The first time I ever heard the term "spiritual direction" was in my RCIA class. The married couple that lead my group mentioned that they went to a (female) spiritual director - they never said what that entailed and I didn't ask but I had scary visions of a spiritual drill sergeant :)
What made me think of this was an article I saw today by William Barry SJ - "Spiritual Direction in Daily Life" (you can download it here). The article gives a lot of information about how spiritual direction works but the little bit from the beginning of the article, which I've posted below, touches also on what I mentioned in my last post - beliefs about where God can be encountered. ....
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[...] Our definition of spiritual direction assumes that God is encountered in human experience, i.e., that experience can have a religious dimension.4 Ignatius presumed that anyone who made the Exercises would encounter God.5 But the points of the "Contemplation for Attaining Love" presume also that God is encountered in everyday life, not just during the Exercises. Our definition of spiritual direction makes the same assumption: God is always and everywhere active in this world, intent on attaining God’s purpose in creation. Moreover, with Ignatius we posit that God desires a personal relationship with everyone. Thus, at every moment we human beings are in contact with God who is active in the world. Everyone encounters God; there is no escaping this encounter. Every human experience is, among other things, an experience of God. That is, every human experience has a religious dimension.
However, we can be unaware of this dimension of our experience. There is nothing unusual about this state of affairs. We are unaware of many dimensions of our experience all the time. I can be so engrossed in listening to a piano concerto in a concert hall that I do not notice the coughing of my neighbor and am surprised later when my companion complains about the noise the neighbor made. Modern psychology has made us aware of how we can defend ourselves unconsciously against the awareness of anxiety-producing thoughts, feelings and sensations. Since awareness of God’s presence is, quite often, awe-inspiring if not downright terrifying, there is even more reason to expect that we will have difficulty noticing and taking account of experiences of God. Spiritual direction is encouraged, among other reasons, because of t he difficulty of noticing the religious dimension of experience.
Spiritual direction, as defined, is a form of spiritual conversation whose focus is the religious dimension of the experience of the one seeking direction.6 Spiritual directors make a covenant with their directees to help the latter develop their relationship with God. In this covenantal relationship directees agree to talk about what happens when they try to be in conscious relationship with God and directors agree to put all their resources at the disposal of directees to help them to deepen their relationship with God .......
4. Cf. William A. Barry, Spiritual Direction and the Encounter with God: A Theological Inquiry, 2nd Rev is e d Edition (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 2004) for a detailed discussion of the religious dimension of experience.
5. The 15th Annotation clearly assumes such an encounter, for example.
6. For want of better words I will use "directee" and "director" for the rest of this article.
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