Spiritual Direction

Spiritual direction names a sustained one-to-one relationship in which a person seeking growth in prayer and religious life meets regularly with a trained guide for reflection and discernment. It is worth stating plainly that the practice has at least two largely separate histories, and grouping them together describes a resemblance rather than a claim of shared origin.

The Christian form traces to the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries, hermits and monastics sought out by others for counsel on temptation, prayer and the discipline of a solitary religious life, recorded later in collections of their sayings. The practice was given a systematic, structured form in the sixteenth century by Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises turned an informal mentoring relationship into a defined, staged program that a director leads a directee through over a set period, a model still used well beyond the Jesuit order that produced it.

Sufism holds a comparable relationship between a murshid, an authorized spiritual guide, and a murid, the disciple placed under instruction, but this relationship is structured around initiation into a particular order and the transmission of that order's own practices rather than around anything derived from the Christian model. The two traditions did not borrow this practice from each other. Each built a version of it independently to answer a need common to disciplined religious life, sustained personal guidance rather than teaching delivered to a crowd.

Naming both under spiritual direction states that family resemblance honestly. It does not assert that a directee in a parish and a murid under a Sufi shaykh are undergoing the same thing.

Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises is the text that gave Christian spiritual direction its systematic form, and the book itself is worth describing directly. It is not written for the person undergoing direction to read alone. It is a manual for the director, a set of instructions for guiding another person through roughly thirty days of structured prayer, organized into four movements Ignatius calls weeks, though they are not fixed at seven days each. The first week works through sin and God's mercy, the second walks through the public ministry of Christ using imaginative meditation, the third moves through the Passion, and the fourth through the Resurrection.

Threaded through all four weeks is the examen, a short daily review in which the person looks back over the day to notice where they felt drawn toward God and where they felt pulled away, and a set of rules Ignatius calls the discernment of spirits, for telling which inward movements are worth trusting. Both practices outlasted the thirty day retreat itself and are now standard tools in spiritual direction well outside Jesuit circles.

A later adaptation, called the Nineteenth Annotation after the numbered instruction in Ignatius's own text that permits it, spreads the same sequence of exercises across several months of ordinary daily life rather than a single residential retreat, and it is this form, not the original thirty day version, that most people who undertake the Exercises today actually practice.