Spiritual direction (1): concerning politics & social media

With reference to James Joyce, Joseph Campbell, and a few desert ascetics

One of the great joys of my life, as well as one of the most demanding tasks I’ve undertaken, has been to do the work of spiritual direction. I make no grand claims about my skill or success in the endeavor. I can’t and shouldn’t overlook my flaws, failures, and mistakes while trying to give guidance to others, particularly when I was young and relatively inexperienced. But even my faults, when recognized and regretted, in some instances with anguish, have in the long run tended to help me improve in the art of spiritual counsel. It’s a risky craft to practice, and the practitioner must seek to remain humble, devoted to his or her rule of life, and tread carefully when venturing to instruct others. In fact, “instruction” is not even the best word for what a spiritual director does. Mostly, he or she listens and trusts God to do the real guiding. The director must be painstaking in acquiring discernment, “listening” to the Spirit within while simultaneously listening closely to the counselee. Nor should it be forgotten that each counselee is an individual, with a unique history, and not just a generic, classifiable “type.” Spiritual direction is also not to be confused with “imparting knowledge.” As Thomas Merton described it, “The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man’s [sic] life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul… The spiritual director cannot do such a work himself.” [1]

I have referred to spiritual direction above as an art and a craft, and so it is; whether it demands some embryonic talent found in a select few, I can’t honestly venture to say, but to practice it sufficiently well requires training, a developed insight, mature sensitivity, some trial and error (only to be expected), and experience. It’s worth noting that the premier paradigmatic spiritual directors in Christian history, the ascetics of the desert, were frequently referred to as “old.” They were trusted because they were indeed elders and proficient, having in turn learned from the elders who had taught them. The word “tradition” refers to something “passed down,” and novelty and “doing it yourself” in spiritual guidance wasn’t – for excellent reasons – to be trusted. It was of the utmost importance for these early directors, as it should be still, to bestow on younger generations the same wisdom they had themselves received.

Over the next few weeks, I will focus on spiritual direction. Specifically, I will be emphasizing practical suggestions that might seem unusual but are – I assure you – part of the classical repertoire. Among the handful of topics, I will discuss the ongoing presence in our lives of those who have died, knowing who our “friends” are and sticking close to them (and by “friends” I don’t mean just those persons we have known in this present life), knowing who our worst “enemies” are and how to deal with them, the importance of Tradition (the capital “T” isn’t an affectation), and – the topic of this post, because it’s possibly the most directly relevant in this new (election) year – how to engage in both political and social (and social media) interaction. Regarding the last, simply because there was no electronic social media in classical times doesn’t mean that there was no social media at all, and the same ascetic practices that guided past generations in controlling their tongues and guarding their ears and eyes apply just as much today – maybe more – to controlling our fingers on the keyboard. (“A brother asked Abba Sisois: “I long to guard my heart. The old man said to him: “And how can we guard the heart if our tongue [i.e., our words] leaves the door of the fortress open?’”) [2]

The fact is – pacé those “spiritual leaders” (so-called) who would insist that our most pressing duty “as believers” right now is to be publicly engaged, and they are to be found on the Right and the Left and, unfortunately, in pulpits – one of the greatest threats to a healthy spiritual life (Christian or otherwise) is to be mentally tangled up in politics and frequent social interaction. (A genuine Taoist, Buddhist, desert Christian, or other sage representative of any of the great traditions would say the same.) It’s the sort of pressure that has been called “the tyranny of the urgent,” and we are all susceptible to falling for it. Western(ized) society thrives on keeping us all in a state of restless urgency, on tenterhooks, churned up, relentlessly insisting that we stay involved; and our churches – long unused to promoting contemplation or spiritual life, unmoored from the original mystical vision of the tradition, and too often dominated by the political movements and ideologies (both Left and Right) of our day – have brought the agitation and polarization of “the world” (kosmos) right into the sanctuary. Worse, they have tended to do it in most cases with overweening sanctimoniousness.

Nothing I am saying is intended to deny that political engagement can be – and ought to be – a good thing. In a free society, we have the right to be heard, to be involved in elections, to demand justice, to protest injustice, and so on. As a matter of course, these are fine things and shouldn’t be gainsaid. But what I am saying is that we live in a day and age when our higher sensibilities are interminably bombarded by the alleged “urgency” fostered in the moment’s political scene, and this burden of “urgency” laid on our conscience never lets up. It’s easy for us to be sucked into the seemingly inexorable cyclone of the zeitgeist, allowing it to sweep into our own private thoughts and souls, and – perniciously – giving us no rest from what used to be called “worldliness.” “Worldliness,” as old-fashioned as that term sounds these days, is in reality a soul-killing state of mind. It means that one has lost all awareness of the numinous, that sense of the existence of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the perennial or eternal or timeless dimension, the transcendent. It’s a condition that threatens to flatten any former spiritual awakening. Unless we are extremely careful, our anger, fear, and other passions will be stirred up, leading us to animosity, bitterness, prejudice, and wrangling. If we hand ourselves over to such consuming psychic obsession and delusion, our contemplative lives will inevitably – even if imperceptibly in the beginning – shrink and wither and die. (“Some brothers once asked Abba Silvanus: ‘What way of life did you practice to be endowed with such prudence?’ And he answered: ‘I never let any embittering thought remain in my heart.’”) [3] I don’t hesitate to say the condition I’ve described is “demonic,” in the sense that, say, Evagrius of Pontus would have understood the term. And the more one substitutes the spiritual life with a favored political “cause” or political ideology, regarding it as coterminous with one’s faith, the more demonic it likely is.

