All through my classes in The Art of Spiritual Direction, I heard it said that we seek the One who is seeking us.
To seek means to attempt to find. God does not need to find us; we are woven in God’s very being. The Weaver is not seeking; the Weaver is always seeing. This is a beautiful thing to know. It is God’s desire that we respond to that seeing, that we look back at that Face that is looking at us. What makes us look back? What makes us feel the tug of the thread? It can be anything, anything at all, because it is God who causes us to feel the movement.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I felt her life before the doctors and the books ever said that I would. It was an awareness of other, the slightest moving touch within. It felt like butterfly wings. From then on, and with each child, I waited for that touch. In large and small ways, the Other touches us, and we become aware. We feel the tug and look back. We wait for more.
We look at the God we have always known, forever imprinted in our souls, formed in the weaving, threaded into the design. In his book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr says God gives us “our unique blueprint, at our own ‘immaculate conception.’ Our unique little bit of heaven is installed by the Manufacturer within the product, at the beginning!” God is within us, and what an Eden it would be if we never forgot it.
We do, though. We lose our way, build our empires, find religion and lose God, and get tangled up in threads of our own making. All along, God is gently tugging at the thread that is our soul. Sometimes we feel the pull, we feel the touch of the Other, and we awaken again. We glimpse the Face and want to see more. Sometimes we come to spiritual direction to get a closer look.
When we are looking for God, we are seeking ourselves. We want to know what it means to have a relationship with God. The psalmist asked, “What are humans that you are mindful of them, / mere mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:4). We ourselves, and the directees who come to us, often have no idea what God sees when he looks at us. Many factors distort our perception, and we need to clear away what clouds our vision. As we see God more clearly, we see ourselves more clearly. Spiritual direction can be a way to clear the clouds.
We also are often confused about how to be in relationship with God. How do we do it? More prayer? Less prayer? What is prayer anyway? Should we go on a retreat? Join a Bible study group? Read more? Oy! We, along with our directees, are hoping to figure this out. It is always “we and our directees,” because we directors are just other directees on the journey. Maybe we’re further along the path than those who come to us, and maybe we’re not! It is essential, however, that we faithfully attend to our spiritual lives in order to be of use to God and of service to those who come to us for direction. If we are not seeking God, we cannot help others in their search.
God’s whole being comes to our aid in our search. God awakens our seeking, loves us beyond all measure, delights in our uniqueness, causes us to trust, listens deeply to our yearnings, accompanies us on our journey, gives us evidence of his existence, heals us, and welcomes us home. These are God’s tools, and they are tools for the spiritual director as well. We know that those who come to us are seeking God. With the Holy Spirit to guide us, our directees may come to see how much God loves them. We appreciate and take joy in their individuality. As we companion them on their spiritual journey, listening to them with holy intent, their trust in us, in the process, and in God, will grow. We rejoice with them when they see the evidence God is giving them of his presence and movement in their lives. We watch their healing happen. We watch God welcome them home again and again.
As we look together into the Face of the Holy One, we are transformed. The psalmist asked for one thing:
To dwell in the Lord’s house
all the days of my life,
To gaze on the Lord’s beauty,
to visit his temple.” (Psalm 27:4)
Gazing deeply at this beauty with an open heart allows God to change us. We shine with the radiance of God’s glory, and we become God’s light in the world.
To watch this happen, and to be a part of this process, is the greatest joy of my life.