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Author: Tara Owens

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

Posted on by Tara Owens

by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give – yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Duke Reflective Leadership Grant 2024-2026

Posted on by Tara Owens

OCTOBER 2024 ANNOUNCEMENT:

Anam Cara Ministries is thrilled to announce that our executive director and founder, Tara M. Owens, has been awarded Duke Divinity’s Reflective Leadership Grant for the 2024-2026 cycle. This grant will allow Tara to take the next step into leadership for the Anam Cara community and provide much-needed writing and reflecting time.

From the grant proposal:

Tara’s work as executive director and founder involves every aspect of the work of Anam Cara, from offering one-on-one spiritual direction to speaking to strategic planning for our ministry partners to staff development to communication to donor relations to budgeting. Her regular tasks  involve writing, leading, communicating, analyzing, and developing future models for growth. It goes without saying Tara is stretched thin in multiple ways and needs to find time to step back and evaluate the next phase of leadership and staffing for the organization as a whole. As a multiple heart attack survivor and one who lives with a life-altering connective tissue disorder, Tara is particularly aware that moments of pivot are vital for individuals and communities to engage with wisdom and intentionality.

 

Over the past year, Tara and the Anam Cara team have realized that the ministry would be better served if Tara stepped back from offering our one-to-one services, such as spiritual direction, and created space for more strategic and communication vision to emerge. After leading a recent pilgrimage on St. Cuthbert’s Way, which culminates in a two-mile walk across the sea bed to the tidal island of Lindisfarne, which has been host to morning and evening prayer since 635, Tara came to realize that the tidal rhythms of the monks (engaging with the broader mainland community in service and support when the tide was out, returning to prayer and reflection when the tide was in) is to inform the next chapter of her ministry and work. This involves acknowledging the tides of her particular work are coming in, even while the larger tide of the work of Anam Cara is currently going out.

 

Tara is at her best serving Anam Cara Ministries when her time and energy are spent on the following priorities: 1) developing content (writing, teaching, speaking), 2) raising money through relational development (fundraising, donor development and care), and 3) leading the strategy and growth of the ministry (discerning capacity, leading strategy, creating healthy teams and communal culture). As a team of four staff, with Tara as the only full-time employee, Tara is necessarily spread thin with the aforementioned responsibilities, as well as offering services, consulting, community development, and management. Tara needs to step back to gain the necessary executive leadership skills and discern how to move the organization from founder-driven to community-driven development.

 

We are so excited that, because of this grant, Tara now has the opportunity to benefit from continuing education and conversations with cross-disciplinary experts. In addition to taking time to work on the spiritual direction book project currently being represented by The Bindery, Tara will receive executive coaching and be taking a Harvard Business course in non-profit leadership, among other activities. If you’d like to read the full grant proposal, you can reach out here.

More from Duke Divinity:

Leadership Education aims to create lasting change in U.S. congregations by supporting Christian leaders and the institutions they serve. Leadership Education designs educational services, develops intellectual resources and facilitates networks of institutions that cultivate a coherent vision of Christian institutional leadership and form Christian leaders. Leadership Education is a non-degree-granting initiative of Duke Divinity School funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. and based in Durham, NC.

These individuals have been selected to receive a Reflective Leadership Grant from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. These grants of up to $15,000 support an opportunity for structured reflection for leaders of Christian organizations that are advancing their mission in the midst of today’s rapidly changing context. Fifty Christian leaders from a variety of faith-based organizations are funded in this third year of the Reflective Leadership Grant program.

“The Reflective Leadership Grant at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity recognizes and supports the faithful and innovative work of lay and ordained Christian leaders who find themselves at a pivotal moment in their ministry,” says Mycal Brickhouse, a director of program and grants at Leadership Education. “Using Harvard professor Ron Heifetz’s language, we want to help leaders experience ‘balcony time,’ which allows them to move from the dance floor to the balcony to gain a broader picture of the work, organization, community and trends. We want to encourage grantees to continue to develop their leadership capacities in ways specific to their work and context. For some, this might look like attending interdisciplinary conferences, and for others it might look like observing similar work in different settings. We are excited about the interest in this grant program from both traditional and non-traditional Christian leaders and we look forward to learning alongside them and their communities.”

More from the grant proposal:

Tara M. Owens believes the experience of mature spiritual friendship grounds leaders and lay people alike to become healing, listening presences (non-anxious and non-manipulative) in the Church and the world, bringing God’s redemptive work into the public square. She is the founder and executive director of Anam Cara Ministries, which exists to facilitate and promote the accompanying of others in their journey with God, rooted deeply in Scripture and located in community, encouraging healing, wholeness, and spiritual formation in Christ.

Anam Cara does this meaningfully through three unique processes: 1) providing spiritual direction through a network of grounded, educated, and spiritually mature spiritual directors, 2) training spiritual directors, supervisors, and teachers in relationally-based models of education and transformation, and 3) offering communally-based transformational education opportunities such as Scripture Circles, retreats, pilgrimages, workshops, and ongoing communities of support.