Related to this, of course, is the character of our social engagement. Little needs to be said here. Most of us have encountered “trolls” online, for instance (perhaps some of us have been guilty of “trolling” others); a few of us have, no doubt, had arguments – political or otherwise – that have resulted in acrimony and maybe even lost us friends and acquaintances. Some of us have had whole days ruined or sleepless nights because we have entered into some lengthy “debate,” ending in dejection. The fact is, “social” media is often a misnomer; frequently, it’s anything but “social” – and, as we know, it has led to some serious nastiness offline. Much of it is related directly to the mindset I’ve already outlined above.

And then there are those persons who, in effect, poison our peace of mind, who seem ceaselessly to be outraged or enraged, derisive, scornful, disrespectful, scolding, or who merely delight in vulgarity. They drag our spirits down, and sometimes we guiltily “unfriend” or “block” them. My advice here is to dispense with the guilt. I would like for you to put the health of your mind (nous) and thoughts above those nagging “social” concerns our society likes to tell us are so “necessary” – the quality of your thought should be cared for as much as, or even more than, you would care for your bodily limbs. The simple truth is, if one is seeking to cultivate a serious spiritual practice, there are those from whom we should have no qualms about disengaging, as unpleasant as that may feel in the moment. One’s serenity must come first, and prayer and contemplation should be – as best we can manage it – free of the turmoil and distractions that other persons bring into it. (“Abba Poemen said: ‘Depart from anyone who is always scornful in his conversation.”) [4]

This brings me back to the subject of the “art” of spiritual direction. The mythologist Joseph Campbell expounded a theory of “art” that he derived from James Joyce, and – since I’ve referred to direction repeatedly as an “art” above – I think it’s arguable that Campbell’s Joycean theory applies here. Campbell divided art into “proper” and “improper.” [5] “Proper” art, he insisted, is intended to induce an altered state of mind, one in which the perceiver becomes – even if only momentarily – detached from the biological and social concerns of daily life. Needless to say, this same idea might be said to apply to genuine prayer, as well. The spiritual guide should concentrate on helping the counselee enter into the sort of prayer that transcends these concerns, at least in periods (the same, by the way, should be said of liturgy and worship – the latter are not the place for politics, for example, or for that matter, entertainment).

“Improper” art, Campbell went on, can be divided into two, equally deficient types: the “pornographic” and the “didactic.” The “pornographic” stirs up desire (we might say, the passions) for something we wish to consume or use – advertising, for instance, is “pornographic” in nature. Political and ideologically motivated art — propaganda — is likewise “pornographic.” The “didactic” does quite nearly the reverse: it stirs up a distaste for what “should be” opposed or rejected. Both the pornographic and the didactic induce “lateral” movements, this way and that but never up or down; neither of them is uplifting or psychically transfiguring. Again, the same might be said of the life of the spirit and the art of the spiritual director: his or her task is to steer the counselee away from the domination of “the passions” (in order to learn to love purely) and from the tendency to reject or oppose others based on only “lateral” concerns (e.g., the notion that one must be either conservative or liberal, either traditional or forward-looking, and so on). The prayer life – like proper art – should rise above the flat, limited pornographic and didactic aspects of “worldly” existence, always open to an altered state of mind and the infinite.

Nothing I have said in this post is especially new or surprising. But it does cut against the grain of our society’s fashionable expectations, which is as it should be. One of the aspects of spiritual health, which we are in danger of losing (and many have already lost), is the idea – as old as the words of Christ – that there lie before us “two roads” that we must choose between: the broad and the narrow paths (Matt. 7:13-15). The starting point of both paths is within us. The narrow way must, by its very nature, sometimes feel to us like a tight squeeze. The reality, though, is that it’s a freer road to travel and promises a far vaster, more expansive, and fulfilling destination than the broad road does. With that image in mind, I leave you with the warning of one of the great desert mothers, the Abbess Syncletice: “Saint Syncletice said: ‘My sons, we all know the way to be saved, and fail to travel it because we do not care.’” [6]

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[1] T. Merton, Spiritual Direction and Meditation (Collegeville, 1960), p. 16.

[2] Owen Chadwick (editor), Western Asceticism (Philadelphia, 1958), p. 136. Apophthegmata Patrum XI, 27.

[3] Ibid., p. 136. Apophthegmata Patrum, XI, 30.

[4] Ibid., p. 135. Apophthegmata Patrum, XI, 25.

[5] What follows comes from Campbell’s recorded lectures.

[6] Chadwick, op. cit., p. 137. Apophthegmata Patrum, XI, 31A.