Parents as Spiritual Directors

Then little children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them; but Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.’ And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.[1]

Who would doubt Jesus’ sincerity about wanting children to come to him? Yet the actions of many in the church imply that we don’t believe children can really access the depths of relationship with Christ. There are challenges associated with the spirituality of children, to be sure, but against them stand the very nature of God and ancient practices that can assist children on the way.

Challenge

When I was a teenager I was delighted to be ministering to children. I felt called to children’s ministry as a child and as a teenager I was already realizing the dream.  However, one Sunday morning shook my convictions so violently that, for a time, I abandoned the thought of ministry to children. A new pastor had just taken over the children’s ministry that I had been running with some friends. I was helping her this particular Sunday when she invited the children to respond to a salvation message. I saw many children finding places of prayer, asking Jesus to be their Savior.  Instead of producing joy, this event rocked me to my core.  Many of these children were already saved and had in the weeks and months before been finding places of prayer to deepen their relationships with God and seek the baptism in the Holy Spirit.  I was immediately faced with the question: Can children understand this spiritual life? Is the richness of relationship with the triune God available to them?

Today, I am the father of five-year-old Foster and seven-year-old Ella. This challenge comes home to me as I attempt to use all of my training as a children’s pastor to help them find their own experiences of God. Ella is naturally more interested in the things of God. Foster is younger and is at a stage where “Jesus things” are boring.  Exploring Foster’s spirituality with him is even more challenging. I have come to believe that the wealth of spiritual relationship is for them, yet those questions from my teen years spur me on to study how that spiritual growth happens.

Worldview

The stakes are high.  The majority of people who come to faith in Christ will do so as children. At the same time the church is facing high numbers of young adults abandoning their faith as they enter college. Their worldview is challenged, and for many, who have made a black-and-white, inflexible structure of beliefs and ideas, their faith will topple.

George Barna gives a litany of statistics profiling the children of our nation.  Fewer than three out of ten fourth graders read at grade level. One in ten teenagers report to having had sex before their thirteenth birthday. One of every ten eighth graders smoke daily and one out of three were drunk in the past year.[2]  While Barna points out that these statistics don’t represent a crisis, and children on the whole do pretty well in spite of messy lives, he says, “Our nations children will struggle to maintain a healthy balance in life.”[3] The trajectory of statistics suggests that, “The end result of growing up in this challenging culture will be a country of adults whose standards have been lowered and whose sensitivities have been blunted.”[4] Barna suggests the missing factor, on which all these problems hinge, is spiritual health.

Rational Theology

The church has wrestled with what to do with children from the earliest days. There have been many questions.  Are children born innocent or guilty? What happens to an infant who dies before coming to Christ as savior? Does infant baptism redeem them? All of these questions have influenced the way that the church has dealt with the challenge of forming faith in young ones, and the church’s responses have created many challenges over the years. The challenges became that much more stark during the enlightenment when theology and spirituality became increasingly rational.

Two Extremes

The major solution to the questions posed by the church was the age of accountability. This idea proposed that children are in a special state of grace until such time as they can discern right from wrong. There has never been a consensus about what age that would occur and it has been left mostly subjective. Theologians come to this idea from two perspectives, the inherent innocence or guilt of the child. The early church, before the time of Augustine and his contemporaries, emphasized the child’s innocence.[5] For the early church it was this innocence that Jesus was commending to his followers as a subject for imitation. Augustine and some of his contemporaries argued for the immediate baptism of infants because their fallen nature would condemn them in death. The two extremes then are that children are innocent and nothing need be done for them, and that children are sinful and unbaptized children will not enter the Kingdom. In between these extremes is the special status of children before the age of accountability.[6]

The response of the church to these ideas falls on a continuum from inaction to zealous evangelism. If one holds completely to the innocence of children the danger is that no effort or value will be placed on developing the spirituality of children. Inaction is also the possible outcome of those who, trusting in infant baptism, leave the child’s spirituality alone until confirmation.  The same can be said of those who trust in a Christian family environment to protect a child. On the other hand, the revivalists of the enlightenment came to see children as the objects of intense evangelism, focusing on conversion, and then again possibly leaving the spiritual formation untouched.

