tone since it is often used in the context of courts of law.

So, with the dictionary confirming my nervousness, I noticed that the conference brochure had most of the workshops labeled with “compassion.” I carefully registered for those sessions that didn’t use the term. But there was no avoiding the plenary sessions.

Fortunately, Janet Ruffing was the main speaker at the plenary sessions, and she is one of the most articulate and well-grounded experts in spiritual direction in the U.S. Soon after she began speaking, I could feel myself relax. She quickly banished my fears that she would offer vague platitudes about compassion. She began by examining the “radical convergence” of the significant role of compassion among the Jewish, Christian and Buddhist faiths. As Ruffing delved into each one, she deeply explored the ways the word is used, considering nuances of languages, and using stories and illustrations from each tradition.

Selecting a few of my notes, Ruffing reflected upon the perspective of God, acting compassionately to the cries of God’s people by bringing them out of exile in Egypt. The people of God responded by betraying the trust God had put in them, building their own god in the form of the golden calf. Ruffing marveled at the “divine compassion that survives the anguish of betrayal, returning again and again to a relationship of love” with the chosen people. This is a courageous compassion, that is not shallow or passive, but moving through pain with deep commitment and forgiveness.

Later, she described how Christians picked up the Jewish experience of compassion, noting that “God’s compassion is unconditional and inclusive,” and “compels us to action.” My notes continue further to say that God cultivates compassion in us, with “God as the source, flowing into us, which we offer to the world.” The sense of the movement, an animating presence from God, leading us into the world is, once again, a very active and engaged perspective on compassion that as new for me. Finally, “compassion grows in us as we grow in God.”

This was brought home quite dramatically this last week when one of my directees was talking about life and what is going on. She described how she has become aware of the fact that she could not come up with compassion out of herself; it was not something that she could create in any way. She was becoming aware that any sense of compassion was coming to her from God, and in her awareness of God’s compassion for her, she was then able to be compassionate for others. I almost jumped out of my chair shouting “Yes!” Fortunately I was able to restrain myself, but I did tell her how she had echoed what Janet Ruffing had described at the SDI conference. It was a deep learning for both of us.

So, I am able to be much more compassionate about compassion, but I am not sure about two more years of conferences with the repeated theme of “cultivating compassion.”