Spiritual Direction

An address given to the Salisbury Diocesan Spiritual Directors, April 28 2010

by Philip Seddon

What am I looking for when I come to you for Spiritual Direction?  For me, as with Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs,’ there are at least four basic levels of need, which I will outline and then explore in further detail:

1.  When I turn to you for Spiritual Direction, I admit to myself that I need space, time, quiet, comfort, privacy.  Something new and strange is happening. I don’t know what to say. Whether something erupted in me long ago or emerged more recently, or both, I know that I need to jump off the train and walk, stand or – best of all – sit still.[1] Pascal says, famously: ‘[T]he sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room’.[2]  I need to stop time, take time, make time for what is primary: myself. This moment, that I would have stand still, is important to me; an important moment in time. I need you to recognise my need for space, and give me time. I need to be able to sit, and, in your presence, let down my anchor in the Trinity, even if the One I long for now feels absent.

2. In this expansive, safe space, with complete absence of threat, I need the welcome of a face that will take me as I am, as I know God does, even though I cannot really believe it. And even when the light of God is reflected from this face towards me, I still have to take the risk of trying to find the words I cannot, words that I have long concealed in a place deeper within even than I know. I may have no words. There may be long silences, or inarticulate sounds and groans, but these are ‘preparing the way’ (Isa. 40:3/ Mk. 1:3) for my voice in the presence of a face which neither rejects, bad-mouths nor annihilates me. Listen to the voice of my lamentation, I am saying; do not mock me. And then I discover that you do not dismiss my utterances, neither minimising nor relativising the force with which my deepest well overflows. I find you to be a space and a face where I feel safe.

3. Deeper down, what I know I need and seek is grace – God’s grace. I need to trust that in my search for a place of safety, with a face that understands and accepts whatever I say, I and we will both be brought into the arena of God’s grace. I know that we may soon go under water and start swimming in the sea of mercy, the ‘deep things’ of God (1 Cor. 2:10); so I want to be sure that you do not just hear and listen, do not only understand what I am talking about, but also know the grace of God that I long for, and can help me find it. I need to be able to walk as well as sit. I need to be sure that you, my Director, know that ‘deeper than horror is the Joy’.[3]  

4. Further in and further on, having found a place to talk – or be silent; to walk – or be still; to cry – or sit; having begun to see the face of Christ in yours; having heard the Word that makes me clean (John 15:3), and been received by the sacrament of your presence; having been touched in our human communion by the Real Presence of Christ, I then find myself being drawn and called to follow Christ into the heights and depths (Eph. 3:18) of his vocation, which I begin to realise is mine. I discover that we have been crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20), buried with Christ (Rom. 6:4) and raised with Christ (Col. 3:1), and ‘I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am’ [Hopkins]. ‘Kenosis is theosis.’[4] All of this – paradoxically – I know I want: the knowledge that this revelation of Christ’s very self is within me. I do know it; but I don’t always know that I know it.

Let Eugene Peterson summarise these four aspects of this holy task:

Spiritual direction is the act of paying attention to God, calling attention to God, being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situation. A prerequisite is standing back, doing nothing. It opens a quiet eye of adoration. It releases the energetic wonder of faith. It notices the Invisibilities in and beneath and around the Visibilities. It listens for the Silences between the spoken Sounds.[5] 

So – impossibly – I need you to be: an eye and an ear, a hand outstretched, a mouth for the Gospel of God, a sponge, a sounding-board, a mirror, a Bible. In short, I am asking you to be an icon of the resurrection: in Peterson’s recent phrasing, to practise the resurrection in the specific instance of my life, of his and her life now, to see me with resurrection eyes.[6]

So now let me go back over the various stages, which are really levels, which I just outlined, and look in a little more depth at each. In each case, I will use some music, some Bible texts and some quotations from Thomas Goodwin - the first of which comes as further sub-title:

‘God goes not constantly by the same rule…no man can say that in such and such cases God will and doth desert men, or that he always does so, - but is various in his dealings herein.’ (292)

‘God breaketh not all men’s hearts alike.’ (Richard Baxter (source untraced))

Entr’acte No. 1.  J S Bach, Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen BWV 32 (J S Bach, Cantatas Vo. 42, Bach Collegium Japan, directed by Masaaki Suzuki)

What does this music say to you about the pain of longing for God?

