This paper comes to you from a course I just finished. I hope it will encourage you to consider working with a spiritual director. I hope, even more, it will open your heart, as it’s opened mine, to the expansive, healing love of God.

Toward a Healthier Spirituality through Spiritual Direction, Empathy, and Experience: Reflections on Spiritual Wholeness from Thomas Oden, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairveaux, Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart

Susan Carson

January 17, 2023

for

Dr. Peter Fitch

THEO 5210 Ancient Insights for Today (Historical Theology) and HIST 5240 Church History

Winter 2022

The hunger for a more experiential, mystical faith is growing in an American landscape dotted with Evangelical churches too purpose-driven to offer personalized pastoral care for the soul. In this void, many desiring a more transformational, embodied spiritual life are seeking spiritual directors. These guides are trained to listen empathetically and help people understand what God is doing and saying in their lives. “Spiritual direction,” says Richard Foster, “is an interpersonal relationship in which we learn how to grow, live, and love in the spiritual life.”[1]

In an article titled “Growing Demand for Spiritual Directors,” Lisa Wangsness of the Boston Globe writes, “The Rev. Michelle Sanchez, a young evangelical Christian pastor, believes the interest in spiritual direction highlights what is missing from religious institutions today….So many religious traditions end up feeling quite divorced from your everyday life and experience, so it’s essentially irrelevant…I think people are tired of that, and I think they hunger for a God they can experience, that is relevant, and close, and that can actually transform them.’’[2]

Within the context of spiritual relationship, directors open space for seekers to listen to God as well as to their own hearts. The empathy of the director shapes a space rooted in love and ripe for knowing God and self. This experiential knowing of love brings growth and healing. Gregory the Great and other Church Fathers emphasized the importance of spiritual direction in pastoral care as part of the pastoral office and central to a healthy spiritual life.

In this paper, I will explore the centrality of spiritual direction and empathy in spiritual health and wholeness. I will demonstrate that empathy creates space for spiritual transformation as we experience God as love and come to know our true selves in love. To do that, I will focus on the connection between empathy and our experience of God’s love through the writings of Thomas Oden and Gregory the Great as well as Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart. I'll propose that our spiritual healing and wholeness come primarily through union with love in God, ourselves and others.

Thomas Oden, writing to address “the deep trouble in which modern pastoral care now finds itself,”[3] invites us to learn from the wisdom of Gregory the Great in the practice of spiritual direction and pastoral care. Gregory, in The Book of Pastoral Care, provides detailed instruction for the work of spiritual care. This handbook is timeless in the wisdom offered for the empathic care of the soul.

Oden lists “empathy grounded in incarnational understanding of God’s participation” as well as spiritual direction among the potential advantages of “reclaiming classical pastoral wisdom through a synthesis of old and new ideas.”[4] “Empathy,” he says, “is the process of placing one's self in the frame of reference of another, perceiving the world as the other perceives it, sharing his or her world imaginatively….When the troubled person finds himself or herself under the care of someone with accurate empathy, someone who seems able to enter another's perceptual framework, he or she experiences a profoundly liberating feeling of being known, being understood. Empathy is the precondition of all therapeutic effectiveness.”[5]

Oden continues, “Effective empathy assumes a cosmic permission to get in touch with one's own deepest experiencing. Persons who are offered this empathic gift tend to grow toward more appropriate self-acceptance and self-understanding…The unspoken assumption is that acceptance is already there, despite all human rejection, and that the person who is neurotically guilty, anxious, and depressed does not have proper self-knowledge.”[6]

This incarnational empathy is grounded in the knowledge that God is with us and for us. In other words, this thoroughly Christian empathy communicates “the reality of God's occurring love; not to introduce God to the world as if God were not already there, but to introduce persons to themselves as those who are already claimed by God.”[7]

Empathy, then, communicates love and acceptance. Embodied in a spiritual director, empathy enacts God’s empathy with us in Jesus. In other words, through spiritual direction, seekers experience the empathetic, self-giving, self-emptying love of God, opening the way to an experience of God’s personal and transformational love. Author Brene Brown puts it this way: “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.”[8] Shame is the sense that I am wrong, that there is something wrong with me at the very core. Empathy takes “wrong” out of the equation. Empathy—an encounter with embodied love--helps heal our wounds, sin and shame.

At the heart of St. Gregory’s method was listening to know the unique needs of individuals who came with their own shame and wounds. From Gregory: “But often a wound is made worse by unskilled mending, so that the cut is felt more grievously because it is bound improperly by the bandages. And so it is necessary that when the wound of sin in a layperson is mitigated by correction, even the restraint should be carefully moderated so that the exercise of just discipline should not come at the expense of loving-kindness.”[9]

“Gregory’s most influential assumption,” writes Oden, “is that no two pastoral cases are to be handled in precisely the same way. Each requires a response gauged to the specific contours of the situation. Gregory calls the pastor to be keenly attentive to these contextual peculiarities, fine nuances, and ever-changing emotive qualities, rather than flatly applying rigid norms without listening to the situation.”[10]

Through empathetic listening, spiritual directors make space for seekers to share and consider their thoughts and emotions, focusing attention on inner conflicts and underlying issues. “To this end, Saint Gregory the Great urged the pastor to utilize ‘careful questionings’ by which to arrive at ‘hidden’ thoughts and to closely investigate these innermost matters.”[11]

The love of God embodied in empathic listening and soul care opens space to experience, in other words to know, this love in our innermost places, uprooting sin and shame to reveal the true and bring healing. Experiencing God and ourselves as love, our souls are progressively healed and ultimately restored in union with God. This is the message and lived experience of Medieval mystics Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart.

For Bernard of Clairvaux, everything comes from and leads to love. This love is experienced by degrees, and this experience of both God and self is the central agent in transformation. Jean Leclercq writes,

“It can be said that for Bernard everything begins and ends with experience and, in between, experience is the object of reflection. God is the source of all things, including experience, but the first object of man's thought is himself and the experience of his unique personal history. He tries to understand that history with the help of God's grace and in light of his word. This experience of himself in his pitiable condition sends him back to God and causes him to experience his love; it also leads him to put that love into practice.” [12]

Love moves us from self-centeredness to openness to union, from humility to ecstasy. Through ascetic practices, prayer and the contemplation of Christ and Scripture, we experience by degrees theotic transformation. Bernard writes,

“To love in this way is to become like God. As a drop of water seems to disappear completely in a quantity of wine, taking the wine’s flavor and color; as red-hot iron becomes indistinguishable from the glow of fire and its own original form disappears; as air diffused with the light of the sun seems transformed into the brightness of the light as if it were itself light rather than merely lit up; so in those who are holy it is necessary for human affection to dissolve in some ineffable way, and be poured into the will of God. How will God be all in all if anything of man remains in man? The substance remains, but in another form, with another glory, another power.”[13]

Through encounter Bernard experiences infinite love that holds and heals, and he comes to know his truest self as loved: “It is the one who felt moved by the same Spirit as the Son who takes for certain the Father's Love. Be confident, whoever you are, be confident and doubt nothing. In the Spirit of the Son, recognize yourself as the Father's daughter, as the spouse of the Son or His sister.”[14] This love originates in the person of God as love, ultimately changing us to become like God, so that God becomes all in all. Focusing on the love as a kiss between bride and bridegroom, Bernard gives us a picture of Trinitarian union with humans experienced through the kiss of the Holy Spirit.

Julian of Norwich echoes these same themes, grounding us in the love of God that heals the false and reveals the true. For Julian this love was opened through a series of encounters she calls showings, revelations of the cross and the flowing blood of Christ that heals and unites us all in Him.

Julian establishes “the identity of man” writes Paul Molinari. “We are quite simply and gloriously the beloved of God. ‘Love is his meaning,’ the meaning of life and ultimately it has no other. We are inestimably valuable and supremely important ‘for the Lord that loveth us.’ There is no wrath in God and, in the end, all will be well.”[15] For Julian, “our goodness is deeper than our brokenness. Our very being is in God. Our substance is found in God and God in us.”[16]

Julian writes, “It is a great understanding to see and know inwardly that God, who is our creator, dwells in our soul, and it is a far greater understanding to see and know inwardly that our soul, which is created, dwells in God in substance, of which substance, through God, we are what we are.”[17]

For Julian as for Bernard, “God is a God moving his creatures because he desires them, and the movement brings peace and consolation….We become partners, first in desire and then in fact.”[18] Through contemplative prayer and the work of grace, we come to know ourselves in the fullness of the knowledge and love of Christ. For both Julian and Bernard (and Eckhart, too) we are becoming by grace what God is by nature.[19] Or we might say that we are becoming love by grace through our knowing of the love of the Trinity. Mirabai Starr sums up Julian’s meaning for us beautifully: “Redemption, then, is not a matter of absolving sin; it is about loving us into the wholeness of who we really are.”[20]

The Lord’s meaning is simple for Julian; it is love revealed by Love for love’s sake for “before God made us he loved us, which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting…In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end.”[21] Love unifies, heals, and holds all things together. Julian calls this “oneing,” using the same bridal and familial (Mother, Father, brother) relationships we find in Bernard and Eckhart. “In our creation we are knot and oned to God. By this we are kept as luminous and noble as when we were created. By the force of this precious oneing we love, see, praise, thank and endlessly enjoy our Creator.” Our soul “is known and loved from without beginning and in its creation oned to the Creator.” For Julian, “prayer ones the soul to God.” [22] In other words, through contemplation we see ourselves in God and we find God in ourselves and in all.

For Meister Eckhart, as with Julian, union or oneing is at the center of our being and becoming. He writes, we were “originally at one in the Godhead—that all things are at one there, and there is no separation.”[23] Our birth into this world leaves us out of sync with the Godhead, brought into the “fraught world of creation, history, and God.” In this life we awaken and return to our original oneing “all the time” through breakthroughs as we learn “that God and I are one.”

