Faith formation and sacred conversations are the focus on the faith journey through spiritual direction, retreats, books, and other resources.
All tagged spiritualdirection
Do you ever wake up with words of a song stuck in your head, or more importantly, in your heart? The old hymn Abide with Me has lodged itself within me recently, asking me to pay attention to it.
What do I talk about with a spiritual director? Exploring some core questions leads us to new discoveries about ourselfes and about God. A recommended resource from Henri Nouwen helps identify the questions we all ponder throughout life.
Bearing witness is a bit of an old fashioned phrase that asks us to attend to someone or something, be it a
circumstance, an event, or our own inner thoughts. Such a call is counter-intuitive to our western ways of progress. But this watching awareness, partnered with prayer stands at the intersection of heaven and earth.
The third element of active listening is responding our of silence, after prayerful listening, receiving and reflecting.
Reflecting as an active listening tool is much different than reacting to what someone says. Reflecting mirrors, clarifies, wonders along with the speaker.
In a highly distracted world, it takes intention to truly listen to another. Three key elements include receiving, reflecting, and responding.
There are many beautiful metaphors for spiritual direction. My new favorite is that of a musical conductor, blending all the voices, harmonies, tones, expressions of the divine score. What are your favorite metaphors?
Retreat. it’s the battle for soldiers to pull back, to stand down, to disengage from the front line and find refuge away from the battlefield. This is no different than the spiritual call to retreat, to step away from the grind of daily life, to unplug from the connections that continually speak into our souls.
Working with a spiritual director is allowing a companion to join you as an experienced observer on your faith pilgrimage through life. And as much as “abiding together” in spiritual direction has to do with sitting and dwelling, it’s really about creating a place to rest as we make pilgrimage through new territory of the inner life.