There are light, pizzicato chords, harsh tone and semitone clashes (E/ F#, G/ F#); there is the plaintive, yearning, oboe matching the floating, hurting soprano voice of love and absence. There is the blunt contradiction in faith between line 1 Liebster Jesus, mein Verlangen – ‘Dearest Jesus, whom I long for’ – and line 2 ‘Tell me, where can I find you?’: deep love and longing; love and loss; yearning and straining backwards and forwards and upwards in semitones to the cry that breaks the heart. In short, the pain of disjunction, of dis-location.

And so to Thomas Goodwin, A Child of Light Walking in Darkness, 1633, a work I first came across in 1983, which has only very recently been re-printed (1996 & 2006).[7]

This is how he begins:

Take a true believer, who hath had the least beam of the ‘light of the glory of God, which shines in the face of Christ’…let in upon his soul…Think with yourselves, what is the worst thing that can be supposed to befall this man. What worse than to have that cranny, through which he first espied that beam, to be, as it were, clean shut up, the ‘light of God’s countenance’ withdrawn…and the terrors of the Almighty shot into his soul? (235; the full paragraph is much longer and more graphically detailed)

What I want at this point is someone who will hear me, listen to the cry beneath the tears, or the fear hidden behind the curtains of silence, or even the joy beneath the cry, but also someone who can listen to God. It may be even simpler than that. I may simply need someone to whom I can talk. I think of Joe Cotterill, now 93, my first Crusader Class leader, who opened the door of Scripture to me, and to whom I would talk. He taught me scripture, I asked him questions. He gave me space to explore – not officially Spiritual Direction, but the freedom of the sheep to ‘come in and go out and find pasture’ of John 10:10. He was a listening ear. He listened to anything and everything I said. I just sat with him. I found company, welcome, a guide, a friend. We rarely prayed, but it always gives me pleasure to think of him.

So Spiritual Direction may begin – and remain – at the level of friendship. To this, then, there may be added the dimension of ‘soul friendship’[8] - I like the Latin translation of that role: amicus or amica animae: ‘friend of the soul’ – i.e. not just friend, but friend of the soul, of the inner hidden person, longing to be known, whatever I know or am not aware is there.  This is Margaret Guenther’s language of ‘holy listening’[9]; Tilden Edwards calls it ‘spiritual friendship’ or ‘spiritual companionship’[10].

Because ‘What you and I need,’ as one of those joke text cards says, ‘is a good listening to.’

 Carl Jung somewhere tells of a patient who came to him and sat for an hour without saying a word – but returned later, because for that person the relief of not having to say anything, the freedom to sit in silence without being attacked or hurried along, the freedom to be with another person listening, waiting intently and compassionately was a revelation, and therefore – in some ways – a salvation.

And so, I have been able to sit with you; you have sat with me, as Jesus asked the disciples to ‘sit here while I pray’ (Mk. 14:32), you have heard me, and so I can be free to say a Psalm which thanks God that he has heard my voice and my supplications (Ps. 116:1, 6:9, 28:6).

Or it may be much more chaotic – an avalanche of pain may crash down the valley, and you, the Director, may feel overwhelmed by all that I pour out over you. Actually, I don’t want you to explain it all, I just want you to listen. It helps when you ask, Tell me more; What happened? Can you describe that again in more detail? Nor will I be embarrassed if I see tears in your face, because I will know that what I have said moves you, and perhaps if I see that the way I was treated hurts you, I can believe that God, too, has heard my cry and shown me his compassion through you. You have been my place of refuge, so I can more easily say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust,’ ‘my portion in the land of the living (Ps. 91:2, 142:5). In either situation, you have been God to me.

Nor (in passing) do I underestimate the power of e-mails as direction. I could write to you, as I do to others, and explore on paper what may be hard to express even in the best face-to-face conversation. So long as I know you can receive me and be my secure place...

Entr’acte No. 2. Herbert Howells: Like as the hart.

What does this music say to you about the pain of longing for God?

Here is another E minor piece of music, sharps and flats, dropping thirds and minor sevenths - even the jazz blues line of Bb A G E. There are external reproaches to reinforce the internal jangling. There is longing, thirst ‘for God, yea, even for the living God’, ‘tears…day and night’ and questions: When? Where? Why?  (Ps. 42:2, 3, 5 & again 9, 10, 11). Above all, the longing to ‘come and appear before the presence of God’ (BCP), or now, in the NRSV, to ‘come and behold the face of God’. Interesting, that cross-over between ‘presence’ and ‘face’ in Hebrew (p
nîm).