Revivalist approach

During the enlightenment, revivalists were calling people to repentance and conversion.  They expected that men and women would come to rational terms with their sinfulness and turn to God. As the enlightenment came to a close, revivalists came to question the practice of leaving children in their sinfulness until such a time as they could have a conversion experience because they had reached a level of mental reasoning.[7] Figures such as D. L. Moody, Charles Finney and Edward Payson Hammond began to increase their efforts at evangelizing children. Yet the enlightenment/rationalist attitude toward children prevailed in church thought, as theories of cognitive development seemed to limit the kind of rational thinking about God in which children could be expected to engage.

Developmental theory

For years the church followed modernist thought, birthed out of the enlightenment, that spiritual development required high level, abstract reasoning skills, and was reserved for thinkers, intellectuals and academics.  It was not for the average Christian, let alone the child.  This thought dominated the research of children’s spirituality during the cognitive period of thought (1960-1990).[8] Based on the work of Jean Piaget, the prevailing thought of this period suggested that children developed in stages.  The cognitive ability to reason with the abstract doesn’t occur until adolescence. If that is the mark by which children are seen to have access to the spiritual richness found in Christ then young children would be excluded.

Fortunately for those interested in the spiritual development of their children, Piaget does not have the last word.  Erik Erikson’s stages of development offer insight into ways parents and other adults can help the child experience God.  In each of Erikson’s stages there is a core conflict being addressed by the individual with one of two outcomes. In infancy the conflict is between trust and mistrust.  The parent then can aid the spirituality of the child by helping him or her learn to trust mom and dad. As the toddler begins the struggle between autonomy versus shame and doubt the parent can help the child learn self-control without losing self-esteem. Children at this stage learn they have a will and also how to submit to the will of another. From four to six the child struggles between initiative and guilt. Not only does he or she test boundaries but also develops conscience. These are important parts of the development of the child morally and the parent can offer guidance through these and every stage of life under his or her care.[9]

Stage theory has its limitations, however. Many people looked to the developmental stages offered by Piaget, Erikson and others to determine how best to nurture the spirituality of children. One problem with this is that “a descriptive account of what is does not automatically lead to a prescriptive account of what can or should be.”[10]  Building lessons and methods based on generalized ideas about the cognitive level of a group will leave children who are ahead or behind the mark frustrated. On the other hand children can often rise to a challenge set before them.

Another note is that much of the research into what children could experience spiritually was based on what they said about their spiritual experiences. This is limited by their ability to use language.  One cannot assume because the child’s ability to express a spiritual experience is limited, that the experience itself is limited.[11]

Along came the recent work of Rebecca Nye and David Hay to answer these concerns.  They found that behind the language and descriptions of the children there was a common thread. The core of the spirituality of children, they found, was a relational consciousness. Those experiences that were spiritual in nature were times when the child had a heightened consciousness of his or her relationship to the reality around them.  The exciting thing to note is that this is not directly tied to cognitive development.  Nye and Hay’s research demonstrates that the core of spirituality is available to children and can be nurtured. The challenge then is how do adults best nurture the unique spiritual lives of children?  There is a wealth of material that has emerged recently about children’s spirituality and the implications for formation.

Theological Foundation

There is no better place to look for a foundation for our treatment of children’s spirituality than in the very nature of God.  In his breathtaking book, The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer bookends his discussion of the attributes of God by drawing the tension between two chapters, “God Incomprehensible” and “The Open Secret.” These two attributes will serve us well as we approach the spirituality of children.

