Tenth Visit to the Spiritual Director

On Thursday, I drove down to Miami to my 10th meeting with my spiritual director.  I always try to keep a blank agenda for our time together, although if I felt really strongly about a discussion topic, I would bring it up.

We began by talking about the time of year we're in, the Christmas Eve plans of our churches, the holiday plans of our families.  I talked about all the grading we'd been doing in my household, and I talked about my earlier experience of grading, back when the pandemic first upended our lives in March, and I told my students to work on their own schedules keeping in mind the date and the hour when I had to turn in grades.

I talked about how that experience helped me feel I was living out a state of grace, and how I continue to wonder if I should make that similar offer to my students regardless of whether or not we're in a pandemic.  Most of my students are going to school in the midst of enormous challenges.  Maybe that state of grace would help them far more than learning to meet deadlines regardless.

My spiritual director asked me about God's law and grace, and I had a visceral, negative reaction to the idea of God's law.  We talked about how I see law as a way to punish and judge, and I don't want to be in a relationship with a wrathful God.  We talked a bit about that, about my childhood fears of never measuring up and how that has continued into adult life.  We talked about how one of the ways I want to show love and show myself as worthy of love is by fixing people's problems.

Earlier on Thursday, I had spent some time thinking and writing about my need to be a helper/fixer, and my trying not to leap right in with solutions/agendas for problems that likely aren't mine to solve/fix.  We talked a bit about that.  We talked about how someone else jumping in doesn't give space for the person to do the solving.  It doesn't allow for a wider range of possible solutions.  As we often do, we talked about the concept of detaching with love.

The most interesting part was that we talked about a God who practices detaching with love.  At first that makes me anxious, although it fits with the idea of free will.  We talked about how and why it makes me anxious.  We talked about how many of us want a Santa Claus God and how many of us don't ever grow out of that yearning.

Me, the fix-it girl, has a yearning for a fixer God.  We talked a bit about how our visions of God, along with our yearning for certain types of God, might give insight as to where we are.

We talked about believers who might need to detach with love from God so that God can do the work.  We talked about the recent "God's work, our hands" initiatives in this context.

In the ending prayer, my spiritual director prayed that we could know when to step aside so that God can step ahead.  That language stirred my soul, so I wrote it down later, and I'm writing it down here.

My spiritual director recommended Margaret Silf's The Inner Compass.  I've added it to my Amazon cart.

I'm happy to have a spiritual director with whom to have these conversations.  It's a richer experience than if I was just pondering these things on my own.