Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

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.

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.

the Master: “Please, please be my teacher.” Teachers can teach only when there are students who want to learn. 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.

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.

Therefore, the essence of spiritual direction is the quality of witness, and witness is the proclamation of what “we have heard, seen with our own eyes, what we have watched and touched with our own hands” (1 John 1:1). To be a witness means to lay down your life for your friends, to become a “martyr” in the original sense of the word. 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.

All the disciplines of the spiritual life are intended to help us to move from an absurd (deaf) life to an obedient (listening) life of freedom, joy, and peace.

There is a great temptation to suggest to myself or others where God is working and where not, when God is present and when not, but nobody, no Christian leader, priest, or pastor, no monk or nun, and no spiritual director has any “special” knowledge about God.

A fourth truth about the God to whom we pray is that God is seeking us. We do not find God, but God finds us.

In short, spiritual reading is a reading in which we allow the word to read and interpret us.

Through regular spiritual practice, we develop an inner ear that allows us to recognize the Living Word in the written word, speaking directly to our most intimate needs and aspirations. In the spiritual reading of scripture, we focus on God and on God’s words. We seek a word and then concentrate on that word in prayer. It is in the listening to particular words in the scripture that God suddenly becomes present to heal and save.

Spiritual reading, however, is different. It means not simply reading about spiritual things but also reading about spiritual things in a spiritual way. That requires a willingness not just to read but to be read, not just to master but to be mastered by words.

As soon as you have community, you have a problem. Someone once said that “community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” That person who annoys you or who needs too much is always in your community somewhere.

If we do not know we are the beloved sons and daughters of God, we’re going to expect someone in the community to make us feel special and worthy. Ultimately, they cannot. If we start with trying to create community, we’ll expect someone to give us that perfect, unconditional love. But true community is not loneliness grabbing onto loneliness: “I’m so lonely, and you’re so lonely; why don’t we get together.” Many relationships begin out of a fear of being alone, but they can’t ultimately satisfy a need that only solitude with God can fulfill. Community is solitude greeting solitude: “I am the beloved; you are the beloved; together we can build a home or place of welcome together.” Sometimes you feel close, and that’s wonderful. Sometimes you don’t feel much love, and that’s hard. But we can be faithful to one another in community. We can build a home together and create space for God and for others in the household of God.