Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

Although we need solitude to know God, we require a faithful community to hold us accountable.

We need a church or faith community

We also need guides: spiritual friends, a spiritual director, or a spiritual accountability group that can function for us as a safe place to bear our souls.

Henri spoke to universal spiritual needs and longings and understood that what is most personal is also what is most universal. He lived from the depth of the Christian spiritual tradition and knew how to listen for the fundamental questions underlying common human struggles.

The book is designed to be read at least twice: the first time quickly and straight through, perhaps in one sitting; the second time slowly and meditatively, perhaps one chapter a week for ten weeks.

The goal of spiritual direction is spiritual formation—the ever-increasing capacity to live a spiritual life from the heart. A spiritual life cannot be formed without discipline, practice, and accountability. There are many spiritual disciplines. Almost anything that regularly asks us to slow down and order our time, desires, and thoughts to counteract selfishness, impulsiveness, or hurried fogginess of mind can be a spiritual discipline.

They can help create space for God within us: (1) the discipline of the Heart, (2) the discipline of the Book, and (3) the discipline of the Church or community of faith.

body. It

is by being awake to God in us that we can increasingly see God in the world around us.

Every corner of our being, of course, includes the physical body. In fact, the “heart” is not purely a spiritual organ but that secret place within us where our spirit, soul, and body come together in a unity of the self. There is no such thing as a disembodied spiritual heart. We are called to love God and neighbor with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength (Luke 10:27).

Typical questions for a spiritual director to ask are: How is your prayer life? How are you making space in your life for God to speak?

Meditation means to let the word descend from our minds into our hearts and thus to become enfleshed.

Through the regular practice of scriptural meditation, we develop an inner ear that allows us to recognize God’s word that speaks directly to our most intimate needs and aspirations.

Scripture does have a personal word for us, yet knowledge of historic Christian teaching helps us avoid the easy trap of wanting scripture to support our own designs.

The third discipline key to spiritual direction is the discipline of the Church or faith community. This spiritual practice requires us to be in relationship to the people of God, witnessing to the active presence of God in history and in community “wherever two or three are gathered in my Name” (Matthew 18:20).

Lent, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost are all about. The Church calls our attention to the divine events that underlie all of history and which allow us to make sense out of our own story.

faith. The more we let the events of Christ’s life inform and

form us, the more we will be able to connect our own daily stories with the great story of God’s presence in our lives. Thus, the discipline of the Church, as a community of faith, functions as our spiritual director by directing our hearts and minds to the One who makes our lives truly eventful.

These three disciplines—the Heart, the Book, and the Church—call for spiritual discernment, accountability, and direction in order to overcome our deafness and resistance, and to become free and obedient persons who hear God’s voice even when it calls us to unknown places.

I would like to be your guide. I hope you are interested in walking along.

The distance between a Zen Master in the Far East teaching an eager young student and a Christian spiritual director in the West responding to a spiritual seeker might seem a wide bridge to cross. Still, this story powerfully points to the wisdom we need to live the questions of our lives, both alone and in community, as we seek our mission in the world.

The young man in the Zen story has unspoken but urgent questions: What is truth? How may I find joy and happiness? What is the right way of living? To his, we might add our own life questions: What am I to do with my life? Whom shall I marry? Where shall I live? What gifts do I have to share? What do I do with my loneliness? Why am I so needy for affection, approval, or power? How can I overcome my fears, my shame, my addictions, and my sense of inadequacy or of failure?

“Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong . . . you will be fine!”

Mother Teresa’s answer was like a flash of lightning in my darkness.

Seeking spiritual direction, for me, means to ask the big questions, the fundamental questions, the universal ones in the context of a supportive community. Out of asking the right questions and living the questions will come right actions that present themselves in compelling ways. To live the questions and act rightly, guided by God’s spirit, requires both discipline and courage: discipline to “ask, seek, knock” until the door opens (see Matthew 7:7–8).