I recall a workshop last September at the Renewing Prayer conference in Cambridge when I asked what had been most important for anyone in their experience of whatever they meant by darkness. One answer flashed out: the faces of other believers. They can be my consolation, even if they are also my desolation. I forget, of course, that they are my mirror-image, which is why I need you to be a mirror to me of my genuine self, and of God. I need a face in the darkness as well as a place to weep, and to bring my shadow into view.

In theology, David Ford has explored this element of the ‘light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6),[11] and only earlier this month did I see freshly the link between our seeing with unveiled faces the glory of the LORD as though reflected in a mirror, and that glory on the face of Jesus Christ. When I look at your face, I am unconsciously looking for signs of the face of Jesus Christ, signs of the image of God in you being cleansed, so that I can believe that it might be possible in me, too. Because if your face can remind me of God’s, then I might be able to ask you the question that those who visited the Desert Fathers and Mothers often asked them: ‘Father, Mother, give me a word.’ So I might ask you for a clue, a word, a thought, a verse, a passage of Scripture, and know that through you, God would give me some life-giving word, daily bread, relief.

Entr’acte No. 3. Arvo Pärt, ‘Como cierva sedienta’ (1998) (Ps. 42-3) on Orient Occident

What does this music say to you about the pain of longing for God?

Here is another minor, but indeterminate and shifting key, with hints and wild fragments of pressure, jagged notes, a high, taut line of increasingly anguished voices. There is assault, attack, bare lines and notes, chattering hyenas. I sense anguished groping and straining towards something unknown, loved, long lost and still to be found again. Here, even more than in the Bach and Howells, large, lunging intervals, lurches and dips of line express a hollowing out, a vacuum, a collapse, a being-stretched or an ascent. Above all, I sense a fourfold contradiction: between 1) You, my God, my rock and my defender and ‘Why have you abandoned me?’ and 2) the outside mockers and the inner doubt and torture: they daily say unto me, ‘Where is now thy God?’ And I ask myself, ‘When shall I appear?’

Yes, before long, if not straightaway, I find myself getting into deeper water than I bargained for. This is where three themes become inextricably linked: the experience of desolation, the need for grace, and the gift of grace, which is consolation.

Listen to Morton Kelsey:

‘I have seen many people with their masks down, and I have never yet seen any who was not infinitely more attractive and beautiful unmasked than masked. The ugliness we often see in the naked soul is far more than made up by its native beauty, which is more wonderful and attractive than any other creation of God. When a man finally opens up the depths of himself to me I cannot help but love what I see. So I believe it is with God. When a man comes before Him in utter honesty, nakedly himself, there is a response on the part of God which opens channels of contact between God and man.’[12]

Tears turn to smiles, or we don’t quite know which is which, or smiles turn back into tears, but certainly ‘those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves with them.’ (Ps. 126:6).

So: what do I want from you, my Spiritual Director? I select five desiderata. First and last, your prayers. Metropolitan Antony tells the story of Father Silouan on Mt Athos praying for Nicholas.

In the beginning I prayed with tears of compassion for Nicholas, for his young wife, for the little child, but as I was praying the sense of the divine presence began to grow on me and at a certain moment it grew so powerful that I lost sight of Nicholas, his wife, his child, his needs, their village, and I could be aware only of God, and I was drawn by the sense of the divine presence deeper and deeper, until of a sudden, at the heart of this presence, I met the divine love holding Nicholas, his wife, and his child, and now it was with the love of God that I began to pray for them again...[13]

Think of the visitor to Mount Athos asking an elder, ‘May I write to you sometimes to ask for advice?’ ‘No’, the monk replied, ‘but I will pray for you.’ The visitor went away saddened. But another monk said to him, ‘You ought to be very happy that the geronta promised to pray for you; he doesn’t say that to everyone. His advice is good; but his prayers are far, far better.’[14]

Yes, I need to know that you are interceding for me before the face of God, that you are holding me where I have lost my footing. I need your ‘listening prayer’.[15] And I need you to hold the range of prayer across the spiritual traditions, so that you can pray with me with tears, or in silence, or in few words, or in many inspired by the Spirit’s running water, or in calling down a blessing on me, or in quiet praying in tongues, as the Spirit bears witness.