The incomprehensible God

God is completely other. Our minds cannot conceive of something so outside our experiences. Tozer notes, that even the mythical creatures of lore are nothing more than fanciful versions of creatures known to human experience in nature.[16]  In God there is no such point of reference that can accurately capture who God is.  We make comparisons in order to understand truths about God, but they are sorry approximations of the reality of the Transcendent.

Faced with the awesome reality of God, our minds completely fail.  No creative imagination of child or adult can create majesty so resplendent as to be worthy of God.  No amount of logic and systematic theology can draw the outline of God’s boundaries. Volumes have been written and myriad traditions guard numerous sacred truths, and yet God is not known in true fullness.

For many the idea that God is ultimately beyond our mental capacity is disconcerting. We have learned to distrust mystery and fear that which we cannot know.  How can we be confident in our relationship with God if we can never know God fully? For those who wonder if children can have access to God before they have the capacity to comprehend God, however, this is good news.  Children are in good company! Not one of us can apprehend God with our minds.

Apophatic Spirituality

Words sometimes get in the way of our understanding of our experiences with God. This is true for adults as well as children. Apophatic spirituality is an ancient way of approaching God without words.  This way affirms that God cannot be apprehended by the intellect but can be apprehended by love.

The fourteenth century English mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing, spoke of putting all the good and valuable things under a cloud of forgetting and placing our naked intent before the cloud of unknowing.[17] We are invited to “beat upon that thick cloud of unknowing with the dart of your loving desire and do not cease come what may.”[18]

Try to understand this point.  Rational creatures such as men and angels possess two principal faculties, a knowing power and a loving power. No one can fully comprehend the uncreated God with his knowledge; but each one, in a different way, can grasp him fully through love.  Truly this is the unending miracle of love: that one loving person, through his love, can embrace God, whose being fills and transcends the entire creation.  And this marvelous work of love goes on forever for he whom we love is eternal.[19]

I am reminded of Hay and Nye’s work in children’s spirituality. Words often limit the child’s ability to describe the spiritual experience. In some cases, even the religious language became a fall back to which children retreated to hide from the reality of what they experienced.[20] Apophatic spirituality is about apprehending God with love. This resonates with the core of children’s spirituality as found by Rebecca Nye: relational consciousness. Even without the higher, abstract, reasoning capacities garnered in adolescence, children still experience the spiritual as relationship. For Christian children this means experiencing their love for God and God’s love for them. Five-year-old Foster can say, “Do you know how much I love my whole family? As much as I love Jesus!” In that statement he is aware of his special relationship with his family and with God through Jesus Christ.  That is intensely spiritual, though he and children like him may struggle with their young minds to understand the nature of that relationship.

The constant voice of God

While no person can apprehend God by his or her intellect, God delights in revealing the Divine nature to us. God’s voice is constantly speaking and self-revelation is almost a compulsion for God.  It seems to me that all of creation exists so that God can express God’s Divine nature. Scripture is the story of God with us, God’s self-revelation, and also contains evidence of God’s compulsion. God walks with Adam.  God covenants with Abraham.  God speaks to Moses as to a friend. In the ultimate act of self-revelation, God became man in the person of Jesus Christ who is the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.”[21]

At the end of his chapter “God Incomprehensible,” Tozer says that while we will never know what God is like in God’s self, we can know the things God has revealed.[22] “The Open Secret” is that we each may know God in relationship.

To know God is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world. It is easy because the knowledge is not won by hard mental toil, but is something freely given. As sunlight falls free on the open field, so the knowledge of the holy God is a free gift to men who are open to receive it.But this knowledge is difficult because there are conditions to be met and the obstinate nature of fallen man does not take kindly to them.[23]

The conditions that he describes are the disciplines. The voice of God is constantly speaking to us.  It rolls on like a river from eternity past. The disciplines put us in a place where that grace can wash over us. The voice of God’s self revelation, as Tozer put it, is like sunlight surrounding us and bathing us in its light. Children are constantly surrounded by the speaking voice of God.  It may speak to them from the beauty of nature.  It may even come when wrapped in wonder over the water running from a tap.[24]  The voice is constantly speaking, though we may not always recognize it.  Adults and children, alike, benefit from someone who will help them listen.