Anam Cara offers support to those seeking spiritual direction through our industry-unique Ostiary role, a sacred doorkeeper who is a spiritual director trained to match incoming inquiries with the appropriate list of spiritual directors, taking into account the individual’s needs, social location, finances, denomination, trauma history, and level of spiritual maturity. We maintain a network of spiritual directors who agree to the Anam Cara Code of Ethics, called the Peregrini
Program. Those in the Peregrini Community are supported socially, educationally, spiritually, and administratively by Anam Cara, allowing them to focus on the work of spiritual direction more freely. We also collaborate with local, national, and international spiritual directors who ascribe to a similarly high code of conduct and education.

Anam Cara also offers the Anam Cara Apprenticeship in Spiritual Direction, a relationally delimited spiritual direction training based on the apprenticeship education model. Three supervisors share the responsibility of teaching and forming individuals and the larger community in the art and practice of spiritual direction, taking into account individual learning styles, educational backgrounds, ethics, and group dynamics. Anam Cara also educates spiritual directors through collaboration in programs such as the Paseo Community’s Stewards of the Mystery program and the Benet Pines Monastery training program.

Anam Cara also offers a communal experience of formation around Scripture through Scripture Circles, a pastoral, theological, and formational time in groups gathered around the text. We currently offer more than ten ongoing study communities (8-15 participants each), both online and in person in Colorado, Tennessee, and globally. We have been asked to travel to teach in London, England, San Luis Obispo, CA, Austin, Texas, and Spokane, WA, among other locations.

We continue to bring awareness to important spiritual formation topics through teaching, speaking, workshops, and leading retreats. These topics include discernment, active listening, empathic distress, Sabbath, creation care, sexuality and spirituality, racial reconciliation, Ignatian spirituality, and embodiment. We partner with organizations such as the International Anglican Church, the Navigators, Laity Lodge, Evolving Faith, Spiritual Directors International, and the
Soul Care Institute.

The majority of our time is spent with individuals, churches, and organizations seeking to deepen their lives in Christ in uncertain and destabilizing circumstances. Many Christians seeking this deeper life often lack one or more of the following skill sets: reflective capacity, mature spiritual practice, theological imagination, Scriptural literacy, cultural awareness, non-anxious presence, non-manipulative engagement, or a robust spirituality of conflict. Tara and the Anam Cara team have the knowledge and experience to create opportunities for transformation and growth without degrading individual agency or dignity. They have a distinctive ability to hear the invitations of the Spirit for both individuals and communities, discern how to make those invitations clear and provocative without being manipulative, and craft experiences that offer encounter without exerting power or domination.

Anam Cara has impacted thousands of individuals and more than 15 church communities by offering spiritual direction, supervision, retreats, workshops, Scripture Circles, and pilgrimages.

Our impact has reached to:

  • We have more than 10 ongoing communities of study through Scripture Circles, reaching more than 100 people every month,
  • Nine volunteer cantors pray the Daily Office live Monday through Friday, morning and evening, through our Anam Cara Abbey social media accounts,
  • Touching more than 18,000 people daily through our Facebook and Instagram accounts with contemplative and Celtic spirituality, spiritual practice, and reflection,
  • More than 600 people experienced the study of the Word in community through Scripture Circles bursts, out of which a community has formed for the ongoing discipline of engaging Scripture in this way,
  • More than 40 individuals have benefited from being companioned in one-on-one spiritual
    direction and supervision with Tara,
  • More than 130 spiritual directors were served through six different continuing education workshops on healthy spiritual attachment, Ignatian discernment, gestures in spiritual direction and more,
  • Thirty-five spiritual directors have joined the Anam Cara team as contractors, providing thousands of hours of one-on-one spiritual direction to their communities with the support of Anam Cara (to make that concrete, Anam Cara offers more than 200 one-on-one spiritual direction appointments per month, on average),
  • More than 800 hours of one-on-one spiritual direction have been practiced by our 20 different Anam Cara apprentices, each training in the art and practice of spiritual direction through the Anam Cara Apprenticeship. We’re also proud to have graduated 25 of those apprentices over the courses of the Apprenticeship who are each continuing as practicing spiritual directors.

Where Are My Feet?

Posted on by Tara Owens

To everything there is a season,

A time for every purpose under heaven. – Eccl. 3:1 (NKJV)

 

I’m not a summer person. Born in the Fall, under some duress, I prefer cool days that harbor harvest to the full-bodied warmth of June, July, and August. And yet, I know the wisdom of this season, too. The way the light is everywhere, catching all of us by surprise, even in its abundance. The way sunsets charm us because the days have been replete with activity—we’re not aching for more, but ready for the rest evening brings. I acknowledge the good of these days, even as I stumble under their density.

