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.
