SPIRITUAL DIRECTION

When the Lord has brought us to a place in our spiritual journey where we meet interior roadblocks, dryness and aridity in our prayer life, when we feel like we are in a sort of spiritual homelessness, we often seek Spiritual Direction. 

We search for someone who is learned in Sacred Scripture, who is wise in the discernment of spirits, someone who will be a holy listener, who will see beyond our feelings, who will shed light on our sufferings and help us to understand why God has declined to prevent the circumstances that bring about these trials. 

A spiritual director is someone who pledges their desire to God to spiritually adopt us, pray and offer sacrifice for us, stand in the breach for us, someone who walks in silent and awed humility alongside the Spirit of God to represent our soul. 

Someone who has suffered deeply in order to be given the privilege of being a spiritual director to one of God's chosen few.

The greatest tool in spiritual direction is the relationship between the spiritual director and the Divine.

If finding such a servant of God is difficult, we remember that the Holy Spirit is the Principal Actor in our spiritual journey into Christ, God, Who is the Divine Guest of our soul. He is never not available to direct us. He is never not Present in our soul. He can never abandon Himself. We are One in Him.

It is in, through and with His Holy Spirit that we can discern if our suffering and trials are His chosen tools to purify our soul. We learn a great deal about ourselves when we bring such thoughts to prayer. This is why St. Teresa of Jesus warns us never to leave the cell of self-knowledge. It is in that room that we discover our disordered thoughts, our hidden motives, our self-loving pride which motivates our thoughts and behaviors.

"Dig deep and find diamonds" (St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face).  

These "diamonds" that we discover can be understood to describe our interior disorders. The Holy Spirit waits to shed piercing light on these blocks to our spiritual growth into self-emptiness in Christ Whom we seek. We ask His Wisdom to name them and be healed from them. Our disorders are transformed into diamonds when we give them to Him and ask Him for the grace to use them for the salvation of our soul and to transform us into His own Image.

If an incident takes place during our day when our pride feels nipped, the Holy Spirit waits to speak to us in our evening spiritual direction meeting with Him.

We meet Him at our evening,  pre-scheduled prayer time. 

We pray.

We relate the event to Him. 

He may ask us to examine every reaction we felt during the event, be it intellectual or emotional or spiritual.

He will grace us with an awareness of what it was that niggled us in the incident. He may direct us to a particular and very pertinent passage from Sacred Scripture.

And we will begin to find evidence of a disordered thought or a deep rooted selfish feeling or wounded ego, or most dangerous of all, a spiritual snobbery ...most dangerous of all because as St. John of the Cross teaches us, spiritual pride is the most dangerous of all of the 7 deadly spiritual sins. Spiritual pride kills the soul.

In this sacred and spiritually safe space with our Divine Spiritual Director, our knowledge of self deepens, He will heal us and we will give great glory to God.