Help Through the Desert

When I talk about Growing in Love and Wisdom, I often start by talking a bit about my own faith journey thought Buddhism and back to Catholicism (the subject of another book I’m in the final stages of editing).

In telling people about my abandonment of Catholicism at the age of seventeen, I share that when I told my high school chaplain of my decision, his response was “Well, Sue, you’ve entered the desert. And all you can go is keep on walking until you reach the other side.” I add that I didn’t really find that advice all that helpful and walked out of the chaplain’s office feeling very alone. (He did add something like “Go with God,” but having just told him I didn’t believe in God, that didn’t do much for me.)

At a recent book talk, someone referred to that comment, asking what advice I would give someone in that circumstance. Essentially, from where I stand now, what would I have said to someone like my seventeen year-old self?

At various times, I have thought about what I wished someone had said to me at the time. I might have benefited had someone suggested that I read Thomas Merton’s Seven-Story Mountain (which I found extremely helpful when I read it years later during my difficult transition from Buddhism back to Catholicism), or even Augustine’s Confessions. By those I mean: Something that would have clued me into the struggles of faith other thinking, questioning people had undergone. Something that, if nothing else, would have let me know I wasn’t alone and that it was OK to experience what I was experiencing.

I would have also benefited had the chaplain offered to be available if I needed someone to talk to, or recommended someone else I might have talked to. Even if I never took him up on it, the invitation would have meant something.

Of course we live in a different world now than in 1974 when I had the conversation I did with my high school chaplain. I suspect he had never read Thomas Merton (and maybe not even Augustine’s Confessions) and so could not have made that recommendation. And he may not have had any recommendations for people I might have talked to.

It is much easier today to walk with people like my seventeen year-old self and I feel privileged whenever a young person struggling along their faith journey comes to speak with me. And I pray that something in my own experience can be a source of guidance and strength to them.

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Spiritual Direction and the Call to Greater Union with God

As someone who is both a spiritual director and one who has been receiving spiritual direction for many years, I read with interest Daniel Burke’s Navigating the Interior Life: Spiritual Direction and the Journey to God, sent to me by The Catholic Company as part of its reviewer program.

Burke and I share the conviction that spiritual direction is an important tool for helping us deepen our relationship with God. As I have told people who have asked me, I think anyone who is a regular pray-er, anyone who is committed to a life of discipleship and to deepening their life with God can benefit from direction. And I share Burke’s passion for sharing with others that which I have benefitted from.

I also agree with Burke both about the need to choose a spiritual director carefully and about the lack of knowledge/awareness many people have about what spiritual direction is. Thus, I think a book like this, that seeks to bring understanding of spiritual direction to a wider audience has great potential value. Having said that, there are several respects in which Burke and I part company.

The book begins with a chapter defining what spiritual direction is and what it is not. His description of what spiritual direction is correctly identifies that there are three parties to the spiritual direction relationship – the director, directee, and God, and that the central aim of direction is “to help guide the directee to purposely, consistently and substantively grow in their relationship with God and neighbor.” And I think some of the distinctions Burke draws are important, such as the distinction between spiritual direction and psychological counseling and the difference between spiritual direction and confession.

I do not, however, share Burke’s view that it is “sub-optimal” to have a spiritual director who is not a priest. While he recognizes that spiritual direction is not “the exclusive territory of priests and religious,” his ideal is a spiritual director that can also serve as confessor. I have seen this bias in others, knowing some people who believe that a priest, regardless of how little training in providing spiritual direction is superior to any lay person, regardless of how much training they have received. I do not share Burke’s view that the training in moral and dogmatic theology provides a sufficient basis for providing spiritual direction.

Given my training in Ignatian spirituality, I also don’t draw the sharp distinction I read Burke as drawing between the spiritual life of the directee and other aspects of their lives. While I agree that the “specific focus of spiritual direction is the spiritual life of the directee,” Ignatius’ emphasis on finding God in all things means there is virtually nothing that is completely divorced from our spiritual lives. Thus, unlike Burke, I think there is very little “elements, activities and interests that are peripheral” to the spiritual life.”

I had similarly mixed reactions to his chapters on finding a spiritual director and entering into a spiritual direction relationship. I think the most important criteria for a director is that the director himself or herself has experience in the spiritual life – that the director has a lived spirituality and is not someone who simply talks about faith and spirituality. (And I agree that there is an enormous difference between quoting from saints like Teresa of Avila and understanding their spirituality.) For me, a director’s view on “a few hot-button issues” are less important than they are for Burke. My job as a director is not to convince a directee of my theology – it is to help them grow in their relationship to God; the same is true regarding my relationship with my own director.

In his chapter on first meetings, I don’t disagree with a lot of what he suggests by way of preparing to meet with one’s director. However, I was taken aback by his claim that it is hard to get an appointment with a potential director. He asserts that director’s don’t make it easy to get an appointment as a means of gauging an interested directee’s seriousness and constancy. That may be Burke’s practice as a director. It is certainly not mine and it has not bene the practice with anyone from whom I have sought direction over the years – priest, religious or lay. When someone interested in direction calls me asking if I am available to take on a new directee, I have a phone conversation with them to determine if it makes sense for us to meet and then meet with the person. It may take some weeks for that meeting to occur given my schedule, but never would I either delay getting back to someone or do anything else to make it difficult for a person to see me.

The book contains a useful chapter on spiritual self-evaluation and of identification of “root” sins, useful not only for those seeking spiritual direction. A later chapter discusses stages of development of the spiritual life. While good, I wonder how useful some of it is for the primary audience of the book – i.e., those not yet in direction.

In all, there is much I thought beneficial in the book, but also a number of things that cause me hesitation about it.

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A Christian Faith Enriched By Buddhism

“A Christian Faith Enriched by Buddhism.” That is the title of the blog post I wrote for Huffington Post, which which had asked me to explain in 700-800 words how Buddhism has enriched my Christian faith.

Yikes – that question occupies an entire chapter in the manuscript I have just completed on my conversion from Catholicism to Buddhism back to Catholicism. The task of distilling what I expressed in 13-15 manuscript pages into a shot essay was not simple. But I think I managed, with some success to at least convey something of both how necessary Buddhism was to my ability to return to Chrsitianity and the ways in which it has influenced my spirituality.

You can judge for yourself how successful I was by reading the whole piece, which was posted by Huff Post yesterday. You can find it here.

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Avoiding the “Godparent Trap”

This is one of those times when a lot of couple I know are either expecting or just had a baby. So I thought it would be worthwhile to share some thoughts from one of my Jesuit buddies.

In a piece in his parish bulletin the was prompted by an episode of a TV show dealing with a couple struggling with the issue of the spritual upbringing of the child they were preparing to welcome into the world, Fr. Joe Costantino wrote:

Who can offer the best spiritual guidance is surely a most appropriate consideration in selecting godparents (and in the case of the Sacrament of Confirmation, a sponsor). Who really can authentically offer such true and important spiritual guidance? All too often though there is a “godparent trap.” The choice is sometimes simply to follow the path of least resistance and select a relative or friend, a person you may feel simply obligated to choose. Those selected are often very fine people, but are they spiritual? Are they persons of faith with a sense of the supernatural and God? Are they a part of an active faith community? Do they put their spirituality into charitable actions? Often these questions are regrettably not part of the equation.

Thanks to Joe for the good questions for reflection on an important issue.

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Non-Dualistic Thinking

One final post prompted by my reading of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upwards.

Rohr gives one the simplest, yet completely accurate description of dualistic thinking. He writes that dualistic thinking is the “well-practiced pattern of knowing most things by comparison. And for some reason, once you compare or label things (that is, judge) you almost always conclude that one is good and the other is less good or even bad.”

Rohr presents “seven C’s of delusion, suggesting that the dualistic mind compares, competes, conflicts, conspires, condemns, cancels out any contrary evidence, and crucifies with impunity.

In contrast, when we grow into nondualistic thinking (he also uses the terms contemplative thinking and both-and thinking), “you no longer need to divide the field of every moment between up and down, totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me. It just is. This calm allows you to confront what must be confronted with even greater clarity and incisiveness.

Dualistic thinking is not inherently bad. Rohr suggests it is very helpful – even necessary – in the first half of life. The hope, however, is that as we move to the second-half of life, we can grow from dualistic thinking to nondualistic thinking. “Nondualistic thinking presumes that you have first mastered dualistic clarity, but also found it insufficient for the really big issues like love, suffering, death, God, and any notion of infinity. In short, we need both.”

For what it is worth, regarding how we move to nondualistic thinking, I think Rohr’s The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See is an wonderful book to read.

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Consequential Spiritual Leaders: A Saturday Exercise

One of my friends recently Tweeted (I think that is the correct verb form) this view: “The Dalai Lama is the most consequential spiritual leader of my lifetime by a significant margin.”

When he forwarded that Tweet in an e-mail to a group of people, another friend gave his own list of who he viewed to be the ten most consequential spiritual leaders in his lifetime. His list was (and I’m not sure if these were in his order of significance or not):
Pope John XXIII
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
C.S. Lewis
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Thomas Merton
The Dalai Lama
Sister Joan Chittister
Henri J.M. Nouwen and
Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.

So here is the exercise: Who makes your list of the most consequential spiritual leaders of your lifetime? Making such a list obviously requires spending some time reflecting on what it is that qualifies someone to be considered among the most consequential spiritual leaders we have encountered. (I add that because the person who initially tweeted responded to our other friend’s list by observing that he thought Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King belonged on a different list…not a list of the most consequential spiritual leaders in the way he understood that designation.)

My own list would include some of the ten listed by my friend and some others he did not include. How about yours?

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Faith and The Garden of Delights

I got to talking with my cousin Joe’s friend Ron during dinner one evening while I was in NY for my aunt’s wake and funeral a few weeks ago. Turns out Ron and I like a number of the same spiritual writers and, in the course of our conversation, he asked I had read a book titled Leap, by Terry Tempest Williams, which he said had had a great impact on him. I had neither read nor heard of the book, which sounded interesting from his description.

Within a week after my return to Minnesota, the copy of the book Ron purchased and sent to me arrived at my doorstep and I just finished reading it. The book uses Williams’ multi-year examination of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Delights, as a vehicle for her journey of faith. She explores, examines, and almost moves into, Bosch’s images of Heaven, Hell and Earth and, in the process, probes and deepens her faith as a Mormon.

Her descriptions of Bosch’s work (which I’ve only seen pictures of, never having been to the Prado) are fascinating and there is a ton I really liked about this book. I found particularly powerful her descriptions of Hell. Hell as the “tortured chamber of our own hearts.” Hell as solitary suffering. (“A suffering that cannot be shared is a suffering that cannot be endured.”) Hell as “the Great Forgetting,” an inability to remember what moves us. Hell as an inability to perceive beauty. Her images are much more terrifying that images of burning in flames.

Williams asks a lot of questions during the course of the book. Many are questions that we all ask of ourselves in one way or another. Here are some of them:

Can a painting be a prayer?

What do we choose to preserve?

What am I afraid of? What are we afraid of?

What happens when our institutions no longer serve us, no longer reflect the truth of our own experience?

How do you paint your own conversion?

Where do we hide our passions, our positions of truth, when everything around us lifts a finger to our mouth and says, “Hush, do not disturb the peace”?

What is the principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that means the most to you?

What do I believe?

We all need to figure out what we believe (and what it is about Jesus that means most to us) and Williams’ questions offer a lot to think about.

There is a lot else I noted as I was reading. Her definition of heretic as one who deviates from the consensus, who holds an opinion contrary to generally accepted beliefs. Her pairing of obedience and trust. Her effort to distinguish religion and spirituality (albeit in a way different than I would). I suspect on a second reading I’ll find a lot more.

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Humor in Our Spiritual Lives

I just finished reading James Martin’s most recent book, Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life. I’ve experienced a few bouts of melancholy of late, and the book has been a great antidote to that.

There are so many things I love about this book. Like many great spiritual writers, Martin has the ability to convey profound truths in an accessible manner. (He is also not afraid to poke a little fun at himself…something we all could benefit from doing now and then.)