Sometimes, my seasons are asynchronous: I’m all Spring spiritually even though it’s Winter. Other times, I’m solidly in hibernation when the days are popsicle-long. This year, the congruity has been shocking: the saturation of Summer is both physical and spiritual. My soul is engaged in the kind of work that will eventually lead to worship, and I use the passive voice intentionally. To mix my metaphors, God is more than tinkering around under the hood—the Spirit is engrossed in transformation, tearing apart and rebuilding parts of me I thought were just fixtures and turn out to be wearing down the rest of my world. Externally, transition meets me at almost every turn, from friendship to community to my body to family and back again.

In times like these, spiritual practice is more than a formality and deeper than formation. It’s breath and life and a way to orient myself into the goodness around me: God, myself, others. More than a reminder, it’s the kind of revelation I need to remember that this isn’t destruction (as much as it feels like it); it’s Love at work.

Seasons like this remind me not to set the bar too high. I’m not here to achieve or progress or transact my way to spiritual success. Instead, the simple acts are the ones keeping my sanity, anchoring me in the Story.

For me, right now, it’s a simple, grounding, embodied question: Where are my feet?

I know that sounds like a spiritual metaphor, and I’m not against reading it that way. But before I go existential (which is where I like to hide, if we’re being honest), I have to start with my banged-up* and beloved self. Where are my actual feet, right now? What do they feel like? Can I wiggle my toes? 

These simple questions are an entry into mindfulness and, for me, so much easier than a clear-as-mud body scan, where I mindfully notice each part of my body in turn. As someone experiencing hormonal and physical change, these large-scale scan leave me more confused and in conflict than I started. My very skin is in transition (oh, hello, puberty in reverse), and sorting out these new-to-me messages can easily spiral me out. This coming from someone who wrote an entire book on our bodies and the goodness of meeting God in them—I’ve done a body scan or two thousand in my day.

Here’s the thing, though. Seasons change. What was soothing in one is stifling in another. You wouldn’t suggest a swimsuit in the middle of subzero temperatures any more than you’d sweat it out in a parka when the thermometer is peaking. That says nothing against either the swimsuit or the snow gear. And needing simple isn’t a failure; it’s simply self-awareness.

The question of my feet allows me to step back (pun absolutely intended) and reassess my worldview. Am I living in scarcity, believing I am not beloved? Am I panicking because my old ways don’t work, and the patterns of peace haven’t yet been established? Can I come back to being held and supported by God, by this battered Earth beneath me, by the network of humans around me and throughout history who have chosen for the good? Can I let go of trying to figure transformation out and simply be where my feet are? Somatic practitioners call this a method of self-regulation. It aligns my nervous system with the truth of my security, allowing me to respond rather than react and consent instead of resigning. I call it holy integration, a response to God’s kind call to take off my sandals, reminding me that the place where I’m standing is holy ground (Ex. 3.).

As a spiritual director, I’ve been formed for almost two decades by holy curiosity, but in seasons like these, it’s easy to slip into hyperdrive, focusing on sorting things out to be safe instead of staying in the posture of prayer that starts with, I wonder… or What might be here? And when that happens, one of the best and kindest ways to get my feet back under me is actually to ask where they are right now.

 

 

*To be clear, I’m not being physically beaten. But living with a connective tissue disorder, being a multiple heart attack survivor, and working to embrace my currently perimenopausal body means I’m feeling the wear-and-tear of living in this world.

 

Third Things In Spiritual Direction

Posted on by Tara Owens

by Emily P. Freeman

Ten years ago, on the first day of Lent, I met with a spiritual director for the first time. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I held on to hope that she would somehow be able to accompany me through new, unfamiliar terrain. One of the first things she did was read from a book of reflections by Macrina Wiederkehr, and as I listened, I was grateful for the space. It allowed me to close my eyes, settle in, and focus on a third element: something that wasn’t me but also wasn’t her.

Now that I serve as a spiritual director, I have my own stack of favorite resources I like to read from in order to provide a similar third element for directees (Parker Palmer calls these “third things”). Here are a few of my favorites, starting with one my spiritual director introduced me to on that first day we met:

Seasons of Your Heart by Macrina Wiederkehr

Drawing from her experience as a Benedictine nun, Wiederkehr writes reflective meditations inspired by the seasons. Combining lyrical prose and simple poems, her writing offers accessible metaphors for faith, wonder, and the mystery of God.

Slowly she celebrated the sacrament of letting go

First she surrendered her green, then orange, yellow, and red

Finally she let go of her brown

shedding her last leaf

she stood empty and silent, stripped bare

leaning against the sky she began her vigil of trust.

—An excerpt from The Sacrament of Letting Go

To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue

A collection of blessings that put language to some of life’s most poignant moments: desire for freedom, meeting a stranger, starting again, and saying goodbye. O’Donohue submits that blessing is a way of life, and I’ve found his offerings to be a welcome reframe of spirituality without the trigger words.

When you travel,

A new silence

Goes with you,

And if you listen,

You will hear

What your heart would

Love to say.

—An excerpt from For the Traveler

Guerillas of Grace by Ted Loder

Rather than reflections or blessings, this is an entire book of prayers: for thanks, for reassurance, and for comfort to name a few. One of my favorite prayers to use in spiritual direction comes from this book. It’s called Gather Me to Be with You and I find it to be beautifully grounding, especially at the beginning of a session.

O God, gather me now

To be with you

As you are with me.

Soothe my tiredness;

Quiet my fretfulness; 

Curb my aimlessness;

Relieve my compulsiveness;

Let me be easy for a moment.

—An excerpt from Gather Me to Be With You

Beginning with a reading may not always be appropriate or necessary, and a third thing may sometimes be something other than words, like a painting, an image, or a song. I find it especially meaningful when a directee brings their own third thing into the room, sharing something that has meaning to them in their own walk with God. Mostly I’m grateful for third things, as they are a welcome reminder of the many ways God is always speaking to us.

 

Woman, You Are Set Free

Posted on by Tara Owens

Children walking through a labyrinth near the author's home

 

Recently, I preached from Luke 13 about the woman whose “spirit had crippled her for 18 years.” She was bent over and unable to stand up straight when Jesus calls to her, saying, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”

The story unfolds with religious leaders complaining about Jesus healing on the Sabbath. Jesus calls them out for treating their own animals, which they give water to on the sabbath, better than this daughter of Abraham. The story ends this way— “the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things he was doing.” There are so many ways to read this story, but what stood out for me was the idea that in order to be set free, we need first to know and then name what we are in bondage to. 

I began to explore that question, rolling it around in my hand like dice. Saying to myself, “you are set free.” I said it over and over. For weeks. I held the story close—the importance of my voice as a woman, the invitation to stand tall, and of course, the promise of freedom. But I still wondered. What did I need to be set free from? What was I in bondage to?

More recently, for our apprenticeship gathering, instead of teaching, or praxis, we were given space for rest and renewal. If it felt right, we were encouraged to take a walk and work through a guided set of questions. Not far from my house is an Episcopal church with a labyrinth. As I headed in that direction, I felt the heaviness of the roles I play—mother, wife, pastor, daughter, friend, spiritual director, and on and on (and on). I couldn’t clear my head enough to focus on the reflection questions in our guide, and I noticed that my body was tensing.

As I slowly made my way around the path of the labyrinth, I rolled my shoulders, adjusted my posture, and stretched my neck as I prayed. As I rounded each corner, I let go of the overwhelm just a little. I felt more and more present and connected—both to self and God. As I neared the center, I realized that the tightness was loosening. I could feel my body relaxing. And then, the story of the bent-over woman in the temple came to me. I could see her; I imagined Jesus calling to her and bending over to meet her eyes. But then I stopped; I could not for the life of me remember what it was he said to her. Why couldn’t I remember? It hadn’t been that long since I turned those words into a mantra.

I continued to walk, and after some time, a wave washed over me, and I recalled Jesus’ words: “woman, you are set free.” And at once, I felt it. The freedom of those words. I laughed out loud! I was surprised and delighted—I felt free. The burden of the roles I play cleared out, even if only for that moment as I heard it again “woman, you are set free.”

When I returned to the group, I shared my experience, and someone pointed out that Jesus called her—called me—woman. Yes, I am a mother, a friend, a pastor—but first, I am a woman, a person. First, I am me.

I don’t have these types of experiences often, and even in writing this, it’s hard to recall the details — did I really laugh out loud? Had my body really tensed and then relaxed so quickly? I suppose the details don’t matter, as much as my response. Will I choose to live as a person who has been set free? 

What am I in bondage to? Everything, I suppose. The groans of creation. My overwhelm and stress. The fear of using my voice, fear of what others might think or say, fear of not using my voice, but mostly the inability to believe I am set free.

So I write the words on a Post-it and stick it to my desk, I type it into a note on my phone, and I think about where I might tattoo the words — all in hopes of not forgetting them so quickly next time. When I go back to fear, when I hunch over in shame, when I tense up and forget who I am, may I remember those gentle words of Jesus — you are set free.

 

Author photo of Holly Phillips sitting in the labyrinth described in the post.
Photo credit: Whitman Phillips (the author’s son)

Holly Phillips is part of the Anam Cara Apprenticeship and comes to it with a background in church ministry. She feels called to walk alongside others and help them find the sacred in the ordinary. After years of wrestling with her place in the church and overthinking life with God, Holly has found new ways of encountering the Spirit through simply being. She currently serves as Co-Pastor at a small church in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her musician husband, their three kids, and a backyard full of birds. If you’d like to connect with her, you can do so through her Substack here.

Stories from Sabbatical

Posted on by Tara Owens

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Tara and her daughter Seren on the Hill of Tara, Ireland, during sabbatical

Even as a writer, I find it hard to put the experience of sabbatical into words. In truth, it would be easy enough to tell you chronological stories of what happened, when, and where. But one of the things I experienced is that time inside of sabbatical isn’t exactly chronological.

So, let’s start with the end, then.