What are my big questions, and what is the answer that will pierce my darkness? “Go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

You may not be able to formulate an ultimate life question right now.

The first task of seeking guidance then is to touch your own struggles, doubts, and insecurities—in short, to affirm your life as a quest.

Our lives are not problems to be solved but journeys to be taken with Jesus as our friend and finest guide.

This is where the ministry of spiritual direction—along with the other interpersonal disciplines of the spiritual life: preaching, teaching, counseling, and pastoral care—can help. These interpersonal resources are intended to help people find a friendly distance from their own lives so that what they are ...

As he lives his own questions in the face of suffering, all Job can say is, “The Lord gives and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (Job 1:21).

We live our own questions in the face of suffering.

Thus, to receive spiritual help in time of need requires, first of all, not to deny but to affirm the search. Painful questions must be raised, faced, and then lived. This means that we must constantly avoid the temptation of offering or accepting simple answers, to be easy defenders of God, the Church, the tradition, or whatever we feel called to defend.

The best guides are willing to be silent yet present, and are comfortable with unknowing. God’s Spirit is ultimately the sole source of spiritual guidance, comfort, and knowing.

Spiritual directors can direct only when there are seekers who come with a question.

Without a question, an answer is experienced as manipulation or control. Without a struggle, the help offered is considered interference. And without the desire to learn, direction is easily felt as oppression.

In spiritual listening, we encounter a God who cannot be fully understood, we discover realities that cannot be controlled, and we realize that our hope is hidden not in the possession of power but in the confession of weakness.

The main questions for spiritual direction—Who am I? Where have I come from? And where am I going? What is prayer? Who is God for me? How does God speak to me? Where do I belong? How can I be of service?—are not questions with simple answers but questions that lead us deeper into the unspeakable mystery of existence.

“Yes, yes indeed, these are the questions. Don’t hesitate to raise them. Don’t be afraid to enter them. Don’t turn away from living them. Don’t worry if you don’t ha...

One of the main objectives of spiritual direction is to help people discover that they already have something to give. Therefore, the director needs to be a receiver who says, “I see something in you, and I’d like to receive it from you.” In this way, the one who gives discovers his or her talent through the eyes of the one who receives.

witness,

To be a witness means to offer your own faith experience and to make your doubts and hopes, failures and successes, loneliness and woundedness, available to others as a context in which they can struggle with their own humanness and quest for meaning.

To offer or receive spiritual direction calls for the courage to enter into the common search, confront our brokenness, and use this capacity to grow through wisdom and understanding.

Spiritual direction means to listen to the other without fear and to discover the intimate, divine connections within your own stormy life history. It means to help others discover that their questions are human questions, their search is a human search, and their restlessness is part of the restlessness of the human heart—your own included.

This leads to the third aspect of living the questions, namely: live the questions until God, sometimes like lightning, reveals enough guidance to enable you to live confidently in the present moment.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice to a young poet, “what is going on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.”

Again, Rilke writes to the young poet:

I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves. . . . Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. . . . Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing [emphasis added].10

Any teacher or director can only be a mirror reflecting a view, or sometimes an arrow pointing beyond itself.

To receive spiritual direction is to recognize that God does not solve our problems or answer all our questions, but leads us closer to the mystery of our existence where all questions cease.

Being formed in God’s likeness involves the struggle to move from absurd living to obedient listening. The word absurd includes the word sardus, which means “deaf.” Absurd living is a way of life in which we remain deaf to the voice that speaks to us in our silence. The many activities in which we are involved, the many concerns that keep us preoccupied, and the many sounds that surround us make it very hard for us to hear the “sheer silence” through which God’s presence is made known (see 1 Kings 19:12). It seems that the noisy, busy world conspires against our hearing that voice and tries to make us absolutely deaf. It therefore is not surprising that we often wonder, in the midst of our very occupied and preoccupied lives, if anything is truly happening.

At the same time, we may feel unfulfilled and wonder if being busy but bored, involved yet lonely, is a symptom of the absurd life: