Yesterday I had a last Zoom class with a beloved professor of sacred scripture who is retiring. It ended with student comments that became increasingly pointed, sinking deeper and deeper into the heart. We who felt saturated by his gentle Franciscan wisdom and faith tried to put words to our gratitude and loss and deliver them to him. No doubt he has yet to recover from our comments. We will never recover from all we learned, especially about things hidden beneath the story of scripture—the words of God that are awesome and disorienting.
This strange new way of holding class may have, who knows, resulted in a bolder revealing of sentiment than we would have managed in person. Certainly, the situation of pandemic that brought us together this way raised parts of ourselves more to the surface, even to face others through a screen. You know what this is like—connecting with the people in your life in new ways so as to suffer various means of technological disorientation. Sometimes the resulting communication is other than satisfactory.
It may be that you don’t have a webcam for online meetings and that, when it comes to seeing the people you want to connect with, you suffer a newfound blindness and heightened need for hearing. It may be that there is a problem with the sound in a video conference and you become an actor in a silent movie with exaggerated facial expressions. It may be that someone leaves their video on while they take off their sweater and you find yourself averting your eyes because this is all, in fact, so unexpectedly intimate. Through this frustration in trying to reach other we are facing an awesome and disorienting thing—our deep longing to communicate.
The beloved professor began every class by unpacking a psalm. “Psalms are prayers of disorientation and orientation,” he would say. Yesterday we read one written in gratitude after Israel’s deliverance from enemies. (The Hebrew word for enemies there means humanity and is the word from which Adam originates—this might broaden the psalm’s application in prayer for you.)
If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when our enemies attacked us, then they would have swallowed us up alive [disorientation]….We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. [orientation]. (Psalm 124:2-3, 7-8)
One of the professor’s last slides outlined themes in wisdom and contemplation. At the top of the list was one in which I recognized myself: “Spiritual Director.” I have taken a two-year course to help me fulfill my calling as such. “A spiritual director helps someone experiencing disorientation become reoriented toward God,” the beloved professor said through the screen, turning me back toward my calling.
My spiritually-directing colleagues and I complain of how that moniker does not describe what we do—only God is competent to direct. Anyone who behaves as though God has granted them a special competence beyond what we all have access to through faith, prayer and scripture is someone to be wary of. What spiritual directors do is help people notice and trust God’s desire to communicate with them through the “stuff” of their lives and their spiritual practices.
We do this through three-way listening—by being a point in a triangle with the directee and with God. We listen to the directee, we listen for what God might be saying or doing through what the directee says, and we listen to our own “stuff” so we can get ourselves out of God’s way. In other words, we are sensitive to our own disorientation and by being so we are a stable presence for others as their inner compass turns toward God.
People experienced in grace offer each other direction through the Spirit whether trained in spiritual direction or not. But I will use my training in what I write here because we are all being called to new and different ways of listening now. People’s need to be heard is mounting and, if it already has not already overwhelmed you, it might.
If you are home all day with children and having to teach them while yourself working in a new surrounding with new technology, you are likely overwhelmed sometimes.
If you are the only person another person sees every day, this is a lot. Perhaps even more so if you are alone having to listen to yourself all day.
If you are offering health care to someone, that would be enough work for anyone. But in this time of isolation you may find that you are also family, friends, therapist and priest—everything to this person, or perhaps to several people.
Holy Week and its readings and services are disorienting—they are meant to be. While in years past chocolate withdrawal and scripture were what made us feel unsettled and wonder what God might be up to and how we fall short, this year we are called to fast from receiving the Eucharist. You may, as I do, sense an absurdity here that directs you to challenge the limits you have placed on what it means to receive.
As a spiritual director—someone who has an absurdly named calling that can never be met—I can tell you that it is orthodox faith to know that you cannot manage all the above by yourself—doesn’t the Creed say there is only “one God”? You cannot provide the necessary direction in these disorienting circumstances to yourself or to others.
But you can listen. You can listen to the other person. You can listen to yourself. You can try to hear God and then after all that listening, tell or write down what you hear. Maybe you will find that you are called to something disorienting and even very hard, but great.