Discovering What I Missed

As September began, my calendar filled again with the work I love and get to do: Scripture Circles, spiritual direction, supervision, apprenticing, teaching. Some of you wondered if that experience was difficult for me, wondered if it would feel heavy or tiring. What I found was that I’d missed something other than I’d expected—I hadn’t missed the work (especially the email part of it); I missed the with-ness with God and with people. That particular quality of sacred presence that runs as a golden thread through all the activities I get to do was what I missed the most, and what energizes me each and every day.

I had missed being anam cara, and discovering that “missing” was one of the many gifts of sabbatical for me.

Sacred Space, Sacred Time

One of the activities that emerged during the three-month window was the reorganization of my home office. With much-needed help, the prayed-over and well-used space of mess and meeting became a holy sanctuary. I gave away a lot of books. I moved retreat resources to storage. I kept only the books I would read again or the unread books. If we meet over Zoom, you almost wouldn’t see any difference in my bookshelf backdrop; however, what is behind me has massively changed. In some ways, I’ve created an antilibrary, a reminder of how much I do not know. Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined that term and writes about it this way:

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

It seems to me that this, too, is a parable of sabbatical, this reorganization of space to make more room for unknowing, while also inviting in more deeply the mysterious relationship that underpins it all—my relationship with Christ.

While reclaiming my space (I hesitate to call it an office) during my sabbatical, I realized I have more than 10 pieces of completely original art on the walls, some commissioned pieces, some not. The one on the threshold, that circumscribes the sanctuary, is an original painting depicting Jesus asleep in the boat during the storm. Around him the lines of the painting swirl and intersect. In the small quarter of the image where his body touches the water, the lines still and create reflection. This, too, is an icon of sacred time.

Don’t Die By Inches

Sabbatical began with a lot of death. Spiritual, relational, physical death happened around me and to me in various ways. There was a moment when I found myself running at full speed into those frigid waters, almost as if by holy instinct. I know what it is to let go of things reluctantly, prying my fingers off one cramped movement after another. I made a decision that if this time was to be in some measure about dying, I didn’t want to do it in slow, agonizing inches. I wanted to be plunged in quickly and completely.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to stay there for a long while.

Become the ancestor of your future happiness – David Whyte

These are the words that formed and held me in the dying. The hope and reality is that whatever this journey was, whatever it now is, whatever it will be, I have said yes to becoming a good ancestor. To myself, yes. But also to the sacred future. There is a way in which entering into sabbatical is a kind of death to linear sequential time—at least in the ways you’ve known it up until that entry.

Practically speaking, that also meant a death to my dream of time away on the island of Iona, time with the community of Northumbria, and time on Holy Island. It also meant death to my expectations (one of the hardest deaths, sometimes) and to my timelines.

There’s been a lot of learning and healing unfolding from those deaths, and there is still more. But death is not something that often happens easily, which surely continues to be the case for me.

Welcome Forward

This leads me straight into the paradoxical reality into which I’m still living: my sabbatical may have ended in linear sequential time, but I haven’t left sabbatical. I’m coming to see that if you’ve really, truly entered into sabbatical time, it’s not something you ever leave.

This makes for awkward conversation, especially when the traditional greeting you offer after someone returns from a vacation or a trip or maternity leave or a hospital stay (all of which I’ve experienced) is, “Welcome back!”

There’s no such thing as “Welcome back” from sabbatical (and I still deeply appreciate the people who have said it to me because what else does one say, really?). The closest reality is “welcome forward,” which also makes for awkward greetings. (Not as awkward as the Joshua/Moses/God intersection at the Tent of Meeting in Exodus 33, but that’s a sacred story for another time.)

All of this is to say that I’ll keep having stories from sabbatical to share: here, in person, in prayer, in writing. I’m still living out of time in ways that God is teaching me about, and as hard as that is to put into words, I’m deeply, wildly, unaccountably grateful.

So, thank you. For being part of the community that made and makes this countercultural reality possible. My hope and prayer is that you, too, will one day experience what crossing over into sabbatical will bring.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Is Your Spiritual Director Certified? Probably Not.

Posted on by Tara Owens

As I write this in the early days of 2022, the tragedy and tangle of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to shape our world in ways both seen and unseen. Homelife and safety, public life and how we form it, mental health and our care for one another, schooling and teaching—all have undergone radical shifts for ill and for good. Counselors, therapists, social workers, all find their schedules full with those seeking care. The same is true of spiritual directors.

One of the gifts of this time comes from the shift in accessibility that we’ve seen across the globe. Forced to move online, caregivers now have more secure, effective, and safe ways to meet with clients regardless of their location. This has opened up the practice of spiritual direction to so many who simply did not have access to it before, which is a huge grace and a stunning gift.

Alongside that gift comes responsibility, and one of the ways that spiritual directors are charged with caring for their directees and the larger community is by the accurate representation of their training and credentials. As training in spiritual direction has proliferated, and spiritual direction becomes more and more known as a healing modality, I’ve begun to hear a certain kind of slippage in the language used to describe a spiritual director’s training and credentials. This is, I am completely sure, good-hearted, as most of our understanding of caring professions gets modeled after licensed professional therapy or social work. But it’s dangerous, unnecessary, and unkind to borrow language from one profession in order to bolster the distinctiveness of spiritual direction.

