46 Quotes About Spiritual-direction

As I grow in my prayer life, my soul becomes a delightfully cluttered attic, filled with random graces that do not all fit together in some perfectly ordered system. The purpose of some graces will be immediately apparent in my life, but the meaning of others might evade me for a while. I must resist the temptation to clean up the messiness of my graces and must not try to come up with immediate answers for the questions that arise from them.

It was the recommendation of John of the Cross (in a manner similar to that of Gamaliel) that one should not pay particular attention to any phenomena or experiences. If an experience were truly and directly of God, he felt, its truth would become evident naturally in one's life. If it were of something "else," it would certainly not be worthy of attention. Therefore, no special attention was necessary.

Responding well to others, especially survivors of wrongdoing, may require that we open ourselves to hearing something other than what we expect or want to hear, even when what we hear threatens our ideas about how the world is ordered—as listening to survivor testimony might do. Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.

We have to learn to hear on every level at once if we are really to become whole. The problem is that most of us are deaf in at least one ear.We have to learn to listen to Scripture. And we have to learn to listen to life around us.

Into the midst of all this indistinguishable cacophony of life, the bell tower of every Benedictine monastery rings "listen." Listen with the heart of Christ. Listen with the lover's ear. Listen for the voice of God. Listen in your own heart for the sound of truth, the kind that comes when a piece of quality crystal is struck by a metal rod.

God does not give his joy to us for ourselves alone, and if we could possess him for ourselves alone we would not possess him at all. Any joy that does not overflow from our souls and help other men to rejoice in God does not come to us form God. (But do not think that you have to see how it overflows into the souls of others. In the economy of his grace, you may be sharing his gifts with someone you will never know until you get to heaven.)

...as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him.

When I heard about spiritual direction, I felt as if I was seeing an old friend I had never met. Spiritual direction (this new old friend) led me deeper into the love of God. Spiritual direction helped me experience more intimately the God of love. And spiritual direction equipped me to be in relationship with others where I could love as I was loved.

For God is so desirous that the government and direction of every man should be undertaken by another man like himself, and that every man should be ruled and governed by natural reason, that He earnestly desires us not to give entire credence to the things that He communicates to us supernaturally, nor to consider them as being securely and completely confirmed until they pass through this human aqueduct of the mouth of man.