Biblical Philosophy

Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.  And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. And he arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant hears.’”[25]

In this story Samuel hears the voice of God for the first time. It takes three interruptions of his sleep for Eli to realize what was happening, but he is finally able to help his young charge recognize the voice of God.

Scripture repeatedly affirms that God speaks to children.  To the child, Jeremiah, God says,

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
And before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.[26]

Jeremiah protests that he is too young to speak to the nations, but God affirms that God has placed Jeremiah even as a youth over nations and kingdoms to deliver God’s word.

To Timothy, Paul writes,

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.[27]

Often we exalt the testimonies of those who have dramatic adult conversions.  How much more wonderful is it, however, for a person to be able to say with Samuel or Jeremiah or Timothy, I have known the voice of God since I was a child?

God’s use of the family

Timothy was the child and grandchild of godly women. Paul is reminded, as he writes 2 Timothy 1:5, of the sincere faith of Timothy’s grandmother Lois, and mother Eunice. God used Timothy’s family to stir in him “a sincere faith.”  The family is God’s chosen instrument to form the faith of little ones.  In Deuteronomy 6, Moses instructs parents to pass on the commands he is giving them.  The imagery he uses is continual, daily and creative. Parents are to talk when they get up and when they lay down, when they walk on the road and when they stay home.  The commandments are to be written on the walls and gates and tied to their hands and foreheads. There is symbolism and constant reminder offered through the context of the family.

Barna reports that, “four out of five parents (85%) believe that they have the primary responsibility for the moral and spiritual development of their children, but more than two thirds of them abdicate that responsibility to the church.”[28]  God has uniquely equipped the family with nearly constant contact and given them the tools to nurture spiritual formation. The church has never found a better way and must help families fulfill this high calling.

Model

How then can parents help children come to recognize the constantly speaking voice of God? There is a strategy for doing just that, which has been practiced for centuries: Spiritual Direction.

Spiritual Direction

Spiritual direction is a relationship in which three people enter into a conversation: the person seeking direction, the director and the Holy Spirit. There is one purpose to this meeting, helping the person recognize the voice of the Spirit. The director listens and asks questions of the person while all the time listening to the Spirit.  The person tells about his or her experiences with life or prayer where they might be conscious of the relationship with God. The director simply helps them see and hear more clearly and pay attention to elements of richness they might otherwise miss.

Brief overview

This relationship is different than counseling or coaching. In those contexts two people meet before God to pursue a human goal, while in spiritual direction, the person and God meet in the presence of a witness, the director, to pursue God’s goal.[29] The director is another set of eyes and ears, a mirror to reflect the conversation back to the person experiencing God’s voice.

The spiritual direction meeting, then, is a place of prayer.  When I sit down with my daughter, Ella, for spiritual direction, we light a candle and spend a little time in silence to become aware of the presence of Jesus. I want to establish an atmosphere of prayer. Both the director and the person need to approach direction with this attitude of prayer. Prayer is when “the human heart discloses itself to God and is open to listen and respond.”[30]  In spiritual direction the director is invited to listen along.

Effective spiritual direction meetings depend on both people intending to listen attentively for the Holy Spirit, which leans more toward patient waiting than active striving to hear God.  Prayer becomes a mixture of activity and passivity: an active intentionality to be available to the Spirit and a passive open willingness that invites God to set agendas for spiritual direction conversations.  Directees do not need to have what they describe as an outstanding or successful prayer life.  But they do need to be willing to pray regularly and explore the Spirit’s invitations.  The willingness of directors and directees to continue to pray and seek God even when prayer is not satisfying or comfortable is essential for spiritual direction to take place.[31]