Spiritual directors, when presenting themselves to the public, preserve the integrity of spiritual direction by being in right relation with persons and organizations representing qualifications and affiliations accurately. —Spiritual Director’s International Guidelines for Ethical Conduct

In 2016, ESDA (Christ-Centered Spiritual Directors) published an article explaining to their members why representing themselves as a “certified spiritual director” is a problematic practice. In it author Monica Romig Green explains:

Generally, when someone uses the term “certified,” it communicates to the hearer that the person has been given a certification as opposed to just a certificate. It usually means that they possess an official designation from a qualifying professional organization that affirms they meet and uphold specific standards of their profession.

To become “certified,” one must show evidence to a certifying organization that they meet or exceed continuing professional standards. Additionally, as a professional designation, certification is usually something that can expire over time and must be renewed occasionally in order to affirm that someone is still practicing their work at a competent or high level of quality.

Contrastingly, receiving a certificate or diploma from a training program usually means that you have successfully completed your specific program’s educational requirements. It does not mean that you have met the practicing standards of a particular profession.

Regarding spiritual direction, there is, in fact, no specific and official standard for training/formation. That means that one person’s certificate of training could mean something completely different than someone else’s. For instance, I know of a program that gives a certificate after someone has spent 2 weeks studying spiritual direction, while other programs require that their students spend two to three years studying and complete hundreds of direction hours before they receive their certificate. With such variation in training, it’s easy to see why our training certificates would not automatically indicate meeting some kind of general standard.

If you’re a spiritual director or even someone exploring the practice of spiritual direction, the whole article is worth reading. As Green argues, and I concur, it isn’t just a splitting of hairs to insist that “completed a certificate in spiritual direction” is a more accurate and ethical way of representing training in spiritual direction than using the term “certified” (or, in several somewhat upsetting instances, I’ve heard spiritual directors refer to themselves as “licensed” which is both inaccurate and manipulative, as it creates a false sense of accountability and safety for the directee when the director has no such body of oversight).

As someone who also respects and honors the work that my colleagues in therapeutic and social work settings have done, I don’t want to water down the incredible amount of work and continuing education they have and continue to do, even if it appears to up my credibility.

There’s also an important tension to hold here, as there is a certifying body in spiritual direction and the supervision of spiritual directors (CCPC Global), through which I hold both certifications. This is an open organization, to which anyone globally can apply who meets the requirements of certification over and above having completed a certificate in spiritual direction. At the same time, the larger community of spiritual direction continues to hold a diversity of opinion about whether or not certification is necessary, beneficial, or an accurate measure of expertise in a field that holds so much Mystery. Spiritual Director’s International (SDI), for example, discourages the use of these credentials, while the professional spiritual direction associations of countries like Ireland or Australia have created even more rigorous standards and accountability structures for the practice within their borders.

As our push online since the emergence of COVID-19 has shown us, there is also great good to de-institutionalization of education. Seminary-level education is now available to those who would never be able to relocate in order to have access to educators of this quality. Systemic barriers historically operating in education because of sexism, ableism, or racism have been seriously (and thankfully) damaged by our ability to seek wisdom not just from “professionals” but from those with expertise and lived experience. Those whose voices have previously been silenced in these spaces and conversations have had the opportunity to create new and dynamic spaces for experience and education.

In the face of this wild, generative proliferation, it is nonetheless important to care for those seeking spiritual direction with an accurate and clear portrayal of education, experience, and expertise. As a practitioner, I’ve continued to sit in the “both/and” of the questions around the professionalization of spiritual direction. In churches and spiritual communities around the world, there are wisdom figures and those who listen on the margins who would never go to graduate school or seek the title of “spiritual director”—and I believe these faithful men and women are still doing the good work of spiritual direction in the world. I also believe that it is important for me and those I train in spiritual direction to continue to do the work of skills building, growth, and learning within the field and that when it is within the purview and possibility of a particular director, to seek to meet any professional standards that are helpful to their practice and serve their directees well.

The chances are that your spiritual director isn’t “certified.” How and whether that matters to a directee is in the hands of those seeking spiritual accompaniment. However, for ethical practice, spiritual directors need to represent their training, associations, and professional development in a clear, straightforward and well-thought-through manner.

A Word About Weeks: The Valley of Gold

Posted on by Tara Owens

 

 

In November 2018, I had the gift of walking through the Valley of Elah. If you’re not familiar with that name, don’t worry—I wasn’t able to place it in the story of God until I planted my feet on it.

In 1 Samuel 17, Israel’s armies are encamped on one side of this valley. On the other, the vastly superior Philistine forces are aligned, ready to decimate the primitive tribe below them. Instead of costly bloodshed, they send out their champion to mock their opponents. And if you’ve guessed that champion is named Goliath, you know where that story goes.

