Still Listening: New Horizons in Spiritual Direction (review)

Still Listening: New Horizons in Spiritual Direction.Edited by Norvene Vest. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2000. 214 pp. $19.95.

Norvene Vest, an Episcopal laywoman, oblate of a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastery and graduate of a Protestant seminary (Fuller Theological), invited twelve other spiritual directors (two Catholic, the rest Episcopal or Protestant) to join her in writing about "cutting edge issues" arising in the practice of spiritual direction. Addressed to "mature directors," these essays offer "a colleague's wisdom" on challenges that have been the subject of their own prayer and reflection. Assuming mature directors need no attention to the overall spiritual direction process, its definition or goals, the focus is on issues considered new.

Taking the old issues to be the spiritual concerns of "white, middle-class, leisured people" (133), with conventional connections to institutional religion, these authors consider as new (1) groups not likely to come for direction ten years ago, (2) special life issues, and (3) features of our social context. Section I intends to help directors listen to challenging patterns of development in workers in large corporations, in emotionally and physically traumatized persons, in recovering addicts and in wary seekers now returning to church. Section II deals with generational studies, the threshold of death, and the growth required if directors are to overcome heterosexism/ homophobia or really to hear marginalized persons. Section III locates spiritual direction in relation to social activism, visual imagination, human sexuality, the "communal soul of a congregation," and cultural history.

Coming to this book from twenty-five years as a spiritual director and ten years teaching spiritual directors in a program that integrates practical supervision and personal and communal formation with academic credit, I am struck by two issues, which will occupy me in the remainder of this review. First, I notice what is considered "a colleague's wisdom . . . for mature directors." Second, I wonder how this book meets the challenge of one of its contributors, Kenneth Leech, who is concerned that professionalism and values alien to the gospel have captivated spiritual direction today.

Aligning myself with Teresa of Avila's preference for spiritual directors having both experience and learning, I perceive all the directors writing here to have sustained experience with the group each essay presents. Then the issue becomes what kind of wisdom, what spiritual direction assumptions and foundations inform and shape this experience?

To answer this question I attended to the references and endnotes. Two of the thirteen essays have neither, though one of these refers internally to Benedict's Rule and Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is. Six essays discuss either issues predominantly found in introductory handbooks for counseling "special populations" (i.e., sexually abused, homosexuals and lesbians, etc.), or in articles contrasting the religion of baby boomers with that of Generation X. At times attention to specifically spiritual direction issues absorbs only one-fifth or even one-seventh of an essay. They make no mention of ways classical spiritual teachers could mentor directors on these contemporary issues. For example, Teresa of Avila's and Ignatius Loyola's practical modes of gaining self-knowledge and the religious basis for needing it could surely support any of the groups of directees mentioned here. Could not recovering addicts benefit from compassionate desert wisdom regarding obsessive thoughts? Would not an awareness of the antiquity of these spiritual issues help to "normalize" them for directors and directees? For example, I wish Joseph D. Driskill, whose Protestant Spiritual Exercises (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1999) makes such an original contribution, had begun his essay with brief references to counseling literature on abused women, and then devoted most of the essay to developing the way his Spiritual Exercises pertain to these directees. These six essays on special populations or contemporary religious culture could be helpful for another audience as well: beginning directors learning to notice their own biases and hear the way God's Spirit transforms us in and through...