The role of the director is to ask questions that help the person recognize where God might be speaking, and at same time listen to the Spirit speaking in order to give feedback or direct questions to where God would have them go. The job is not an easy one. It takes full active attention to the person telling about his or her experiences with God.  At the same time, the director is listening with wrapped attention to the stirrings of the Spirit.  From the Spirit, the director may sense what parts of the person’s story are important, what to press, and where to ask questions.  The director may also hear from the Spirit a special word of encouragement or direction for the person. The director must also have a high view of the individual sitting across from him or her. Thomas Merton writes, “A true director can never get over the awe he feels in the presence of a person, an immortal soul, loved by Christ, washed in His most Precious Blood, and nourished by the sacrament of His Love.”[32]

Parents as spiritual directors

In order to minister to children, I am convinced one must approach them with just the kind of awe and humility Merton writes about.  We must be convinced that the spiritual needs of our children are as important as our own and that the charge of nurturing that spiritual formation is a high and holy calling.  Spiritual direction can be an intimate setting, as the sharer and the director both lay their souls bare to receive from the Spirit. It is appropriate for parents to serve in this very intimate position.

After centering into the presence of Jesus, the director usually asks something like, “So, where have you felt close to God this week?” However, it could be a month since the last meeting.  That is common for adults, who have full hour sessions, but I have found in directing my own children, that fifteen to twenty-minute sessions, weekly, work out better.

The child then goes on to tell the stories about where they have felt God.  It may be a special time at church, or maybe they felt Jesus playing with them, or helping them with their schoolwork.  Often the discussion centers on some experience of prayer.  If the child doesn’t have experiences from which to draw, the parent can help the child with these experiences throughout the week. Going on prayer journeys from The Praying Family or exploring disciplines from Habits of a Child’s Heart may be very helpful here.

The parent as director listens to the story, asking questions for clarification. Here, the parent must resist the urge to correct the experience or interject a moral lesson.  The role of the director isn’t to teach but to listen and draw out from the child conclusions about where and how God is speaking to him or her.

Spiritual direction is also helpful in times of stress or crisis for the child. When Ella was having a hard time at school, spiritual direction became a safe place for her to rest in the love of daddy and Jesus.  When we found out that she was being bullied, I led her through a healing prayer meditation where she actually took her bullies to Jesus! She was imagining Jesus was with her, and she asked him where he was when she was being bullied. Jesus showed her that he was right behind her, following her every step.  This is an image she can take with her, and when she feels threatened or hurt she can lean into Jesus or turn and give him a hug.

For a parent to become good at directing his or her children, it is important that they find a spiritual director themselves. The direction sessions will not only help them find where God is speaking to them but introduce and strengthen techniques and methods for being a good director. A parent may also want to find an experienced director to supervise the parent’s direction of his or her children. A supervision relationship helps the director see blind spots in his or her own life that may affect the ability to effectively direct the child.  A supervisor normally listens to a recounting of the director’s session with an ear to what is happening in the director and between the director and God.

Conclusion

The spiritual direction approach is consistent with what we have discovered about children’s spirituality.  Spiritual direction like this may well be the missing component to the spiritual development of children. They get the cognitive lessons through Sunday school, devotions and stories, but the relational consciousness can be developed through conversations like these. As we build a foundation of experience of relationship with God, we help children find something that cannot be taken away.  A worldview can be challenged, beliefs can be shaken, but when a child experiences his or her own relationship with God, that story can never be denied.

Bibliography

Allen, Holly Catterton, ed. Nurturing Children's Spirituality: Christian Perspectives and Best Practices. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008.

Anthony, Michael J, ed. Perspectives on Children's Spiritual Formation: Four Views. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006.

Bakke, Jannette A. Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000.

Barna, George. Transforming Children Into Spirtual Champions. Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2003.

Barry, William A., and William J Connolly. The Practice of Spiritual Direction. New York: HarperCollins, 1982.

Beckwith, Ivy. Postmodern Children's Ministry: Ministry to Children in the 21st Century Church . Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004.