That said, I’ve been thinking a lot about that valley since I took the picture of it at top. I’ve been thinking about it enough, that when a friend who was in Israel a few weeks ago sent me the picture at bottom, standing roughly where I’d been standing, my breath caught in my throat. Because the valley that had been only haunted by spring green when I saw it was ready for harvest. And I suddenly understood Pentecost on a deeper level than I ever had before.

For some of us, Pentecost brings up images of tongues of fire and a specific day in the Church calendar, if it brings up anything at all. (For me, it brings up a kitschy song, but that’s another story for another day.) However, Pentecost was a major Jewish festival, one of the moadim or sacred times. Also called the Festival of Weeks, or Shav’out (which begins on May 16, 2021), Pentecost is a harvest festival where the first fruits of the wheat harvest are to be brought to the Temple as a sacrifice to God.

The visual of the ripening harvest and the awareness of all that had been weathered by the people before they made their pilgrimage from their homes up to Jerusalem for this sacred festival makes me even more awake to the fact that God’s heart for us deep and wide.

Imagine for a moment the disciples gathered, waiting as Jesus commanded them, in Jerusalem. They don’t know what is to come. They’ve just been told that the Spirit will be poured forth. They don’t have any idea what that will look like, and, shaken by 40 days of Jesus’s frankly squirrelly resurrection appearances, they almost seem to be hiding.

And yet, there’s this festival that most of them know they need to be participating in. The firstfruits of the wheat harvest to be brought to the Temple comes most typically in the form of bread. The baking of which would have been happening all around them, filling Jerusalem with the pungent, yeasty smell of loaves and loaves of freshly made sacrifices.

Wouldn’t they been remembering all the times Jesus broke bread for them? Wouldn’t they have been thinking about the times that they walked through the fields of gold in their three years of following this wandering rabbi, plucking grain from the stalks, hungry not only for food but for more of what this iconoclastic man seemed to offer? Wouldn’t they be wondering about the harvest that Jesus had promised?

It’s on this festival that God chooses to pour out the Spirit. It’s in the midst of a city filled with the scent of baking that the Spirit enables these frightened women and men to become bread for others, the bread of Heaven.

They’ve walked through the valleys together, including the valley of the shadow of death—and giants much bigger than Goliath have been slain by Christ. Death is no longer. Sin has no grip. The valley that was a place of battle has become a valley of provision.

In this way, these disciples, these men and women waiting for what Jesus had promised, are themselves the firstfruits of His harvest. They are the grain that has been milled and crushed, leavened with the yeast of Christ’s resurrected presence. The waiting between Jesus’s ascension and this moment when the Spirit comes in tongues of fire has been a kind of proofing, a time when God has commanded them to rest quietly and let grace rise.

It strikes me that the tongues of fire were the kind of spiritual heat that was necessary for this full offering of themselves as food for the people. At Pentecost, they knew that the firstfruits, the wave offering that was to be given in order to sustain the people, were actually themselves. That the story that they were trusting in was coming forth in their very lives and faithfulness.

Pentecost is about the Spirit, yes. But it is also about all the valleys of darkness that God sows with good seed. In time, these valleys are filled with gold—sheaves of wheat that become the bread of our lives. And the bread of our lives that becomes sustenance for all people.

Thanks be to God.

Catch Me In My Scurrying: A Prayer for Lent by Ted Loder

Posted on by Tara Owens

Catch me in my scurrying

Catch me in my anxious scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my feet to the fire of your grace
and make me attentive to my mortality
that I may begin to die now
to those things that keep me
from living with you
and with my neighbours on this earth;
to grudges and indifference,
to certainties that smother possibilities,
to my fascination with false securities,
to my addiction to sweatless dreams,
to my arrogant insistence on how it has to be;
to my corrosive fear of dying someday
which eats away the wonder of living this day
and the adventure of losing my life
in order to find it in you.

Catch me in my aimless scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my heart to the beat of your grace
and create in me a resting place,
a kneeling place,
a tip-toe place
where I can recover from the dis-ease of my grandiosities
which fill my mind and calendar with busy self-importance,
that I may become vulnerable enough
to dare intimacy with the familiar,
to listen cup-eared to your summons,
and to watch squint-eyed for your crooked finger
in the crying of a child,
in the hunger of the street people,
in the fear of the contagion of terrorism in all people,
in the rage of those oppressed because of sex or race,
in the smouldering resentments of exploited third-world nations,
in the sullen apathy of the poor and ghetto-strangled people,
in my lonely doubt and limping ambivalence;

and somehow

during this season of sacrifice,
enable me to sacrifice time
and possessions
and securities,
to do something …

something about what I see,
something to turn the water of my words
into the wine of will and risk,
into the bread of blood and blisters,
into the blessedness of deed,
of a cross picked up,
a saviour followed.

Catch me in my mindless scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my spirit to the beacon of your grace
and grant me light enough to walk boldly,
to feel passionately,
to love aggressively;
grant me enough peace to want more,
to work for more
and to submit to nothing less,
and to fear only you …
only you!

