Spiritual Direction

One of the most helpful and important supports for anyone striving to wholeheartedly follow the Lord is individual, personalized guidance.

 

While you can receive a certain amount of guidance in group settings or from reading good spiritual books, the lives of the saints, etc., they will always fall short, to some degree, of the help we can receive from another individual who knows us personally.

Here at City on a Hill, we want you to be a saint, so we’re committed to providing as many good options as possible for individual guidance. If you’re interested, read on!

Forms of Individualized Guidance

 

Throughout the Church’s history, individualized guidance has taken many forms and has gone by many names. Some examples of individualized guidance that you might know from the secular world would be counselors, academic tutors, and personal trainers. These target growth in specific areas of our life, whether that be mental health, physical health, intellectual health, emotional health, or some mixture of those.

When it comes to the primary purpose of our life, which is to grow each day into more and more perfect union with the living God (i.e. holiness), individualized guidance is even more important.

Two of the most common types of individualized guidance that we find in the Church’s history are:

  1. Regular Confessor

  2. Spiritual Director/Mentor

What is a Regular Confessor?

 

A regular confessor is a priest that you meet with regularly for the sacrament of confession. While this isn’t full-blown spiritual direction (explained below), it can still be incredibly helpful. Rather than hopping around to different priests all the time for confession, committing to going to only one priest for confession can be beneficial for a number of reasons. For example:

  1. It keeps us accountable to going regularly to confession (e.g. monthly, every two weeks, or even every week).

  2. It allows one priest to get to know us well, so that the counsel he offers might be more helpful. 

What is Spiritual Direction?

 

Spiritual direction is an ongoing one-on-one relationship with someone who has extensive experience and knowledge of the Christian life. This is often a priest or a religious brother or sister, but can also be a well-formed layperson. While someone may have a regular confessor who is also their spiritual director, it’s also possible to have these two roles filled by two different people. 

Usually, spiritual direction takes place at some sort of regular interval: once per month is typical, but it could also be every 6-8 weeks, or even just quarterly. Totally random intervals of time for spiritual direction generally isn’t recommended, as it can lead to laziness about our growth in holiness, hesitancy to return to spiritual direction because we’re ashamed at failures or lack of progress, or other negative consequences. Spiritual direction can be a lifetime habit, or it can be something that we engage only for a certain season of life. That being said, long-term spiritual direction will usually end up bearing more fruit than short-term spiritual direction.

Topics discussed in spiritual direction would include, but aren’t limited to:

Virtue & Vice: Learning how to root out specific vices and cultivate specific virtues.

Prayer: Learning how to pray, as well as building & deepening a prayer life

Discernment: Learning how to discern God’s will regarding big and small decisions.

Mission: Learning how to be on mission in the midst of the world, spreading the light of Christ to the people and situations around you.

Vocation: Learning how to live out one’s vocation to the full.

How do I find a Regular Confessor

 

The answer to this is quite simple. If there is a priest with whom you’ve had good experiences in confession, just ask him, whenever you see him next, if he’d be willing to be your regular confessor. If he agrees, you then have two things to figure out:

  1. How often will you go to confession to him? (General recommendation is anywhere from 1x/week to 1x/month).

  2. When will you go? You have two options here:

Option 1: Go to confession during one of his regularly scheduled times for confession in his parish. If you go to confession anonymously (behind a screen), just identify yourself at the outset of the confession. Say: “Bless me, Father, for I’ve sinned -- it’s John Smith here, Father -- it has been two weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins…”. Identifying yourself will enable the priest to know who you are, and gives him permission to give you more pointed advice based on his knowledge of you.

Option 2: Set up a separate time to go to confession with the priest, outside of the normal parish confession times.

How do I find a Spiritual Director?

This is a bit more tricky than finding a regular confessor, as spiritual direction implies a more robust type of one-on-one guidance than the brief counsel you might receive in confession. The first place to look is for a priest or religious brother or sister who you trust and who demonstrates both a level of personal holiness and knowledge of the spiritual life. Perhaps, if you’ve received good advice from a priest multiple times in confession, you could simply ask him if he would give you spiritual direction.

Here at City on a Hill, we provide the following assistance in finding a spiritual director. 

Contact City on a Hill co-chaplain Deacon Tim Wise, and we will get back to you with some questions and then can direct you to someone who might be able to begin meeting with you for spiritual direction. He keeps a short list of available spiritual directors around Kansas City.

For inquiries, email:

Addendum: Getting the Most Out of Spiritual Direction

 

The two most important virtues or dispositions to foster in order to benefit the most from spiritual direction are the following:

  1. Transparency/Sincerity - Without total transparency, spiritual direction will not bear much fruit. We must be brutally honest with our spiritual director, otherwise, they will not be able to actually help us, because there will be key pieces of our life that they don’t know about. It’s generally advised to begin a spiritual direction meeting (and also confession) by discussing the thing we know must be discussed, but which we’re most hesitant to discuss.

  2. Docility - Without a willingness to be taught and led, spiritual direction will not bear much fruit, if it bears any at all. Regular resistance to the recommendations and guidance of one’s director means that we aren’t really willing to be “directed”, and therefore that spiritual direction is not actually happening. Docility is key.

Another very important practical thing in order for spiritual direction to bear fruit is that we prepare well for spiritual direction meetings. Without spending 15-30 minutes preparing and writing down things to discuss - giving your director a compact but thorough account of your living out of the Christian life over the past month or so - without that preparation, spiritual direction won’t be much help.