In one of the chapters in his book, Martin explains several reasons “why we need humor in our spiritual lives, in our daily relationship with God.” The first is that humor leads to poverty of spirit, which Johannes Baptist Metz calls the ground of every theological virtue. The second is that humor reminds us that we are not in control. The third is that levity is a sign of God’s presence on our lives.

It is the third that resonated deeply with me. What came to my mind when reading Martin’s text here was my experience during my first directed retreat after returning to Catholicism. I had approached that retreat with some trepidation, not at all sure of where things stood between me and God. It is fair to say that I lacked trust both in God and in myself and wasn’t at all sure where God and I were with each other and where we this relationship between us was going.

On the fourth day of the retreat, during the times I spent walking out of doors, I had a frequent sense of God being playful with me. The incidents themselves were silly…nothing worth writing about (and I suspect they would lose something in the telling). The notes I wrote in my journal for that day are cryptic, but they refer to several different experiences that conveyed a sense of God being playful and laughing, not at, but with me.

What finally struck me after a number of these experiences that day was the insight that if God and I could be playful together, we must be on good terms. I realized one cannot really be playful with another person unless the two people have a level of comfort that allows them to let go. And what I remember most clearly is that absolute delight I felt at that realization, at knowing that God and I were doing OK with each other.

Those moments of humor accomplished something profound in me, in a few moments conveying something that hours of more “serious” conversation between me and God might not have conveyed so effectively. God was there. And God and I were happy to be with each other. And we were going to be just fine.

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Friends on the Journey

I just returned from a few days in Seattle. Although I was there for business, I stayed with my friend Joshua and his son, affording Joshua and me the opportunity for many hours of conversation about faith, our spiritual journeys, Christianity in its various form and the like.

My life is enormously blessed by the presence in my life of people like this friend – people who help me grow in my understanding of my faith and who challenge me by their questions and by their own lives. Some, like my friends Mark Osler (with whom I’ll be having another Mid-Day Dialogue of Faith next week, about which you can find out more here) and Chato Hazelbaker, sit only a few offices away from my own office at St. Thomas, affording the luxury of lots of face-to-face conversations over morning coffee or a meal. Others, like my friends John in NY, Doug who just moved to Rwanda, and Joshua in Seattle, live further away, meaning more limited face time and more electronic communication of one sort or another. Some, like John, have been walking with me for many years; others, like Joshua, have more recently become a part of my life.

But near or far, old or new, such friends are blessings – and necessary ones at that. No two spiritual journeys are identical, but we all need people with whom we can share our stories, who will challenge us, who will help us process and help us see things that we might not see on our own. We grow from our communion with them in ways we could not grow on our own.

I arise this morning tired from my travel, but enormously grateful for the love and friendship of the Joshuas in my life.

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The Value of Joy in the Spiritual Life

I just started reading James Martin, S.J.’s newest book, Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.

I was excited as soon as I saw this book being advertised, for I have long bemoaned what Martin himself has experienced – that “many professional religious people (priests, ministers, rabbis, and the like) as well as some devout believers in general give te impression that being religious means being dour, serious, or even grumpy.” Certainly not all – I know many religious and lay that are joyful people…but also far too many that fit Martin’s description.

Martin begins by talking about the meanings of humor, laughter and joy from both secular and religious perspectives. As to humor and laughter, there is no significant difference in the secular and religiuos approaches.

With respect to joy, however, the religious understanding is very different from the secular one. Martin writes,

Joy is not simply a fleeting feeling or an evanescent emotion; it is a deep-seated result of one’s connection to God. Although the more secular defintiion of joy may sometimes describe one’s emotional response to an object or event, wonderful though it may be (a new job, for example), religious joy is always about a relationship. Joy has an object and that object is God.

Understood that way, it is not difficult to understand why we see joy on the faces of so many holy people – I think of the way St. Francis is often described, or of my own experience meeting the Dalai Lama. It is also easy to undertsand why joy is one of the traditional fruits of the Holy spirit – a gift, Martin suggests, we ignore at our peril.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this book.

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