Spiritual director Jenny Gehman reflects on her own journey to spiritual direction and the holy hospitality she experienced.
Jenny Gehman, east coast representative for Mennonite Women USA, is a spiritual director, freelance writer and retreat facilitator. She and her husband, Dan, attend James Street Mennonite Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. To learn more about Jenny or engage her as a spiritual director, visit JennyGehman.com.
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About nine years ago, I sought out my first spiritual director. I was just stepping into what I’ve since come to call my weeping years. They were years of great loss — loss of parents, positions, people — of my place in this world.
I don’t think I could have articulated it at the time, but looking back, I believe I came into spiritual direction with the need not so much to be helped as to be heard.
Helping involves fixing things and figuring them out, and there’s probably a time and place for that. However, I had broken bits and bobs that needed to be witnessed, not put in working order.
Simply said, I needed a safe space to set my soul down and sift through what was there. What my spiritual director provided for me is summed up well in the tender words of Jan Richardson, who writes:
“There are stories
embedded in our skin
and words enfleshed in us,
and so may You bless us
with those who by tender touch
release the tales,
trace the lines,
free the words
one by one.
Give to us those
who will listen us
into our own language
till we are hoarse with the telling
and with the laughter
at being released
from the silences we had kept
so long.”[1]
Spiritual direction is many things. It is companioning, listening, attending and noticing. It is quiet and questions, reflection and revelation, discovery and discerning.
And it is a holy hospitality, in which the whole of you can be heard.
David Augsburger once said, “Being heard is so close to being loved that, for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”
Sometimes, the healing we seek comes less from being helped and more from being heard — from having a safe place to set our souls down and sift through what’s there.
[1] Jan L. Richardson, Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas (United Church Press, 1998), 33.
Learn more about the Mennonite Spiritual Directors Network at mennosdn.org.
You can find links to the Spiritual Directors Network website and other congregational and ministerial resources on MC USA’s Church Vitality webpage: https://www.mennoniteusa.org/
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