I need your patience, because I need patience. I need your patience, because some things never seem to change or improve, and I feel as frozen as one of Queen Jadis’ stone statues. Or the opposite: with John Bunyan ‘I should sometimes be up and down twenty times in an hour.’[16] Exactly: ‘We are not the same to-day that yesterday we were; but ‘Christ is the same today, yesterday and for ever, Heb. 13:8’ (313).’ So sometimes I need you to tell me that you can see the change in me, even if I cannot, still feeling as trapped as ever in circumstances I cannot change.

I also need your direction, your Spiritual Direction[17], your wisdom from God. I need you to pray for and to have what I also want to have, which is what Solomon in the AV asked for, viz. an ‘understanding heart,’ or what the NRSV calls an ‘understanding mind…to discern…’, and what literally is a ‘listening heart’ (lb shMma‘) (1 Ki. 3:9). What I don’t always understand is that I have been fed lies from my youth upwards. But you know that. As I talk, you can hear my lies about myself and about God. So I need your direction, 1) to expose the lies I live by; and 2) to reveal to me the grace of God to live by. I needed you to help me sit; now I need you to help me walk, and to walk with me along the Way I am being summoned.

Goodwin is so good on this aspect of the Child of Light Walking in Darkness (Is. 50:10-11). He recognises that the Spirit may lead us into darkness (ch. III); he recognises that Satan ‘may draw forth false and fearful conclusions…and start amazing doubts and fears of [our] utter want of grace’ (246); he sees how we ‘misinterpret’ and ‘pervert’, ‘misconstrue’ and ‘misapply’ what God is up to, and analyses how we ‘practise…delusions’ and draw ‘false conclusions’ and ‘false apprehensions’ (246-7), and pass ‘false accusations’ and ‘pass a false sentence’ upon ourselves (268-9). This is where distinguishing between the psychological and the spiritual, between Satan and the super-ego, is so hard and so important, and where you and I always need greater discernment than we seem to have. But even though Goodwin will in one sentence put together ‘Satan and our own conscience’ (270), listen to how he also distinguishes between Satan and the Holy Ghost:   

The difference is, that the Holy Ghost dealeth sweetly herein, but as a father that rebukes and convinceth his child of his misdemeanours; but without putting in any such sting in the conclusion, that therefore we are hypocrites; …but in these of Satan, that is the issue he mainly drives to all, and it is made the foot, the burden of all those his accusations (269-270).[18]  

Or, famously, (282):

When the Holy Ghost hath lashed and whipped the conscience, and made it tender once, and fetched off the skin, Satan may then fret it more and more, and be still rubbing upon the sore, by his horrid suggestions and false fears cast in.

But Goodwin is also equally well aware of the ways in which we feed our own sickness and desolation (esp. in ch. v). He knows ‘that our hearts are a great deep also’, both in terms of deceitfulness and self-deception (which Goodwin calls ‘false-reasoning’ and ‘befool[ing]’ ourselves) (249-250), as well as in our frequent inability to use our reason well, since it ‘is of itself a busy principle, that will be prying into, and making false glosses upon all God’s matters as well as our own’ (251), and in our alternative option of ‘self-flattery’ (253).

Sara Maitland is right: silence – the true, saving silence of the Presence of God – can ‘unskin’ us, but also correctly and rightly overwhelm our demonic super-ego (I expand slightly!...).[19]

I then also need you to bear Scripture within you, Job and the Psalms, Paul and Peter, so that you can give me texts and promises which I can devour or feed on, to counteract the lies I so often fall into. I need you not to set the Spirit against Scripture, because both are vital to me. And I love it, as you listen and pray, when you are given the gift of words from Scripture to match the words I have been using, so that I can meditate and feed on those verses on my own when nothing else satisfies. I might want you to say that you sense what God is saying, or that God has given you a picture,[20] or a word of prophecy to comfort me, or a spiritual tongue to undergird me. I do not want you to separate the direct Word of God from your role as Director; I want you to be open to the Spirit at this moment. Sometimes, I need you to say the words that I cannot say. I need you to point me to, to take me to, to be the grace of Christ. Which means I also need your courage, and trust, in me, and in God, to travel with me into fearful or beautiful arenas I have never visited before, so that we meet the same Lord together, who is gracious to all those who call upon him (Ps. 86:5) and who blesses us mutually through and with each other.

