If you are reading this, then obviously you are looking for a spiritual director. I personally don’t feel that you should trust me (or anyone else frankly), with the care of your soul until you know something about the person who may be tending to it. To that end, let me tell you a little bit about myself and my own journey.
I was raised as a Catholic. From my earliest memories I remember attending mass. For the first two years of elementary school, I attended a Catholic parochial school where all children were required to go to mass in the morning before the school day started. While mostly this experience involved a lot of restlessness and boredom, there was Something I encountered occasionally in this space that even to a seven-year-old felt quite profound. I wouldn’t have the language to describe it until many years later as an adult, but I think what was happening to my child self was what Thomas Merton poetically describes as the “in breaking of God“ – moments of profound beauty that even a child could recognize as pure gift.
Like many of you, my teen and early adult years were a time of searching, rebellion, and distancing myself from the tradition I had been raised in. While I was not participating in any sort of organized religion from my college days onward, I had certainly not abandoned any sort of belief in God either. When our first child was born in my late 20s, I recognized a need and desire to return to some sort of religious community, but I had not married a Catholic and my husband had no desire to convert. Thus began my foray into the Protestant tradition. We joined a Presbyterian Church and I studied Calvin. Like a lot of converts, I became zealous for my newfound faith identity and fairly derisive towards the Catholic tradition that had raised me. Several years later, I would find myself attending a United Methodist Church which finally felt like the perfect fit. Our family joined this denomination in 1998 and it’s been our home ever since, though my notions of any church being a “perfect fit” have long since vanished.
Though my Raleigh home church is flawed and imperfect (as all churches are), I grew in faith as a member of this UMC. I learned a good deal about grace and forbearance here. I learned how to study the Bible here. I learned about service here. (I learned a whole lot of good things here). I also learned about painful, dysfunctional, divisive community when this same church nearly split in 2012 and a reconciling team from the conference had to be brought in to rescue us from total destruction and chaos. Fully half of the church no longer trusted the other half, and many people left. It was a dark and difficult time. This event, along with a series of very painful personal losses around the same time, cut deep and left me feeling completely unmoored, rudderless, and lost. The faith I had known was no longer somehow the faith I was left holding. Everything felt like it was in tatters and nothing felt certain anymore. I was entering a time of desert wandering, though I couldn’t have told you that then, nor did I have any knowledge of what it was or the language to describe it. The mystics, however, call this season the dark night of the soul.
Dark Night events are a strange thing. You aren’t depressed but you may be carrying a deep nameless grief. You are completely functional, but you feel as fragile as a china tea cup. To the outside world you appear perfectly fine and normal, but inside you feel as though you are being swallowed by quicksand. Your deepest fear is that someone will notice you are struggling. You most ardent wish is that anyone would notice your pain. Paradoxical, but true. My own dark night of wandering in the wilderness would last for a solid year, and then take a year beyond that before I began to sense that I had somehow crossed over into a place of resurrected life. What would emerge for me from this season of struggle and deconstruction was a very clear calling to become a spiritual director. It was unmistakable, and I began pursuing my calling in the summer of 2013 at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Virginia.
Spiritual directors can be thought of as companions and guides. One reason you might consider me as a sacred traveling companion is because I have traveled over a whole lot of ground in my own faith journey with God. I understand the struggles, the pitfalls, the hurts, the confusion, the joys, the sorrows, the aches, the longings, the questions, the doubts, the fears- in short: the humanity we all experience as we wrestle with God.
The beauty of my story is that God has brought me full circle back to my Catholic roots now that I am in my 50s. As the poet TS Elliott has so profoundly written “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” In my dark night period I began reading a Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr, founder of The Center for Action and Contemplation(CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work spoke so profoundly to me that I devoured book after book. In 2014 I applied to a brand new program through the CAC called The Living School, and was accepted into the third cohort (Class of 2017). All the beautiful and wonderful that I was drawn to as a small child has been lovingly given back to me as an adult, and indeed- I now truly “know it for the first time”. I consider myself to be an honorary Franciscan, the CAC is my soul home, the UMC remains my home base for service, and I feel much like a hybrid of the best of all that I have gleaned from the various streams of the Christian tradition (mixed in with some liberal doses of Sufi mysticism – Rumi and Hafez, anyone?)
So- if any of this resonates with you, then meander over to the “contact me” link, send me a message, and we’ll talk. I regard all newcomers who show up on my doorstep seeking spiritual direction as envoys from The Beloved. You are welcome here in whatever state your soul is in.
Namaste!