Random thoughts about Spiritual Direction

Small Group Leader Ship as Spiritual direction

Intro:

The language of prayer and spiritual direction has this in common: language (whether of words for silence) in the Presence, in the context of mystery, listening for the hinting at “what eye has not seen nor ear has heard” and the “love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”.

We go looking for adventure, we play or watch a game, read a novel, travel to Zanzibar. One of the classic ways of restoring a sense of wonder tinged with adventure, the sheer mystery of life, is to enter the wilderness- a world blessedly free of domestication, permeated by what we don’t know: mountains that defy our control, weather indifferent to our comfort, grizzly bears and mountain lions unpredictable and dangerous. Life spills out of the containers of our routines. In the wilderness we become alert. We can take nothing for granted; every tree is a living sculpture, every flower a surprise, every animal a grace, each step taking us into a never- before-experienced combination of scent color and shape. Our simple sense of life, basic life, is heightened. Boredom is vanished,

Stafford’s wilderness with a map describes a great deal of what goes on in the Christian church these days. We think we want god beyond our understanding so we can worship largely , god sovereign in all our circumstances and suffering so we can be cared for securely, the god of Paul’s exclamatory, “how unsearchable are his judgments and how unascertainable are his ways”. But then we get nervous about the unsearchable and the inscrutanable. We hesitate; maybe that’s just a little too much mystery. We want a wilderness with a map.

With doctrine there is a problem, we are in control.
Spiritual direction using language, language that slowly becomes a comfortable mystery. Information is the secularized substitute for god’s answers and technology is the secularized substitute to god’s miracles.

All our lives we have gone to schools that have equated mystery with ignorance, schools promising to banish ignorance from our lives if we will just study hard enough.

Spiritual direction is another way of language.