Copyright: This article is reprinted from Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life (11-4, May/June, 1987) on the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ with the permission of Weavings, 1908 Grand Avenue, PO Box 189, Nashville TN 37202-0189.
Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and
formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
Canada. The Rev. Dr. Tilden Edwards is Executive Director of the Shalem
Institute for Spiritual Formation, 5430 Grosvenor Lane Bethesda, MD, USA. 20814.
Recently I participated in a Sunday morning liturgy at a Russian Orthodox church. At the end the priest remained in front of the altar with a metal cross in his hand. The people came to the priest and kissed the cross as he silently smiled in recognition of each person.
That gesture expresses the nature of the pastor as spiritual guide: one through whom others are drawn to kiss the Lord of Life and know the severely loving smile subtly present for us through all things.
All members of Christ's body share this pastoral privilege in some form by right of their baptism. This cannot be emphasized enough. My purpose here, however, is to look at the ordained pastor as one who has special responsibility to guide the people's understanding and sharing of this ministry and the good news it carries.
This view reflects the pastor primarily as a practitioner rather than a functionary. As practitioner, the pastor is centrally involved with caring for souls -- for their being and becoming in God, individually and corporately. This care grows out of the pastor's own desire for the fulfillment of St. Paul's prayer: "May [God] give you the power through [God's] Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong . . ." (Eph. 3:16-19).
An enormous weight of functionary expectations focused on tasks of institutional and social maintenance is placed on pastors. These tasks can eclipse the heart of the pastor's calling to be a practitioner who models the values of soul-care. Often this sad situation is reinforced by the dominant values of the congregation. A mutual, unconscious complicity arises between pastor and people to avoid the truth of God, in the name of God. The people are not willing or yet graced to face the price of the gospel. That price involves relinquishing one's ego attempt to overcontrol, possess, and secure life. Only then can we live truly open to the liberating abundance and shared life promised us in Christ.
The pastor as a practitioner of spiritual guidance needs to approach ministry as a calling to attend to both this context of resistance and the liberating reverberations of God's Spirit among us. Such personal sensitivity will help the pastor tune in to what is most significant in the church's life and the pastor's own ministry: in preaching, teaching, prophecy, counseling, meetings, prayer and faith sharing groups, sacramental rites, programs, and community outreach. Indeed, the pastor is at least indirect spiritual guide through everything he or she does and is.
Historically a very specific form of individual spiritual guidance grew up that came to be called "spiritual direction" in the Western Church. Spiritual friendship, companionship, disciplining -- whatever it is called, spiritual direction is disciplined focus on one's whole life from the vantage point of the Holy Spirit's hidden movements in it.
Spiritual direction is not problem solving focused on oneself. Rather, it is an opportunity to drop into the subtle, mysterious energy of the Spirit. With their guide, people seek to appreciate that living presence shaping their unique Christ-nature and to discern its particular calling to share their gifts for ministry. It is also a time when they can look at their unique ways of noticing and inviting the Spirit's presence in and among them day to day, i.e., through personal spiritual disciplines. This ministry perhaps is the most intimate form of guidance: going through "the pain of giving birth to you . . . until Christ is formed in you" (Gal. 4:19).
Some pastors are specially called to this unique form of guidance relationship. How can they best carry on such personal guidance? It needs to begin with the pastor's own guidance. As John of the Cross reminds us, "The person that is alone without a spiritual guide, and has virtue, is like glowing ember that is alone. It will become more frigid rather than hotter."(1)
Such help comes from many sources. God sometimes sends a particular person to be a soul friend for the long haul -- a priceless treasure, a human sacrament with whom God's hidden Yes in one's life surfaces. Just knowing that there is someone who particularly cares and prays for their deepest liberation and calling in God, even if we see the person infrequently, empowers clergy to remember what is most important day by day. Perhaps knowing the spiritual friend's intimacy with them in prayer is one reason why the tradition of relatively infrequent meetings has grown up, once a month being about average. The Eastern Orthodox tradition especially considers the spiritual companion's gift of ongoing intercessory prayer the most important dimension of the relationship.
When guide and guided do meet, they probably will have prayer and hopefully silence together for a few minutes, and then the guided will let rise as transparently as possible his or her sense of grace threading through life (which may be in very rough as well as smooth circumstances). The one receiving guidance will share responses to perceived grace: joy, compassion, fear of surrender, resistance, and perhaps testing of particular callings to discipline, lifestyle, relationships, and ministries. The guide listens and, when so moved, gently questions, affirms, and perhaps suggests a particular focus for attention between sessions. Through this process both guide and guided need to remember that the Holy Spirit is the real director. Such awareness can lighten the sense of personal inadequacy and threat in undertaking such guidance. Guidance is best when both partners are least self-conscious and least trying to do anything but be openly present. The awareness beneath the ego-conscious surface is where people are most permeable to the Spirit and where they glimpse the unique image of God in Christ that they are becoming.
