My friend Aimee over at Good and Beautiful Things recently wrote about her origin story as a theater teacher. She got me thinking about the origins of my current work. How did I get to where I am?
Many years ago, I attended a lunch event at a sister church. The speaker that day was someone who had just written a curriculum called Waking Up Grey: An Exploration of Creative Awakening. It was art based and I was in the midst of rediscovering a love for writing in the day of blogs. I signed up for more info.
That spring I joined a group and used the various prompts to write and ponder my relationship to God and creativity. One week at the group, I shared that our women’s retreat the previous weekend had featured an hour of silence. I was smitten. I fell in love with silence at that retreat and I’m sure my tone was wistful as I relayed this experience. “You need to check out Gail Pitt with Dovehouse Ministries,” my friend Gigi said. I scribbled that name into the front page of my workbook and promptly forgot about it… until about eighteen months later when my family attended the ministry fair at our new church.
Right as we walked in, I saw a Dovehouse Ministries table. Behind that table stood Gail Pitt with sign up sheets for spiritual direction groups and silent retreats. I signed up for one of each and I have been in spiritual direction for more than fifteen years now. I had no idea what spiritual direction was that day, but I trusted my curiosity.
What are the dots that connected to lead you to where you are today? Can you look back and see the invitations of God?
Life is not a straight line, so this origin story isn’t quite as neat as I make it out to be. Yet I find it encouraging to look back and see God at work in seemingly insignificant ways. What if I hadn’t attended that luncheon all those years ago? What if I hadn’t done Waking Up Grey? What if I was too scared to sign up for spiritual direction without researching it first? I suspect I still would have found my way to spiritual direction and eventually my way to becoming a spiritual director — that’s how right this work feels to me.
In the early days of receiving spiritual direction, becoming a spiritual director wasn’t on my radar. It was a time purely for God and me. During those first years, I would take surface streets to direction and turn off the radio for the drive. I would ask myself, “Where have I seen God this month?” That question and the process of spiritual direction are my origin story, as surely as a radioactive spider bite.
Spiritual direction is different work than anything I’ve done previously. In my various professional incarnations, I have been a customer service rep, a national account director, a project manager, a nonprofit grant writer and an executive director. I’ve also been a full time mom and homeschool mom overlapping with some of these other roles. Life is certainly a journey. If you’d told me twenty years ago that I would be a spiritual director at age fifty, I would have wondered what that even meant.
What aspect of your life today would be surprising to a former version of yourself?
My first experience of spiritual direction was through spiritual direction groups. Unlike individual direction, this meant I was immediately serving as witness to direction and receiving direction. It was amazing how the entire group could read the same scripture and hear different things about our lives. That encouraged me to trust what I was hearing - there wasn’t just one script.
Spiritual direction doesn’t offer performance metrics or client feedback. There are fewer spreadsheets (although I’m always looking for a reason to make one). I don’t have colleagues. These are things that were a bit worrisome as I was getting started. In the early days of leading spiritual direction, I asked my spiritual director how to know I was doing a good job. She asked how I assessed that in my work as executive director of a homeschool tutorial. Good question. Other than the obvious feedback from parents, my body told me when things were running smoothly and when something was misaligned.
That was good practice for the work I do now, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I don’t enter a spiritual direction session with a goal for my directee. I enter with a desire to listen. I want to listen to who I’m with. I want to listen to the Holy Spirit. I want to listen to my own heart and body. Over time, I am learning to trust these listenings and share what I notice. It is my hope and prayer this makes me the spiritual director I long to be - one who is a safe space, an encouragement in the journey and a kind presence in the midst of hard times.
How do you assess your success in your work? When you pause at the end of a day, what makes it a good day?
Book Corner:
What I’ve Been Reading Lately
via eBook:
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
It’s challenging for me to mentally go back to the first days of the Covid pandemic. There was so much we didn’t know and the finish line kept moving until it disappeared instead of us reaching it. Lucy Barton is living through the first days of the pandemic in this book. Her ex husband William is a scientist and he gets Lucy and their adult daughters to leave NYC ahead of the worst of the pandemic. I love Elizabeth Strout’s writing. It’s simple yet profound and she makes me feel I really know her characters.
How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang
I liked the main character perspective of a daughter of Chinese immigrants in this book. I also enjoyed the glimpse of the life of a writer for a TV show. It’s always fun for me to see behind the scenes. I do wish the two main characters had used their time apart (as required in every romance novel) to do some deep therapy, but this was a quick read for me and a good palette cleanser between heavier books.
via home library:
Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle, SJ
I put this book on my to-read list seven years ago. Why did it take me so long to read it? I have no excuse, but I urge you to read it post haste. Heartbreak and hope are on every page alongside a vision for how this world could be. The star of this book is not the writing, but the stories, the cast of characters, and the deep love of the author for his fellow humans.
May you have the space this week to look back over roles and rhythms in your life. What’s your origin story? Are you being invited to something new, something deeper?
Peace and Grace,
Shannon
Your letter has me pondering my origin story once again. I recently signed up for a workshop on “writing your spiritual memoir”. I wasn’t able to be at the class live via zoom but have the recording waiting. The invitation of writing my memoir has been gently tugging at me for quite a while. Your words inspire me to pay attention to and trust my inner prompts.