In fact, I might need you precisely to say to me, or perhaps to convey to me by your general encouragement of me: Philip, take your courage in both hands. Trust your gut, trust your own instincts, trust this moment to be a gift of God’s grace to you. Trust God to be here now, to lead you and speak to you; trust and trust God’s mercy again and always. ‘Only when we stop resisting the gift, and rest instead in God's mercy, will we find our real voice.’

But above all, I need your knowledge of Christ, whose brilliant light is more than I can bear, but which I know is in us and between us, so that I can sense his grace in the inter-face between  us. I need to know that whether it’s called darkness or light doesn’t matter, since I have been baptised again and again into and by God’s Holy Spirit, and because I want to be continually baptised in the Spirit and to swim like a fish in the waters of Jesus’ baptism.

Entr’acte No. 4. Annie Lennox, ‘Ghosts in my Machine’ (from Songs of Mass Destruction)

What does this music say to you about the pain of longing for God?

Now, in this most awesome aspect of my pilgrimage, when I am still coming to see you after years, and I think that perhaps I am boring you silly, I need you more than ever to accept my weakness and my blindness to what God has already done in me, and I need you still to hold my hand as I am called further in and further on. I need you to be as deep as I want to be, and I need you again to trust God for me, because sometimes – often – the darkness is a darkness where there is no light and no comfort (238), ‘exceeding terrible and full of horror’ (242), and I do not know how to trust. Then I need to know not only how to sit, or walk, but also how to stand (Eph. 6:13-14). I need you to hope for me, and so to help me hope, that there is such a thing as the Light of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the joy of God’s countenance (Ps. 16:11); and that the darkness I feel is not dark to God, but as the light (Ps. 139:11-12). Blessed are those who know that, for they can guide others out of Hades.

Goodwin, 289:

Now, who are they who are furnished with such apt, and fit, and seasonable considerations to comfort such, but those who have had the same temptations, and have been in the like distresses? This art of speaking peace and words of comfort in season is the greatest wisdom in the world, and is not learned but in Heman’s [i.e. the Psalmist’s] school.

This fourth – unnamed – element (though let me say again: ‘kenosis is theosis’) came into focus very recently for me in terms of the Eastern Orthodox icon of the Resurrection, the Anastasis. Carmen, an artist and iconographer from Romania, reminded us in our recent Easter School that in Eastern Orthodoxy, Easter begins on Good Friday; Sunday begins on Friday: joy is proclaimed to those in the grave:

Christ is risen from the dead
by death he hath overcome death,
And to them in the graves hath he given life.

It is in the darkest, most unexplored, depths of my soul that Christ seeks me out, looks into my face, and ‘with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm’ (beyad haz
q
h ûbizrMa‘ netûy
h, Ps. 136:12, Jer. 32:21, etc.), raises me, Adam, you, Eve, up. ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ God will not take us somewhere else in order to minister his grace to us; it will be here, right here and now, as we talk, considering this mess, this morass, that God administers his grace.

So: here I am. I have come to you for Spiritual Direction, told you about my shame and fears, my sense of a fragile ego and self, my abandonment, my fear of non-existence, of not being taken seriously, or of being idolised, fear that nobody, let alone you, could possibly love me if they saw a film of my thoughts. And all you can say is: ‘Philip, it’s OK. J.’ You are being conformed to Christ (Rom. 12:1-2), you say. You are being re-cast in the form of Cross and Resurrection. The divine Light is shining in you. The High Priest of our salvation was made flesh. And then I recall that George Herbert said: ‘My stuff is flesh, not brass’ (The Pearl). And Athanasius: ‘He became what we are that we might become what he is.’ Don’t try to become God, you say, without being human, without being you. What an extraordinary affirmation – thank you!

But then Goodwin warns me that ‘after God hath pardoned [us] also in our consciences, as well as in heaven, yet the guilt may return again and leave us in darkness (297). The point is: it happens. He knows that. Again he counsels patience (316), explaining that ‘waiting is indeed but an act of faith further stretched out. As an allegory is but a continued metaphor, so waiting is but a continuing to believe on God’ (330); he knows that we play the game of hiring lawyers to plead against ourselves (319), and begs us instead to plead to Christ for ourselves (333); ‘if thou diest,’ he says, ‘die at his feet, mourning, bleeding out thy soul in tears’, ‘plead that thou art never able to satisfy him’ (334), and see how the tears flow as you fling your accusations in Christ’s face. 

