We are in a millennium where we try to excel when it comes to time management by squeezing in our daily routine as many ‘profitable tasks’ and other ‘commitments’ as possible. We have been schooled into believing that our worth is synonymous to what we manage to produce; that which is visible to the human eye as ‘success’, or which gives us a sense of ‘belonging’.
Yet there is the other side to this equation. Precisely because our day is choc-a-bloc, we have come to appreciate the little time we have left to ourselves even more. And it is in this context that many are turning towards spiritual accompaniment, often discovering that it may represent a turning point in their life.
Spiritual accompaniment is not confession. Pope Francis emphasises the difference between the two: “You go to your confessor so that he may forgive your sins. You go to your spiritual director to tell him the things that are going on in your heart, your spiritual emotions, your joys, your anger, and what is going on inside you.”
Spiritual direction or accompaniment can be carried out not just by a priest or a religious but by a lay person who has been trained in the art of spiritual direction, and who has the charism of helping another person’s relationship with God. The guide or companion accompanies the retreatant through his or her spiritual journey.
Throughout the process of spiritual direction, the retreatant is allowed to reflect, read, pray, as well as a time to meet privately with the guide to discuss what is happening in the times of spiritual reflection. The guide’s role is not to direct the retreatant into some kind of formal preset pattern but only to co-discern the various movements retreatant is deeply experiencing to whatever activity God is motioning.
Sharing with a spiritual director helps retreatants be more objective and moves them to reflect on what is making and giving value in their life in the context of their relationship with God.
Spiritual direction helps a person to talk and listen to God. In spiritual direction, the individual is helped to grow in his or her intimacy with God and to live out the consequences of that relationship. Spiritual direction is a process of interiorisation because it implies letting God, who dwells within us, to draw us deeper towards himself.
In Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), he encourages all to be involved in spiritual direction. The pope writes about the need for everyone to be initiated into the “art of accompaniment” which teaches us to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other.
In the words of Thomas Merton, the whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of our life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes that we present to the world, and to bring out our inner spiritual freedom, our inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.
Gordon Vassallo is an accredited spiritual guide at the Centre for Ignatian Spirituality.