I do not believe that one can become a spiritual director just by taking an academic course, however useful this might be as a conceptual background for offering spiritual counsel. Similarly, a psychological background can be very useful, but it is primarily intended to make one a good psychological counselor. It does not automatically produce someone who can discern the delicate movements of the Spirit in people coming for spiritual direction.

Centering Prayer, as we have already seen, is a particular method of preparing for contemplative prayer. Those following this path need a director who has personal knowledge and experience of this path. Sometimes spiritual directors or retreat directors trained in the literature of the Christian contemplative tradition think they can teach Centering Prayer after reading a few books on the subject. However, to teach Centering Prayer requires special training and a long period of its regular practice, without which we do not fully understand its subtleties and hence cannot impart it adequately to other people. Since Centering Prayer is a receptive method, the psychological effects of such a method need to be foreseen by the director. The dark nights may start fairly soon in such a practice, and then the director needs to be a good listener and know how to give plenty of reassurance. A Centering Prayer support group that has been meeting for some time can often provide this kind of encouragement better than a director, particularly one who has little or no experience of the dark nights.

In general, the direction of contemplatives requires some special sensitivities. One of these is a particular alertness to maintaining a balance of inner and outer activities. A purely apophatic prayer may stagnate without some conceptual input through spiritual reading, liturgy, or listening to sermons or lectures that speak to the contemplative person's state of prayer. There needs to be a balance of intellectual, affective, and intuitive elements in prayer. Contemplative prayer frees us from attachment to the use of our faculties in going to God, not from their use. The right use of them disposes us for the gifts of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, which lead to contemplative prayer in the full sense of the term.

Centering Prayer is a further dimension of relating to Christ, a relationship developed in reflection and affective prayer but moving beyond it. It is "resting in God," to quote St. Gregory the Great. But one is not forever resting even if one's prayer is restful. There must be action, prompted by the attitude of faith and love accessed in times of resting in God. The resting of Centering Prayer has to be manifested in daily life. Otherwise any prayer, especially if it is consoling or peaceful, can degenerate into a high-class tranquilizer, leaving us in the same situation we were in before, namely, of attachment to self-centered goals or preoccupations and insensitivity to the needs of other people. Thus the interaction between daily life and prayer assimilates us to the contemplative dimension of the gospel, which demands not just prayer alone or good deeds alone.

Christ is always the teacher. The transmission of his experience of God as Abba, loving Father, is the work of contemplative prayer, to which all spiritual guidance is in service. Thus for Christians, the liturgy celebrated in the Christian assembly, especially the Eucharist, is an essential part of the Divine Therapy since it is the transmission of the graces attached to the major events of Christ's life. Contemplative prayer will deepen one's appreciation of the liturgy and one's capacity to receive the divine transmission present in the Christian assembly and especially in the sacraments. The better prepared we are through contemplative prayer and action, the more profoundly will the presence of Christ in the Christian assembly reach into the depths of our being and transform us at every level. Without this grounding in a full Christian life, contemplative prayer can take us only part of the way toward the transforming union.

In earlier chapters I have tried to develop a conceptual background for the experience of the spiritual journey, using the "Divine Therapy" as a paradigm. This paradigm can be useful for those who are also called to be spiritual directors. There will be times when contemplatives feel they cannot pray anymore. All that is left to them is the desire to pray, sometimes buried under enormous difficulties in daily life along with interior purification. They need to be reminded again and again that the desire to pray is itself a prayer. St. John of the Cross wrote with great insight, "Love consists not in feeling great things, but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved." The love of God is not a question of feeling but of choice, and this choice is put to the test during the transitional periods on the spiral staircase that St. John of the Cross calls the dark night. Thus someone who wants to pray is praying, and someone who feels no love is loving as long as he or she continues to remain available both in prayer and in daily life to the Divine Therapist. Trust in God has to be proposed vigorously and without end to those who are struggling on the spiritual journey with prolonged periods of powerlessness, dryness, and even the sense of being abandoned by God. These are signs of progress, not regression.

At times, the loss of the presence of God can cause such deep mourning we may think that someone we are trying to help is in a depression. We have to distinguish clearly a clinical depression from depressed feelings. The latter are the natural and inevitable consequence of the sense of loss in someone who has been experiencing sensible consolation and is now struggling with a lack of apparent benefit, profit, or any feeling of love toward Christ.

What distinguishes the dark night from a depression is the fact that a person in the dark night normally has an intuition that these trials are going someplace. One perceives at times the fruits of the dark night in one's changing perspectives such as the growth of a nonjudgmental attitude toward everyone, greater detachment from things and persons, humility, and trust in God. In a clinical depression one goes around in circles getting nowhere and can perceive no benefit at all on any level. In some persons both mental states can be present at once. In this case, the person should get psychological help for the depression. One who is simply in the dark night should not be given pills or tranquilizers indiscriminately. They may interfere. with the process of grace. This particular area of discernment is sometimes a close judgment call.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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