When I engage in spiritual direction, both as the seeker and as the director, I feel like we are putting a signal out for Mystery.  Mystery?

Just as you are thinking about a creative approach to a job solution at work, the phone rings, and it’s a colleague wondering whether a certain approach would solve the problem. It’s the same idea you were toying with.

You are spending the afternoon playing in the yard with your four year old when out of nowhere, they say: isn’t the air around the tree so special? The words, the observation, the requirement that you look at the air around the tree all blow through you like a runaway train. Where did that come from? And then, the play continues.

You find yourself sitting by the hospital bed of a beloved who has for days been comatose. For a sudden moment, they open their eyes, speak gently to you about something that matters to you, and then they slip quietly back to the work of their transition.

You have run out of your house to fetch the mail from the mailbox that stands on the street. As you come back to the door like you have a thousand times, you see it right there on the brick and concrete porch–a tiny flower is growing up out of a crack and has produced a single bloom. What are the chances that all the conditions for this to happen would come together?

From the most unbelievable to the most mundane of experiences we have these moments of the awareness of the Mystery that we are constantly living in. The potential for the awareness of Mystery is always with us. It seems especially alive in children. It seems to fade into a back room of our consciousness as we become adults, and then, for circumstances in or out of our control, we find ways to bring it forward again.

When I engage in spiritual direction, both as the seeker and as the director, I feel like we are putting the signal out to Mystery that we are here, that we are willing, that we are open to that kind of consciousness in our lives. 

~Robert Patrick

If you think spiritual direction is something you want to try out, go here for help getting started.