Before starting spiritual direction…
If you are not doing many of these things as part of your spiritual plan, you aren't really ready for regular spiritual direction... So start!
Sometimes people hear about this thing called “spiritual direction,” and make an appointment with their priest to “begin spiritual direction.” They may have read about this in the lives of the saints, or heard a Catholic acquaintance talk about it, and thought that it’s the next step they need to take in their spiritual life.
That’s often not true, because they’re often not ready for it.
Most people say spiritual direction when they mean spiritual counseling. The latter is when the person asks the priest (or other spiritual guide) for advice or an answer to a particular question. It is a one-off or occasional meeting. The person just needs to talk with someone who can give an objective perspective from a spiritually- and theologically- informed point of view. Spiritual direction is only possible when a person makes a disciplined commitment to be businesslike about his or her spiritual life. It only makes sense when a person has already created a spiritual plan of life that they’ve been consistently following. It involves regular meetings that you keep even if there’s nothing new to report. Most of the work is done by the person in direction; often, the director’s job is to simply make the directee accountable to someone, and to provide a regular opportunity to analyze one’s relationship with God rather than simply inhabit it.
The first few meetings I usually have with someone coming for spiritual direction aren’t really spiritual direction. They’re mostly helping the person develop a plan for a prayer life. I realized that it would be helpful to put the general principles of a Catholic spiritual life into a post so that people considering taking their spiritual life more seriously can get started working this out on their own…
1. Keep a spiritual notebook (paper or digital). Write in it every day. Keep it with you throughout the day. Include in it your examination of conscience and your resolutions from prayer and retreats, as well as any other spiritual thoughts that come to you. Use it to prepare your confessions.
2. Every day, strive to:
Go to Mass.
Make an examination of conscience.
Read the Bible and some other spiritual book
Say the Rosary
Spend a set amount of time in contemplative prayer or lectio divina.
Pray the Liturgy of the Hours.
Make a visit to our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, at least briefly.
3. Keep Sunday as a day of rest, prayer, and works of mercy. Arrange your week so that you do no shopping or work in the office or schoolwork or work around the house that can be done another day (cooking dinner is necessary; doing laundry or mowing the lawn can be done on Saturday). Spend time with family and friends. Call your mom. And treat it as a great feast day by…having a feast, complete with a drink, a cigar, an ice cream sandwich, or whatever treat it is that you deny yourself the rest of the week.
4. Schedule an annual retreat of at least 3 days. Make sure that at least once a month you spend a few hours in more intense prayer and recollection.
5. Try to lift your mind to God in aspirations several times a day, and live so as to be conscious of God’s constant presence during your day.
6. Foster a few private devotions (novenas, chaplets, patron saints, etc.) and stick to them.
7. Choose 5 small to medium mortifications, and deny yourself in those things regularly. These can include things like what you eat and drink, what you read and watch and listen to, who you decide to spend time with and listen to, what thing you find difficult you strive to do anyway, what thing you find pleasurable that you decide to forego, what donations you’ll make to the Church and other charities. Offer each mortification to God for a specific intention.
8. Develop an apostolic plan: that is, figure out the most effective way that you can spread the Gospel given the possibilities available to you. Pray and offer sacrifices for the people in your world. Examine your conscience on how you keep to your apostolic resolutions.
9. Avoid sin, root out bad habits that lead to sin or put you in occasions of sin. Go to confession frequently, especially when you fall in one of the areas you know are your weaknesses. Attack your predominant fault.
10. When you do your work, offer it to God.
11. Consider the virtues of the saints that you’d like to acquire, and try to come up with a plan to acquire them.
12. Strive to be cheerful! Don’t be discouraged when you fail. Don’t be a perfectionist–be a spiritual child.
Once you’ve ramped up these dozen areas of your spiritual life, you’ll have a lot to talk about with your spiritual director!
Nota Bene: Like physical exercise, spiritual exercises need to be added slowly–you can’t go suddenly from nothing to 3 hours of prayer and liturgy daily, anymore than you can go from not exercising to doing a triathlon quickly. There are stages to one’s spiritual life, steps one has to take, a mountain one has to climb (to use the traditional metaphors of Catholic spiritual masters). So start by adding some things from this list. Perhaps divide the list into low-hanging fruit, things that that seem doable, and that seem likely spiritual game changers for you, and then add things from each list over weeks and months.
NB #2: With most of these things, some will come more easily than others. That’s okay: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly, especially at the beginning. That’s part of what spiritual direction is for–to help you improve. But you can’t improve unless you’ve already started. Which is why until you’ve committed to installing the basics of a spiritual life into your regular routine, you’re probably not ready for regular spiritual direction.