And thus (Goodwin writes) whilst thou mayest be a-speaking blindfold, as it were, casting anchor in the dark, yet speaking his very heart, he (Jesus) haply may own thee, and fall upon thy neck and kiss thee (336).

In short, you keep holding me between presumption and despair: between a self-centred assumption or anticipation that I am saved, and a self-centred assumption or presumption that I am not. You hold me in the truth.[21] You help me stand.

Even after it all, if I only manage to remember one promise that you have given me, you have still ministered Christ to me in your role as Director.

If one promise do belong to thee, then all do, for every one conveys whole Christ, in whom all the promises are made, and who is the matter of them all (321).

But please don’t pre-judge the path God will take with me. Give me neither false comforts nor false ideals. Sit, walk and stand with me. Don’t send me to the psychiatrist because I have sensed Jesus deep within myself. Even if God has taken you at Three Miles an Hour, in the title of Kosuke Koyama’s famous book, I can testify that God has sometimes come to me at lightning speed, ‘in a flash, at a trumpet-crash’.[22] You never know, I might turn out to be a blessing to you; I might even start running!...[23]   

Of course, it is extremely important to bear this in mind, as Goodwin says:

Think not therefore thou hast not true grace, because thou wert never terrified as some have been. As some have true faith and sound peace who never tasted ‘joy unspeakable and glorious’, so some have sound humiliation who never knew terrors of conscience (342).

And it is certainly true, as Richard Baxter again said, that:

God breaketh not all men’s hearts alike.

But, but, but: ‘God mendeth not all men’s hearts alike’ (Philip Seddon!). Spiritual Direction is such a subtle vocation, such a gentle ministry, that it requires what Goodwin calls ‘a lady’s hand’:

To be a bone-setter is not every man’s skill; he must have special art and cunning, and withal a lady’s hand, as we use to say, that is, meekness and pity (289-290)

Goodwin himself and John Donne were alike absolutely clear about the reality of God’s ‘direct action.’

Goodwin, 263:

Some he humbleth much, some are led on with comfort; some he works on with a sudden and marvellous light, as if the sun should rise on the sudden at midnight, and on others insensibly and by degrees, as when the dawning steals upon the day

John Donne, (St Paul’s Christmas Day in the evening, 1624):

[God] brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons

Yes, there is what scholars call a mysticism of light[24] as well as of darkness, and, as Karl Rahner famously said: ‘The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.’ St Symeon the New Theologian, St Seraphim of Zarov, St Dorotheus of Gaza, all knew the fire of the Holy Spirit burning and shuddering within. ‘Just as a pregnant woman feels the child moving in her womb, so we know that the spirit of God dwells in us on account of the joy, the happiness, and the exultation we feel in our hearts.’[25]

So does this person who sent me these lines (from a longer poem) not so long ago:

‘What grace is mine that your eternal glory
seeks shelter in, transforms, the darkness of my fragility?
The revelation of your very self is the radiance that you are in me.’

But this, of course, is Jesus rejoicing in the Spirit (Lk. 10:21), it is Jesus’ prayer that his joy might be in us, and that we might be full of his joy (Jn. 15:11), it is the phMtismos – the light, or rather the illumination, the ‘in-shining’ of the light – of the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Cor. 4:4), or the illumination in our hearts of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6), it is the rejoicing ‘with joy unspeakable and full of glory’ of 1 Pet. 1:8.[26] The image is being cleansed – and the full glory is being revealed. That is where it all began. I, your Directee, know this; and still I long for it.

In the words of Thomas Goodwin, with which I began:

‘God goes not constantly by the same rule…no man can say that in such and such cases God will and doth desert men, or that he always does so, - but is various in his dealings herein’ (292).

What I, as a Directee, am searching for in this space in your face, and what you, as a Director, are also looking for in me, are signs of the grace of the resurrected Jesus, and of the image of God in me being cleansed and renewed. You and I are as utterly dependent as each other on the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 8:11). It is the gift of the Spirit to which the NT testifies that can become present to us in this unique inter-face. The Holy Spirit of Jesus turns out, as we knew all along, to be the real ‘Director of Operations.’

____________________________________________________________

The Revd Philip Seddon retired as Director of Ministry at the Southern Theological Education and Training Scheme (STETS), based in Salisbury, in July 2010.

© 29.iv.10/ 19.vii.10

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