One’s idea of self is inseparable from a concomitant image of God. It is through spiritual conversations over time that many directees are able to get past a certain fear and awe of God that they have grown up with and let God engage their eyes in prayer. To look God in the eye, as it were, draws us to the truth of God’s love and the truth of ourselves as lovable. As Saint Paul says in his Letter to the Ephesians, it is the experience of God that surpasses all knowledge. Through experiences of God, belief gives way to knowledge, which carries its own kind of certitude.

Our lives seem to be fraught with fears of all sorts. We fear the possibility of a terrorist attack; we endure multiple fears caused by our present economic disaster. More personally, we fear our own inadequacy, of being found to be less than we project to others; we fear being out of control; we fear God; and the list goes on. Yet God, we can be sure, desires us to have tranquil hearts, and it is through God that we come to the peace that the world cannot provide. Spiritual direction is one key that can open us to this peace, by leading us to approach God despite our fears and let divine, gratuitous love expel them.

IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that spiritual direction assumes prayerfulness. Any attempt at a spiritual life will fall flat without prayer. Prayer is the experience of and the expression of relationship with God. Sometimes it is verbal, but most often it is wordless. There are times for formal prayer, but most of our days are spent in other concentrations. One object of spiritual direction is to assist folks to experience God in all things, always and everywhere, not only in formal prayer. This takes time and practice and brings with it a rich reward.

Spiritual direction is about relationships. Indeed, all of our lives are about relationships—with God, with ourselves, with our families, with the Church, with those we love and with those we find hard to love, even with Earth and our place in the universe. All of these relationships, when brought to spiritual direction, hold the potential to deepen and enrich our very being. Spiritual direction brings us face-to-face with the power of grace. We become more alert to a kind of soul-joy in responding to grace, which is simply another name for divine love poured out in us and through us to the waiting universe. Is it any wonder that we are seeing a growing hunger for this instrument of God’s grace?

Sister Marian Cowan is a spiritual life consultant and artist from St. Louis, Missouri. She is the author of a chapter in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions, Norvene Vest, editor.