Butts, Kim. The Praying Family: Creative Ways To Pray Together. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003.

Coles, Robert. The Spiritual Life of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.

Hart, Tobin. The Secret Spiritual World of Children: The Breakthrough Discovery that Profoundly Alters Our Conventional View of Children's Mystical Experiences. Makawao, HI: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003.

Hay, Robert, and Rebecca Nye. The Spirit of the Child: Revised Edition. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006.

Hess, Valerie E., and Marti Watson Garlett. Habits of a Child's Heart: Raising Your Kids With the Spiritual Disciplines. Colorado Springs: Navpress Publishing Group, 2004.

Johnston, William, ed. The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. New York: Doubleday, 1973.

Mapes, Patricia, and Greg Mapes. Raising Spiritual Children: Cultivating a Revelatory Life. Dayton, OH: Nexus Institute, 2009.

Merton, Thomas. Spiritual Direction & Meditation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1960.

Ratcliff, Donald, ed. Children's Spirituality: Christian Perspectives, Spirituality And Applications. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2004.

Stonehouse, Catherine. Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey: Nurturing a Life of Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998.

Temple, Gray. "Spiritual Direction in the Episcopal Tradition." In Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls, by Gary W. Moon and David G. Benner, 78-95. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2004.

Tozer, A. W. The Knowledge of the Holy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1961.

Yust, Karen Marie. Real Kids, Real Faith: Practices for Nurturing Children's Spiritual Lives . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.

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[1] Matthew 19:13-15 (NRSV).

[2] George Barna, Transforming Children Into Spirtual Champions (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2003) 18-21.

[3] Barna, 26.

[4] Barna, 26.

[5] Holly Catterton Allen, ed., Nurturing Children's Spirituality: Christian Perspectives and Best Practices, ed. Holly Catterton Allen (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), 64-66.

[6] Donald Ratcliff, ed., Children's Spirituality: Christian Perspectives, Spirituality And Applications, ed. Donald Ratcliff (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2004), 55.

[7] Michael J Anthony, ed., Perspectives on Children's Spiritual Formation: Four Views, ed. Michael J Anthony (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), 26.

[8] Allen, 26.

[9] Catherine Stonehouse, Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey: Nurturing a Life of Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 48-58.

[10] Allen, 32.

[11] Robert Hay and Rebecca Nye, The Spirit of the Child: Revised Edition (Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006), 60.

[12] Michael J Anthony, ed., Perspectives on Children's Spiritual Formation: Four Views, ed. Michael J Anthony (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), 14.

[13] Tobin Hart, The Secret Spiritual World of Children: The Breakthrough Discovery that Profoundly Alters Our Conventional View of Children's Mystical Experiences (Makawao, HI: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003), 7.

[14] So Ratcliff (Allen, 34.), and others in Children’s Spirituality (Ratcliff).

[15] William A. Barry and William J Connolly, The Practice of Spiritual Direction (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), 21.

[16] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1961), 10.

[17] Tozer, 15.

[18] William Johnston, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, ed. William Johnston (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 55.

[19] Johnston, 50.

[20] “On the other hand, the disadvantage of encouraging children to talk in religious terms was that it tended to trigger off impersonal ‘learned’ responses rather than reference the child’s personal experience” (Hay and Nye, 88).

[21] Hebrews 1:3

[22] Tozer, 16-17.

[23] Tozer, 180.

[24] Hay and Nye, 122.

[25] 1 Samuel 2:7-9a (RSV).

[26] Jeremiah 1:5 (RSV).

[27] 2 Timothy 3:14-15 (RSV).

[28] Barna, 77-78. Also Allen, 255.

[29] Gray Temple, "Spiritual Direction in the Episcopal Tradition," in Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls, 78-95 (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2004), 91.

[30] Jannette A. Bakke, Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 39.

[31] Bakke, 39.

[32] Thomas Merton, Spiritual Direction & Meditation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1960), 34.