Spiritual Direction and the Ex-Evangelical
There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s classic Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket when Private Joker is approached by a superior officer about a peace symbol button he’s wearing. “Who’s side are you on, son?” the officer yells at him. “Don’t you love your country? How about getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come in for the big win?” Some times that encounter feels like church, doesn’t it? Do you resonate with books and articles about “the dones” or “ex-Evangelicals“? Do you feel yourself losing the mooring of your belonging? If you find yourself disillusioned with your Evangelical or fundamentalist community, spiritual direction can be a helpful and healthy space for self-reflecting about your faith.
One reason this scene sticks with me is the fact that I first watched this movie while I was in the midst of trying to make sense out of the rubble of my own faith. I’d grown up going to church every Sunday and Wednesday. But then I blew the whole thing up when life threw me some curveballs. I was in my early 20s. I never had a church authority figure confront me literally like in the movie, but that voice certainly lived in my head during that season. I’m so grateful for the gracious community I found during that time who offered me a safe place to be myself even when I was pissed off at God. I also know that’s not everyone’s experience. I have dear friends that haven’t been so lucky.
Perhaps the current political climate has put your faith in crisis. Or your convictions on a particular social issue aren’t welcome at your church. Or maybe you’re not finding a safe place in your community for your multiplying doubts and questions. Or you’re discovering that you work for a church you’d never attend if it wasn’t for that paycheck. If you find yourself in such a space where your Evangelical upbringing just doesn’t cut it for you anymore, these are just a few of the ways that spiritual direction may provide a safe harbor for you.
Keeping your faith in your lobster season
Lobsters outgrow their shells every few months. Essentially, as its inner being grows, it goes through what sounds like a traumatic process. Here’s how the authors of The New Parish describes it:
Next, the lobster pops its eyes out of their holes, rending the lobster blind for the duration of the process. Then begins the slow struggle of wrenching the flesh of its large pincer claws through its much smaller joints. After the claw-flesh is free, the lobster is out with a flip of its tail. But once free, the lobster is at risk. Unable to stand for more than half an hour at a time, the lobster just flops around, tired, helpless and exposed, as it waits for its new shell to harden.
Helpless and exposed while you wait for a new shell to harden. That sound familiar at all? The maturing process of our own faith can be a scary process. But a spiritual director has seen it before and can be something like a coach or a midwife through it all.
It’s not unusual at all to find that the forms that shape us in one season of life come to be a limiting force that holds us back from further maturity. In other words, our strategies that got us here, won’t get us to where we need to go next. We all have to stretch our wings and leave the nest. And that can be terrifying all by ourselves. A spiritual director reminds us that this is okay, that we are normal, that we will be alright in the end and that this isn’t yet the end.
Exploring new rooms in the Christian house
I grew up in an Evangelical Methodist setting. I went to college at a Christian school steeped in charismatic Pentecostalism. My passport was full of stamps from mission trips. I spoke fluent Evangelical. For me, it all unraveled when I went through a divorce. My personal experience was not squaring with the picture in my head of how all this church stuff was supposed to work.
By God’s grace, I found myself on the doorstep of a house church that utilized a Roman Catholic prayer book for its rhythm and structure. And a whole new world opened up to me. A friend who led that community took me to the Abbey of Gethsemani and introduced me to the work of Thomas Merton. I wandered into this stream of contemplative Christianity that I’d never encountered before—things like lectio divina, the daily office, centering prayer, and spiritual direction.
The Christian faith is so big. It’s like a huge house with hundreds of rooms. Some times, through no fault of our own, we fall in love with one particular room. Maybe it’s the one we were born in. We can come to believe it’s the only room in the house. This especially gets us in trouble when we decide the room suddenly got too small and we just need to burn it down. But there’s so much more to explore, and a spiritual director can be our guide, leading us out the doorway, into the hallway, upstairs and downstairs, into different nooks and crannies of the Christian tradition that we may have missed. There is so much more.
Trusting in the process
There are a great many things we do that form us as Christians, that draw us closer to God—reading Scripture, volunteering at church, serving the homeless. But there comes a time for all us when we begin to mistake the means for the end. We start using that activity as a defense for holding God’s actual presence at arm’s length. It’s to this that Jesus warns when he says, “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter.”
I’ve talked with individuals who suddenly woke up to find this happening. Or they came to discover that all their church busyness was serving someone else’s vision of more buildings, a bigger budget, and more people in the pews. It didn’t have anything to do with God at all. If you find yourself here, what happens next requires much wisdom. Pop culture has all kinds of images for this, whether it’s Neo waking up to the Matrix, Kimmy Schmidt emerging from the bunker, or 5-year-old Jack in one of my favorite movies, Room. Joseph Campbell calls this liminal space “the call to adventure.”
In Stages of Faith, James Fowler suggests that there’s a psychological element to the ways we approach faith as we mature through infancy into childhood and finally adulthood. Remember the awkwardness of puberty? Our souls experience a similar discombobulation in the transitions. It’s part of the human experience, and a spiritual director can be a friendly guide through all the awkwardness as we grow.
Cultivating our hope, weeding our cynicism
Often when we find ourselves in this place where the faith that was once so familiar doesn’t fit anymore, the temptation is big to just tear it all down. Or we find ourselves drawn to tearing down everyone we associate with that worldview. Cynicism pulls us like a tractor beam into the Death Star. We find ourselves attracted to people and conversations and online spaces that cultivate our cynicism like mold in the damp dark.
But hope does just the opposite. Hope offers a way out of the spiral of nihilism and disgust. It is hope that draws us to the love of God that empowers us to forgive those that have disappointed us. It is this love of God that creates life in the midst of the mess and brings light into dark places.
Cynicism drags us down, but hope leads us forward. Cynicism isn’t cool. Hope is cool. A spiritual director curates a safe and healthy space for questions and doubts, and at the same time, reminds us that questions eventually have answers and even doubts can be doubted.
What to look for in a spiritual director
Finding a spiritual director for your journey requires some wisdom, some trial-and-error. Don’t just go with the first one you meet. Your story is sacred. Interview several, asking direct questions.
You want a spiritual director who will challenge you and not just tell you what you want to hear. Look for a director who shares your non-negotiable theological convictions. If you used to have a dozen of those but now only have one, make sure you share that one in common. Look for a director with life experience. Ask questions about their spiritual story. If it’s not evident that they’ve wrestled themselves with God, you’d probably do better continuing in your search. If there’s no arc to their story of being lost and found, of their own listening and responding and being surprised by God, keep looking.
If spiritual abuse and trauma are a part of your story, a good spiritual director will see that and be able to refer you to other professional mental health services. Spiritual direction is not the same as counseling, and it should not replace counseling when it’s needed. One Episcopal priest friend told me that his diocese requires all clergy to have both a spiritual director and a therapist. These are complementary resources for our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Your disappointment with church doesn’t have to be the end of your faith journey. Spiritual direction holds a non-anxious and non-judgmental presence for your sacred story, wherever you currently find yourself in that story. You don’t have to be alone. Life is too short to try this alone.
To begin looking for a spiritual director, start with the nearest retreat centers in your area, or explore the directories of Spiritual Directors International, Sustainable Faith, or drop me a line.