“For us, therefore, religious experience is to spiritual direction what foodstuff is to cooking. Without foodstuff there can be no cooking. Without religious experience there can be no spiritual direction” (Spiritual Direction in Practice 8).
Barry and Connoly give the work of spiritual direction as drawing out those times in life when God is interacting with the person they are directing. This means that the directee has to have had some kind of religious experience to draw on. Some prayer to discuss, maybe not even formal prayer, but the opening of the heart to God and experiencing him.
This got me thinking of the conversation I had with Dallas Willard. He wrote that the ecstatic experiences we Pentecostals cherish don’t build character. They are for something else, namely ministering to the body of Christ.
But they do provide religious experiences to draw on. A dutch reformed pastor who is on retreat with me related the story of a friend who went to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church during it’s famous revival. He went with his Ph.D. adviser as a sort of anthropological experiment. He even reluctantly went to be prayed over, being goaded by his adviser to study it. Those praying over him prayed some very specific things (like we experienced when we experimented with Spirit directed prayer during our January retreat). He was even “laid out” by the Spirit.
He now has that experience of the Spirit moving in his life to remember and know that it is real.
Perhaps those goose-bump moments and the excitement they produce do not by themselves develop character, but build faith and become the foodstuff for later spiritual direction.
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