If pastors are drawn to such a relationship with someone they know, they need to risk asking for it. If there seems to be no one at hand, pray for such a person to appear and stay alert. It is usually best for the person to be outside the pastor's congregation and family, since clergy often have complicated relationships in these contexts that can become barriers to simple mutual presence to the Spirit. If pastors are drawn to a relationship with someone who also wants them as guide, it is important to give one another an unambiguous hour of special focus rather than mixing talk about one another in the same hour. This promotes disciplined, sustained focus on one person.
If pastors have no one with whom they are willing to open themselves spiritually in this way, they become less trustworthy guides of others. Bernard of Clairvaux said, "He becomes the disciple of a fool who sets up to be his own teacher,"(2) and that foolishness can spill over to others. Of course, their own responsible discernment of the Spirit must have the last word. But pastors need someone with whom to expose and test it.
Since pastors usually have so many responsibilities, it is not possible for them to guide many individuals regularly. Such one-to-one guidance is a gift, demonstrated by people spontaneously coming to them. Their guidance gifts may lie elsewhere, for example, in preaching, teaching, or small groups. Therefore, it is wise to identify several laity in the church who are so gifted -- people to whom others naturally seem to gravitate spiritually. The pastor can support these people and offer them further educational help if needed. Gifted laity, like pastors, are likely to feel inadequate at the thought of being recognized as spiritual guides and need reminding that their central confidence for this ministry must rest in the Lord, not in themselves.
All pastors inevitably are involved in occasional guidance: in crises, informal conversations, and many other circumstances. The strong formation in pastoral counseling received by most clergy today tends to make them too problem and management oriented in their approaches to these people's situations. The pastor's unique gift (in contrast to that of the psychological counsellor) is a well-conditioned and sensitive eye that can sense the Spirit at work (or being blocked) in a person's life, and the ability to talk about this as the person seems able to receive it.
As people have become increasingly conditioned by society to be ego problem oriented, attempts to reveal a deeper dimension of reality at work in their situations can be difficult. The church needs a more comprehensive approach to spiritual formation. The great potential advantage of the pastor is that the pastor can approach spiritual guidance in the context of other mutually reinforcing and long-term forms of guidance in the faith community.
In spiritual guidance pastors need to remember that the Spirit resonates differently in people's lives. Some find themselves called primarily to strong direct social action, others to solitude. Some are called to intensive study, other to simply personal service. Others are guided to creating beauty, to contemplative or ecstatic presence before God, or to energetic hospitality. Still others need to be affirmed in the Spirit's hidden presence through times of patient waiting, dryness, resistance, and pain. The spiritual disciplines involved in these paths and phases may vary significantly, depending upon our personalities and situations.
Spiritual formation needs to help sensitize people to these different authentic possibilities for themselves and others. Small groups that meet weekly for a period of months can expose people to a range of spiritual disciplines. With the group's support they can test and choose which ones seem most right for them to practice regularly. Such groups also provide:
In an average church there is usually a small group of such people ready for deeper formation each year. Such small group guidance could be a staple annual offering of the pastor and gifted lay leaders.
Because fullness of life is impossible for me until it is fulfilled for you and all creation, spiritual formation as well as individual guidance needs to take place within an awareness of our shared journey. Life in the Spirit can never be private, because that Spirit is uncontainable. It is an opening energy that circulates freely through creation, bringing one hand into another, the flower from the seed, the living from the dead. It is the divine energy that shapes life into one coinherent cosmic Body of Christ, moving fitfully toward its fullness in God.
Personal guidance exists in this context. So also does that corporate guidance which is called for when Christians need to attend to the Spirit's collective calling at various levels of community. The pastor moves between the corporate and individual dimensions of spiritual guidance, turning one time this way and another time the other, symbolizing and actualizing their connectedness with one another and with the larger Body of Christ.
The process of deepening the church's life in Christ today requires that spiritual guidance be taken with great seriousness. Both clergy and laity are forever in danger of sinking too deeply into functionary modes that cheat pastor, people, and community of authentic spiritual practice. The best place for pastors to begin in this struggle is with themselves. Guidance for parish practice will emerge organically out of the pastor's deepening sensitivity to the Spirit's caring life moving in and through himself or herself and the faith community. The forms of pastoral guidance will be manifold, but all authentic forms will be united by a single-hearted desire for fullness of life in the risen Christ.
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End Notes
(1) J.M.Neufelder and Mary Coelho, "Writings on Spiritual Direction by Great
Christian Masters" (Seabury Press, 1986), p. 5.
(2) "The Letters of St. Bernard of Clarivaux," trans. Bruno Scott James
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1953), p. 133.
(3) C.f. Gerald May, "Pilgrimage Home" (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979) for a
practical understanding of group spiritual formation, especially in the context
of Christian contemplative action.