Spiritual Guidance as Love Activism

In the Northern Hemisphere where I live, we’ve passed the autumnal equinox and are entering one of my favorite seasons – fall. As the days become shorter and the nights lengthen, we’re invited to lean back and settle into this fecund, pregnant, obscure season heading towards winter. During fall our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrate the New Year. My gut tells me there’s great wisdom here. For our spiritual wellbeing, we need to center down and invite the Spirit to inspire new life within the depths of our being.

Ironically, as the Spirit is inviting us to center down, there’s a flurry of activity within the Shalem community. The synchronicity isn’t lost on me. We’re entering the nuts-and-bolts period of nurturing Vision 2025 into action. Shalem Society is preparing to gather for our annual gathering. And, the Spiritual Guidance Program (SGP) has just opened registration for the Spiritual Guidance Class of 2026. As the program director of SGP, I’m intimately involved in all three of these activities. So, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a coherent pattern emerging within the convergence of these activities that might be lifegiving for those folks seeking admission to the guidance program. Thus, as prayerful detectives, I invite us to sift through the presenting clues, searching for a coherent pattern.

First, let’s look at Vision 2025: Our Ongoing Hope. I was a member of the committee that drafted this document for the Shalem Community, and I currently serve on one of its ongoing committees, the Relationship Management Project. The document’s ethos is written in my heart and is a guiding light for forming and informing the Spiritual Guidance Program. It states that Shalem’s mission is “To nurture contemplative living and leadership,” and our vision is “Shalem will be a dynamic and inclusive community, empowered by the Spirit, where seekers engage in transformation of themselves, their communities, and the world through spiritual growth, deep connection, and courageous action.”

Vision 2025 is also a guiding light for the Shalem Society. The upcoming retreat is entitled Activists of Love: Contemplative Hearts Holding a Broken World. I have accepted an invitation to serve during the retreat on a panel on love activism. This invitation has inspired me to prayerfully consider just what it means for me to be an activist of love. I find myself revisiting a watershed moment in my own spiritual development that occurred in 2004 during my first residency as a student in the Spiritual Guidance program. It was in a seminar entitled Art and Spiritual Guidance.

We were asked to draw, using our non-dominate hand, our image of God. Initially, I sat there baffled. I’m not a visual artist and the concept of drawing an image of God seemed incomprehensible to me. How does one draw God? I didn’t know how to begin, but not wanting to be perceived as resistant, I decided to sink into prayer and simply doodle on paper with my non-dominant hand. The next thing I knew, I was gazing at an image of a lotus flower growing from the muck of a pond through the water into the open air. The flower was still pretty much in bud but beginning to open. I’d never thought of imaging God this way but in my gut, it made total sense.

What really rocked my world, however, was that I also knew in the depths of my being that it was an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Don’t asked me how I knew, because I’d never had any attraction, much less a relationship, with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, that eternally wounded, open heart that’s always ready to manifest as God’s love connecting and indwelling with everyone and everything. Through the subsequent years, this image has served as my icon of what it means to be an activist of love. To meet each person I encounter with an open heart poised for love. And I’ll add, this orientation can be, and often is, quite painful as such love is often misunderstood and rejected. Nevertheless, that’s my vocation which I willingly, wholeheartedly accept.

This open-hearted, loving orientation is what I desire to bring to every spiritual seeker with whom I sit in spiritual guidance. I understand spiritual guidance to be a ministry of prayer involving the Holy Spirit, a spiritual seeker, and a spiritual guide. Within this corporate prayer, the spiritual seeker and guide listen for the Holy Spirit’s invitations/clues for the seeker’s spiritual journey. Both the spiritual seeker and guide are often invited to journey through foreign regions they’d never imagined visiting – such as my devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The experience I describe above is an excellent examples of the kind of practices those who are called to the ministry of spiritual guidance are invited to engage as they journey through Shalem’s Spiritual Guidance Program. Although the program provides serious didactic components, it’s profoundly experiential – profoundly contemplative.

For me, contemplation is simply the practice of attending wholly to reality. Totally present, totally open, when we sit with the Spirit and a spiritual seeker in Spiritual Guidance, we can expect and welcome the reality that all parties will be changed – will be transformed. In addition, I would observe that contemplation can be an all-encompassing way of life. We can always engage with God, self, and others contemplatively, no matter how others may be presenting – admittedly, easier said than done. That’s why we practice, practice, practice…

As I search for a coherent pattern in the convergence of the launch of Vision 2025, the theme of the Shalem Society retreat, and the experiential learning of the Spiritual Guidance Program, I find it right there in Vision 2025: our mission is “To nurture contemplative living and leadership,” as we seek to “be a dynamic and inclusive community, empowered by the Spirit, where seekers engage in transformation of themselves, their communities, and the world through spiritual growth, deep connection, and courageous action.” Embracing this mission and vision is how we live into our unique vocations as activists of love who incarnate the Good News that God is present, active, and loving. Thus, I invite all, who feel called, to join us in centering down and inviting the Spirit to inspire new life in the depths of our being.