Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems.
Can it?
This is the second half of our new series with Cami Mann, "The Forum on Spiritual Direction.’ In this session Cami beautifully invites us into her journey in and out and back into her Catholic faith practice. She shares some of her own trauma, and begins to map out the unique charism of her trauma informed practice of spiritual direction.
In the scope of this series, you are invited to engage at least two zoom conversations and to even attend an in-person retreat. Details on these events along with a working outline of the Forum can be found HERE.
Josh and Cami serve as the co-directors of the Invitation School of Contemplative Listening, a study and practice of spiritual direction at the vital intersection of contemplation and justice.
‘Yes’ to Frailty
The Invitation Podcast has always consisted of guided prayers, meditations, and spiritual conversations. My interest has not been in teaching the ideas of formation but to invite listeners into the experiential, transformative reality of God.
This Forum series with Cami is proving to be the most substantial documentation I’ve offered to date of this sacred, contemplative space. I eagerly offer these things to you with an evangelical zeal that I thought I had forgotten. I’m jealous for you to get your heart and mind into this transformative reality too. Yet, I’m attempting to invite you to this space with patience and generosity. Genuine, thoughtful exchange is at a premium today. To engage you in these things in any way is precious and holy. The question is how to be enthusiastic, eager, even zealous to connect with you and yet, and yet….to not wear out my welcome, to not scare you away, to not impose myself upon you, to not create another set of “shoulds” for you to attain, another stage for you to perform on.
As I mention in this episode, I’m thinking about the podcast, this Forum especially, as a message in a bottle. If you are the one who has found my bottle, you will find scraps of paper stuffed inside that read:
Please, don’t “should” on yourself.
Please, notice my affection is for you to be you as you are, messy, disregulated, riddled with doubt.
Please, we are only as gentle with others as we are with ourselves.
I've been thinking about the intimate relationship between madness and genius. This spectrum is well researched in terms of our greatest artists and thinkers. To dream dreams, to hope with vision that is beyond our current conceptual realities requires one to be relatively unstable, flexible, even crazy. I immediately think of St Francis stripping naked and giving away all his earthly possessions. Do you recall any holy fools? Do you hold them at arms length with indifference? I have. Today, they are making more and more sense, a different kind of sense. Sixth grader Kadisha Hamed said, Mr. Banner, that doesn’t make sense” after I had read Robert Frost to her class. I replied so many years ago, “it doesn’t have to make sense in order to make sense.” Foolishness. Instability. Madness.
C.S. Lewis famously taught us that Jesus must either be Lord, liar, or lunatic. He cannot be all of those things. Last night in our School of Prayer cohort, one participant quoted Shane Claiborne that those following Jesus should like him “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” More madness, yet genius.
I definitely do not want here to recognize my own genius. I’m suggesting that being formed in Christ, to become like him, this requires of us a level of instability to see what he sees, to love what he loves, and to love how he loves. It’s the chicken and the egg. We need a particular kind of instability, a familiarity with our abundant weaknesses and failures, to live as confessional beings. The ancients called this “compunction,” when the ego is punctured, when all my modes of self-determination have been frayed, when I can no longer pull myself together and function as a socially acceptable, productive, consuming member of society. When my ego is punctured, when my self-determination is flattened and emptied, I have created more space for the Spirit to fill and move in and through me.
The cruciform irony is that my weakness is the greatest gift I have to offer you. In our nothingness we can find more ready access to everything of God. This will always come off as foolishness even to the religious establishment. I will say that the arena of spiritual direction, to spend an hour listening for the movements of the Holy Spirit in another person, to not teach, instruct, or fix that person, this madness is a wager on the genius of Christ revealed in others as they are without explanation or qualification.
I pray you will find a way to be uncouth today, to fall off your rocker. Oh that you will become unmoored and even dizzy in your freedom to love God, others, and even yourself in unnecessary, extravagant ways.