Soul Friendship

Adrian Chatfield

Description

This guide explores spiritual direction from biblical and theological perspectives and aims both to inform teaching and equip practitioners with greater reflective skills.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 29 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786221582
• Langue: English

Extrait

Nigel:
To Graham Pigott, who planted the seed that germinated into this book. I acknowledge here my debt to his Christian joy, inspiration and challenge.
Adrian:
To my wife Jill, whose patience has known no bounds when I have been under writing pressure over the years. She is my sharpest critic and best friend in the enterprise of life.
Contents
About the Authors
Introduction

1 God and Spiritual Direction
2 The Human Person in Companionship
3 Jesus, God Incarnate; ‘Turning Up’
4 Salvation and Transformation: Towards Union
5 The Holy Spirit and Companionship
6 Theological Approaches to the Bible in Accompaniment
7 Spiritual Direction and the Traditions of Christianity
8 The Church and Spiritual Direction
9 Towards a Practical Theology of Spiritual Direction

Bibliography
Index of Names and Subjects
Copyright
About the Authors
Nigel Rooms has been ordained for almost 30 years, is presently based in Leicester and is an honorary Canon of Christchurch Cathedral, Arusha, Tanzania. He holds masters and doctoral degrees in theology and mission. He worked in senior training and development positions in the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham and, with the Church Mission Society, now helps local churches to shape their long-term future. He is editor of the journal Practical Theology. He has been a spiritual director for ten years and is a Priest Associate of the Sisters of the Love of God at Fairacres, Oxford. Nigel is married to Karen, who is also an Anglican priest, and they are mightily blessed with two adult sons, Joe and Alistair. Nigel’s allotment is a source of joy throughout the year.
Adrian Chatfield is a Trinidadian priest who was sent as ‘a missionary to the English’ in 1983. He has been a parish priest and theological educator in the UK and South Africa, and was involved in setting up and running the Simeon Centre for Prayer and the Spiritual Life at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. His doctoral work was on spirituality in Caribbean literature, and he has been a spiritual director and trainer since the early 1990s. He was a member of the National Fresh Expressions team, and continues to encourage new forms of church and pioneer ministers. His spiritual ‘cave’ is long-distance running, where he has discovered a new joy in prayer. Adrian is married to Jill, who is also an Anglican priest, and they have a son and daughter and four grandchildren. Adrian loves searching for and photographing wildflowers, fungi and birds.
Introduction
Spiritual direction is a burgeoning and multi-faceted ministry across the churches in the UK and the wider western world, including many Protestant denominations. The publishing of books related to spiritual direction has continued unabated over the past 20-30 years, so why have we written another book on the subject?
Like all authors perhaps, we think our book is a little bit different. We know that there is a lot of writing on the ‘how to’ of spiritual direction, but there is less on the theological grounding of the practice . That is why we think it would be helpful in current thinking about spiritual direction to look at the question of what is theological about two people meeting regularly to discern the movement of God in the life of one of them. We hope by the end of the book that everyone involved in being directed and directing (as beginner or experienced) will find a valuable theological resource that can strengthen the depth and breadth of our practice. Ultimately this should increase our commitment to spiritual direction, develop our capacity for receiving and offering direction and enhance the quality of what happens in the direction session and beyond. We offer this work also as a theological apologia for spiritual direction and expect that it will reinforce the teaching and reflection on it in many places.
In this Introduction we will discuss definitions of spiritual direction and the limits of what we are attempting. We know that we don’t write in a vacuum, so we’ll spend some time thinking about sources for this work, both primary and secondary. We will take a ‘practical theology’ approach to the subject, so we’ll need to spell out the methodology, as sometimes there is considerable confusion about it. We’ll set out some current changes in the context of the Christian Church in the western world as a background for understanding the vital importance of spiritual direction and then we’ll introduce the rest of the book.
First, though, a word to position the authors. We are both white male Anglican priests firmly in the second half of life. Having said that, we have considerable experience of living and working cross-culturally in the Caribbean and Africa and are, hopefully, conscious of the biases we may bring to this project. We have both been directed as praying disciples of Jesus for many years and offer direction to others. Theologically we both wish to take reflection on experience utterly seriously, hence our approach in this book, which we’ll say more about later. Our method of writing has been to share out the initial creation of each chapter and then to agree (sometimes after serious further thought and discussion) the final text together. 1 So we’ll use both singular and plural first-person pronouns at different points as we proceed.
Definitions, metaphors and nomenclature
Inevitably there are as many definitions of spiritual direction as authors writing about it. Often definitions expand into explaining the purpose or aim of direction, which is not unreasonable but which is probably also the reason for the variety of definitions. There is clearly not one outcome for what happens through spiritual direction. When writing a leaflet introducing spiritual companionship some years ago, our group came up very quickly with more than ten concrete transformations it offers, drawn from our experience. (A full reproduction and explication of this text is in Chapter 8.) However, several authors such as William Barry, William Connolly and Kenneth Leech are agreed that on reading the Christian tradition they have come to understand its ultimate purpose or aim as the union of the praying subject of direction with God.
Formally and factually, spiritual direction is two people meeting regularly to focus on the spiritual life of one of them, with certain agreed boundaries of time, place and subject matter. ‘Spiritual life’ here is defined as ‘the life of the whole person directed towards God’ (Leech, 1994, p. 30). Informally, spiritual direction can occur fairly spontaneously in many settings – after church over coffee, on a car journey, at a pastoral visit. Our focus in this book is on the former without ignoring totally the possibilities of the latter.
Let’s begin with the Jesuits, and Barry and Connolly’s definition:

help given by one Christian to another which enables that person to pay attention to God’s personal communication to him or her, to respond to this personally communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God, and to live out the consequences of the relationship. (1986, p. 8)

While being slightly wooden and individualized, Barry and Connolly are not over-or under-claiming what occurs in direction and are relating it to the revelation of God. Personally I prefer the word ‘movement’ to ‘communication’ since the latter might imply, at least to some readers, the use of words alone (which we won’t preclude, just not apply all the time). Movement is no less real, but harder to pin down, and is related to my understanding of God as a verb rather than a noun: God as the flow in which we participate. We will say more about this in Chapter 1.
Martin Thornton is much more succinct: ‘Spiritual direction is the application of theology to the life of prayer’ (1984, p. 1). Prayer, as he points out, is a ‘this-world’ activity that extends into all areas of life. Here we have the beginnings of permission for our approach to the subject of this book since it points us to understanding what happens in the direction room: ‘God-talk’ or the naming of the movement of God in the life of the directee in the world. This is the act of doing theology not as an academic theoretical exercise but as an urgent practical matter. As Evagrius Ponticus (345-99 CE ) is famously quoted as saying, a theologian is ‘one whose prayer is true’. Thus we could claim that spiritual direction is ultimately a form of practical theology.
Leech importantly places spiritual direction in the prophetic tradition, which does not reduce the practice purely to the realm of the personal: ‘Spiritual direction is concerned with healing and reconciliation … with the transformation of consciousness’ (1994, p. 182). Spiritual direction, since the Holy Spirit is involved, encompasses questions of power and therefore politics, and is connected to the holistic nature of what happens when the Kingdom of God comes near or is ‘at hand’ (that is, never graspable by being in the hand).
So perhaps summing up we might say that spiritual direction is two people attending to and naming the movement of God in the spiritual life of one of them, for the ultimate good of that individual and the world they inhabit.
So much for definitions; perhaps even more useful are metaphors for spiritual direction, since a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed even the names we give the practice are metaphorical, so we’ll need to address the nomenclature question here as well.
Thornton begins with a biblical metaphor –