I’ve been reviewing my journal from a while back and ran across something Gerald May wrote in his Care of Mind/Care of Spirit.
“In classic spiritual direction it is traditional for directors to help directees evaluate sufferings and discomforts in terms of their graced potentials. Certainly this approach is far more likely to happen in spiritual direction than in counseling or psychotherapy, which nearly always leap to ‘remedy the problem.’ But in the midst of our modern problem-solving mentality, spiritual directors are too often seduced into simplistic attempts to make their directees feel better. We must reclaim some of the old wisdom that says there is a difference between consolation and simply feeling good, and that suffering is often indeed the outer clothing of growth. (Gerald G. May. Care of Mind/Care of Spirit. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982, 1992, p. 61)
The pruning places of my journey have been God’s means of growing me in this orientation. Father, may I continue to live these insights in my current suffering and discomfort places. Teach me to see the graced potentials of these places of inward desolation and discomfort that I’ve been walking through. Free me from the compulsion to “fix it” or to keep expecting you You to “fix it” for me. Help me see how You are trying to “fix me” instead through inward transformation. May I learn to see with different eyes and from a different perspective.
I’ve gained much benefit from various kinds of counseling along the way. I’ve also been learning to listen and watch for God in the midst of an inner sense of discord, of dissonance, or of friction. The goal of life is not always about solving problems, but sometimes about living them in God’s presence.
If feeling good means missing the grace that feeling bad might open up to me, then teach me to seek You in the midst of feeling bad. If feeling worse for some season is a path to being grown into a truly holier, healthier person, then teach me to persevere in my suffering places. Teach me, as May says, the difference between consolation and ‘feeling good’. Enable me to see ways in which suffering places in my life or in the lives of others can actually be the outer clothing of growth and maturing.
