The Training Of Spiritual Directors In The South African Context

The Jesuit Institute South Africa¹ first began training spiritual directors in 1999, shortly after the end of Apartheid. Our approach to spiritual direction and the training of people to accompany others on the spiritual journey is rooted in the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatian Spirituality has as a fundamental presupposition that God is to be found in all aspects of our human experience including cultural, personal, and societal historical. The idea of God being found in all of our human experience is a core Ignatian idea. It is found in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus written by St. Ignatius, in which he wrote that Jesuits should be exhorted “to seek God our Lord in all things.” He also wrote that “God’s majesty is present in all things, through his indwelling, through his working and through his essence, and can therefore be found in all things, in speaking, walking, seeing, tasting, hearing, thinking, and in whatever else we may do.”² The implication of this stance, which has been further explored by modern Ignatian writers³ is that God is to be found in the world and in our experience and hence spirituality cannot be split off from the context in which one lives.

In light of this, we want to highlight some of the issues which we believe are critical to training Spiritual Directors in a post-Apartheid South African context.⁴ We will begin by broadly outlining some key features of the South African context; we will then touch on one aspect of the work in the township context; and then finally move to looking at some of the challenges of the training and formation of Spiritual Directors in South Africa.

An important feature to note about working in spiritual direction in South Africa is that the legacy of Apartheid continues to shape and form people in subtle ways. Specifically we would like to highlight four particular areas that are apposite to anyone wishing to work in the ministry of spiritual direction. The first and most obvious is the damage done to people’s image of God during Apartheid. For non-white South Africans there may be damage done in terms of an image of a God who allows such pain and suffering. For non-white South Africans God may often be a distant figure who is not involved in the daily suffering of their lives.

By contrast, for many people in the white community, especially for those whose practice of faith was woven into the fabric of Apartheid, the fall of Apartheid and the subsequent exposure of it as evil, especially through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was a devastating blow that has left many ordinary Christians without a meaningful and viable faith. The classic analysis of Willem Verwoed,⁵ was that white South Africans either needed to acknowledge their own complicity in an evil regime, (and thus to completely rediscover a God of love and compassion), or to see everything in the new South Africa as dangerous and corrupt, in order to maintain their internal status quo.

The second area of damage caused by Apartheid that we encounter in spiritual direction, has to do with the formation of image of self, and self-esteem. We know that Bantu education had as a stated aim the mis-education of African people so that they should not, in the infamous words of the architect of Apartheid Hendrik Verwoed, aspire to be more than “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”⁶ The emphasis of education on servility, linked as it was with the everyday indignities of the pass system,⁷ the refusal to recognize non-Western forms of marriage, the invasiveness of The Immorality and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act,⁸ as well as the limitations of movement and the limitation of access to public spaces all served to ensure that non-white South Africans were made to feel like lesser beings.

Steve Biko in his critique of Apartheid explored in depth not...