Bequeath me not becalmed seas,
slack sails and premature benedictions,
but breathe into me torment,
storm enough to make within myself
and from myself,
something …
something new,
something saving,
something true,
a gladness of heart,
a pitch for a song in the storm,
a word of praise lived,
a gratitude shared,
a cross dared,
a joy received.

Ted Loder, Guerrillas of Grace, Augsburg Books, 1981, 123-125.

Dread Leads You Deeper

Posted on by Tara Owens

Tara encountered Christiana Peterson and her words in Grand Rapids at the 2018 Festival of Faith & Writing. She knew immediately that Christiana would be a friend to the Anam Cara community. The excerpt below can be found in Christiana’s book, Mystics & Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints.

Though the chapter this comes from is called Winter (and it is currently summer), when I stumbled across this, I loved it and wanted to share. Christiana gives us a glimpse into her every day journey – one that hold the roles of mother, wife and farmer with an ache to live in deep spiritual places. Christiana explores the desire to live a life of mysticism amidst the mundane routines of the daily life.

 

In the middle of February, my craving for the healing warmth of soil under my fingernails saw me starting my seeds inside the house too early. Flimsy black plastic trays lined the edges of my sliding glass doors. Their roots would be long enough to need more room before the soil in my garden was warm enough to transplant them. But I didn’t care. If I could just see something grow, I could believe that spring was possible. I could believe that the tracks in the snow—ones that marked my anxiety-filled trips to feed the chickens—were melting into the dirt, providing the moisture it needed for another year of growth. I needed to see the snow melting and the sun rising.

And I did. And just as my fingers were aching to grow something tangible in the soil, life was taking root inside my body as well: I discovered I was pregnant with our third child. Even though this was unexpected, we were excited to tell the kids. We knew Neva and Jude would take to their older sibling duties with gusto.

My belly expanded into the warmth of those summer months in the sixth growing season, healing parts of me. But true healing isn’t linear; it happens in fits and starts. Sometimes the tracks in the snow melt into the earth. And sometimes the snow covers them again and more are made.

Our lives had become waves of celebration and tension. Matthew and I realized that we could map out the farm seasons not by how well the farm had done or the health of the crops but by which major drama had occurred each year. The stress of five years in such an unsettled place began to catch up with both of us. Each winter, with the shorter days and so much more time to think, we wondered whether we should keep sticking it out for another farm season. It began to feel as though there were a fifth time of year: the season of dread.

In his book Contemplative Prayer, twentieth-century Cistercian monk and mystic Thomas Merton writes of the necessity of dread—dread leads you deeper. He says of a monk who is deep in monastic prayer:

The Word of God which is his comfort is also his distress. The liturgy, which is his joy and which reveals to him the glory of God, cannot fill a heart that has not previously been humbled and emptied by dread. Alleluia is the song of the desert.

The monk who is truly a man of prayer and who seriously faces the challenge of his vocation in all its depth is by that very fact exposed to existential dread. . . . The monk confronts his own humanity and that of his world at the deepest and most central point where the void seems to open out into black despair.

As I plunged more deeply into motherhood, I wondered what dread meant for a woman—one who, with her duties, couldn’t be a monk in the practical ways of life. Maybe she was a mother and a wife, working in the naptime hours or caring for others, or maybe she was single and working outside the home. Maybe she had a loving husband who craved her body and emotional strength, or babies who needed her body to live, who needed her emotional strength to be healthy. She was tapped out, her needs forsaken not because her husband and children were at fault but because she idolized her marriage, she attached to the idea that motherhood was a calling. Instead of insisting on her need for the things that gave her life, she was afraid that her needs were the idols.

She needed to grow in her spirit. But sometimes it felt as though I didn’t have the space to feel God’s presence. The mystics seemed to dwell in places of constant search, marked by times of quietness and times of agony, periods that lead them into a deeper relationship with God. Many of them monastics and nuns, they all appear to live in extremities of solitude, silence, and prayer, where distractions are mostly internal.

Clearly they didn’t have three young children. My solitude was extreme only in its absence.

Did I take a pass on mysticism when I became a mother and not a nun? Distractions abounded, and solitude took so much energy. And what was left for myself? What was left for God?

As I reached my mid-thirties, my hormones changing in normal ways, I was overcome by my own existential dread. Not from hours spent in solitary prayer—that was hardly ever a possibility—but from anxiety and depression. Were those anxious thoughts my prayers? Was this the kind of dread that should be my friend?

Maybe. Maybe dread was the only thing that made me desperate enough to ask God for help.

(Quotes are from Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton)
“Excerpted from Christiana N. Peterson’s new book, Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints. (Herald Press, 2018) All rights reserved. Used with permission. www.HeraldPress.com

Christiana N. Peterson has written at places like Christianity Today, Christian Century, SheLoves, and Art House America about farm life, fairytales, community life, and grief. She lives with her husband and their kids in Ohio where she spends her time writing, wrangling four children, reading YA novels, leading worship, and trying to figure out how to live a mystical faith.

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