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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) 99-107



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Recent Literature and Emerging Issues in the Ministry of Spiritual Direction

Janet K. Ruffing, R.S.M.


In this review of recent literature 1 in spiritual direction, primarily from 1998-2001, I have categorized the treatments into four groups: volumes which advance the understanding of the ministry by breaking new ground; those which serve as introductions to the ministry or introduce it to a new population; volumes which focus on a specific technique, theory, or issue in spiritual direction; and finally those which are basically historical studies within a particular denomination. In the second part of the review, I highlight some of the issues about spiritual direction, its practice, and the mentoring of spiritual directors that are emerging in this literature. The dozen or so treatments published during this period are both encouraging and disappointing from a critical perspective.

For a spiritual director who has been reading this emerging new body of literature, only a few of these volumes break genuinely new ground and promise to affect the practice of spiritual direction in original, complex, and illumining ways. Among these I include Frank Houdek, Guided by the Spirit: A Jesuit Perspective on Spiritual Direction (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1996); and Katherine Dyckman, Mary Garvin, and Elizabeth Liebert, The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed: Uncovering Liberating Possibilities for Women (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2001). 2 Both of these volumes are written by experienced spiritual directors who are also scholars and experienced in supervision and spiritual formation, integrate years of extensive personal experience, specifically within an Ignatian perspective, the behavioral sciences, cultural issues, and theological perspectives. Directors are the primary audience for each volume although directees will often benefit from them.

Houdek's work remains thoroughly committed to fostering spiritual growth in directees, although he skillfully uses insights from psychology especially related to difficulties with fear, anger, depression, sexuality, and authority. His treatment of the difference between depression and the dark night is extraordinarily perceptive. His central chapter on "Prayer and Spiritual Discernment" is both original and insightful. He describes a spiritual director's need to assess and support the directee's life of prayer and the director's indispensable role of discerning whether a directee is of a "good spirit or a bad spirit" as being at the "core of spiritual direction." Houdek's focus on the director's role of assessing, supporting, and challenging contradicts a common assumption that the spiritual director's primary role is simply contemplative listening. 3 [End Page 99]

Dyckman, Garvin, and Liebert's book is a skillful and comprehensive presentation of the Spiritual Exercises for women. Their purpose is to advance research on the Exercises (accomplished in the careful historical sections), to advance the experience of the Exercises for women (achieved through their prayerful collaboration, debate, and disciplined reflection on their experience of women making and directing the Exercises), and to advance the practice of the Exercises themselves (discovered through new possibilities for directors and directees.) This volume integrates the new cosmology as well as feminist theological and psychological insight as it bears on the particular dynamics of the Exercises. 4

Although valuable in a limited way, a second category of the new literature, comprising a larger number of these works, serves basically to introduce spiritual direction either to neophyte spiritual directors or to a relatively new population potentially beginning spiritual direction as directees for the first time. This category includes Wilfrid Stinissen, The Gift of Spiritual Direction: On Spiritual Guidance and Care of the Soul (Liguori: Liguori Press, 1999); Jeannette Bakke, Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000); David Rosage, Beginning Spiritual Direction (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999 /1994); and Thomas H. Green, The Friend of the Bridegroom: Spiritual Direction and the Encounter with Christ (Notre Dame: Ave Maria, 2000).

Wilfrid Stinissen, a Swedish Carmelite priest, expanded a set of four lectures for Roman Catholic clergy into this slim volume, which gently and broad-mindedly describes spiritual direction as one form of pastoral care, distinguishing it from and relating...

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