Last week I took a pilgrimage. After some helpful prodding and encouragement from my wife, I finally sought out a spiritual director again. When my ordination fiasco began in the fall of 2008, I decided it was important for me to process through the experience with someone who would help me listen for the voice of God amidst the chaos. Thus began a relationship with a spiritual director that lasted about 16 months. It was definitely helpful and helped me to clarify some things going on in my life at that time.
However, summer began, I had to cancel one appointment, and then…I just never got back in touch with my spiritual director. I suppose that’s the way it goes sometimes…we have good intentions and then life happens, and things kind of get thrown out of whack.
My initial desire to seek out that spiritual director arose out of a moment of crisis. I think those can often be very important times to meet with a spiritual director. But this time it was different.
I remember at a Youth Specialties conference when I first started in youth ministry after college. I heard someone talk about the spiritual life of someone in ministry by using the example that anyone who has flown on an airplane would be familiar with: “Please put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to help anyone else with theirs.” The idea being that you will be pretty useless if you can’t breathe yourself.
The analogy to a life of ministry is obvious: if we’re not feeding our souls, aware of the presence of God in our own lives, how are we going to be able to help others to do the same?
So it was with this desire that I got on my scooter in Livermore and drove to the Dublin/Pleasanton BART Station. Then I took an hour long BART ride into San Francisco and got off at the Glen Park station. From there, it’s a half-mile walk straight uphill to my spiritual director’s house. It was a warm day when I did it and by the time I got to the top of the hill, I stopped at the corner for a few minutes so I didn’t knock on the door completely out of breath.
I mentioned on Twitter how I was going to be making this trek, and someone else commented that it was essentially a pilgrimage that I was doing. The dictionary defines pilgrimage as:
a journey, esp. a long one, made to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion.
Both the time spent traveling to and from my spiritual direction appointment now has a sense of sacred time. After my appointment, I walked down the hill, grabbed dinner in this very funky little corner coffeehouse that served crepes for dinner and began the journey home. It did – in a way – feel like thin time: time that I was alone, focused on myself, thinking about our conversation, the various invitations that my director gave me.
And so it begins – a new relationship with a new spiritual director…a bit further than my previous director geographically, but in the end, I think it will be time well spent as I make the journey. I’m excited about what I am going to learn about myself and God and am open to the new ways in which the Spirit wants to be working in my life.
It’s a useful thing, and necessary, for pastors to have people they can go to in order to explore and expand their faith. I’ve known many pastors who have taken advantage of spiritual directors, and they’ve grown from it.
One question this always raises for me, though, is wondering about how this clear need for spiritual nourishment reflects the character of our relationships with our congregations. That we often don’t have a place to grow and develop in our connection to God within our congregational and denominational contexts seems…well…like something is amiss.
And what is “thin time?”
That is a good question…one that does seem a bit amiss with me as well…I’ll have to think more about that.
I think that “thin time” – as I meant it above – is just another form of “thin space” or “thin places.” To me – that term has always meant that the veil between the holy and the mundane…or the sacred and whatever else we encounter in this world (though I’m aware that tends to smack a bit of a dualistic nature of understanding our world) is just that much “thinner” in certain spaces….and I think in certain times as well.
There was just something holy about walking down the hill and eating the crepe – that otherwise, could have seemed like a rather normal, mundane task. But it wasn’t that way this time…does that help?
I love this post, Adam.
I know that you’ve been struggling with what to post here and how to use this space. I love hearing bits and pieces of your life like this – where you encounter the “thin spaces” and where you find your soul unexpectedly fed. There’s a vulnerability to this post, and a relatablility. I look forward to hearing this “voice” more often around here! Beautiful.
Thanks a lot Melissa – you’re right, I have been wondering what this space is going to become…I’m definitely searching for my “voice” and this was a fun post to write. As “daddy” posts are now moving over to http://www.DazedDad.com and more personal random life stuff moves to http://www.AdamWC.me/Facebook/Twitter, it’s been hard to figure out how best to use this space…
Thanks for the encouragement.
I thought the same thing on my way to Spiritual Direction last week in Marin – going there is like a pilgrimage for me. So grateful for those thin places!
Adam, what a wonderful post. Now that I’m on internship in a different state, I too have had to connect with a new spiritual director. My trek is not nearly as far as yours, just over to the next street, but as I walk over and back, I find myself processing our time together. It’s so helpful to have someone walk with us in this journey in a different way than our spouses do. Blessings on your continued pilgrimage.
We call them different terms. Mentor. Spiritual director. Discipler. Therapist? Accountability partner?
But to have someone we trust in a position of some influence is so important.
I wish I’d done this in my late 20s and early 30s like I did in my early 20s. I miss it a lot. And I’d be a better person today if I had.
By the way, I love the Rublyev icon. I have that hanging on my wall here. You ever studied that closely? Lotsa deep and fascinating and occasionally controversial trinitarianism in there.