For Eckhart, the soul is the ground of God within each of us, “the natural image of God” which must be “adorned and perfected in this birth.”[24] God enters the soul with his all, working to bring (or birth) the soul into the end which is God Himself. This is the nature and ground of the contemplative life for Eckhart.

The birth of God, an awareness and experience of the life and presence of God within, occurs as we empty ourselves. This path, says Eckhart (Bernard and Julian as well), is open only to pure souls, for “light and darkness cannot co-exist.”[25] “When you have completely stripped yourself of your own self, and all things and every kind of attachment, and have transferred, made over, and abandoned yourself to God in utter faith and perfect love, then whatever is born in you or touches you, within or without, joyful or sorrowful, sour or sweet, that is no longer yours, it is altogether your God's to whom you have abandoned yourself.”[26]

In the end, the emptying and opening are the work of love within us. “He can hardly wait for you to open up. He longs for you a thousand times more than you long for Him: the opening and the entering are a single act.“[27]

Eckhart, writes Charlotte Radler, “holds that one becomes what one loves; pure love engenders pure being. In German sermon 38, Eckhart claims that love, like intellect, generates likeness. Thus, if human beings love fragmented and earthly things, they become fragmented and earthly; however, if they love God, they become God. For Eckhart, then, transformation and unification of love unlock and result in transformation and unification of being.”[28]

Radler continues, “In perfect unity, the soul even shares in the ubiquity and purity of God’s love: ‘God is everywhere in the soul, and it is everywhere in him; hence, God is an all without all [things], and it [the soul that is in love] is with him an all without all [things].’”[29]

For each of these mystics, writes Davies, the emphasis is the importance of the divine image in the human person, the union or oneing with God and the soul, and the “inner and essential union with God, who, as the Father, gives birth to the Son in the Trinity, and, as the same Father, gives birth to the same Son in the depths of the human soul.”[30] James Finley sums up the message of the mystics in this way:

“I think in the language of these mystics that we’re being perpetually created by God, as God’s beloved. And as God’s beloved, God wills for us to realize that we’re God’s beloved, that is we’re the touch or the taste of God. And when we realize that we’re God’s beloved, which brings peace, then with it comes God’s capacity given to us to say yes to that. So, God’s our beloved. So we give ourself in love to the beloved, who’s infinitely being given to us as beloved’s beloved. And that union, that reciprocity, God wants us to experience that because that’s our destiny on this Earth in a veiled way, but it’s foreshadowings of eternal life. We’ll spend all of eternity in this reciprocity of love.”[31]

With the help of the mystics we find that all is love, and the knowing of this love is our healing. Empathy embodied in a spiritual director through the act of holy listening, helps lift the veil, bringing us face to face with God as Lover and our true selves as beloved. In the presence of empathy and listening, the visible and invisible touch and a thin space opens. This capacity to help people, writes Peter Fitch, “seems almost like an invisible river of healing, flowing beneath the conscious surface of things. Learning how to listen or to harvest the fruit of silence yields a potential for healing that we ought to learn more about.” [32] We see this in our prayer room at Roots&Branches. Set apart as a place for listening and healing for over eight years now, this space carries a tangible sense of peace, presence and flow.

Our spiritual wholeness, a progressive work of grace, is union in love—the healing of the body of Christ as we become (together and separately) fully human, embodying Jesus on the planet and loving our neighbor. This all begins and ends in loving connection. Connection with God. Connection with one another. Connection with ourselves. Sitting together, face to face, hearing one another’s stories, looking into one another’s eyes, allowing our lives to touch, to rub up against each other, we find ourselves. Maybe at the most basic level, all this begins with listening. Simply being present with one another. Submitting and setting aside our private need to be heard, to advise, to assert our opinions, to be right, to be the center. Listening—really listening to the heart, simply to understand—this is where healing begins.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Brene. Daring Greatly: How the Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead. New York: Gotham Books, 2012.

Colledge, Edmund, and James Walsh, trans. Julian of Norwich:The Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978.

Daniel-Rops, Henri. Bernard of Clairvaus. Translated by Elizabeth Abbott. New York and London: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1964.

Davies, Oliver. Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings. London, England: Penguin Books, 1994.

Evans, G. R., trans. Bernard of Clairvaux. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.

Evans, G. R., trans. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.

Finley, James. “Turning to the Mystics.” Julian of Norwich, n.d. https://cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/TTTM_Transcript_JON_D3.pdf.

Fitch, Peter. “Developing Intimacy with God.” Book Chapter, n.d.

Foster, Richard. “What Is Spiritual Direction?” Renovare. Accessed January 10, 2023. https://renovare.org/articles/what-is-spiritual-direction.

Fox, Matthew. Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic--and Beyond. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2020.

Gregory the Great, St. The Book of Pastoral Care. Translated by George E. Demacopoulos. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2007.

Imbach, Jeffrey D. The Recovery of Love: Christian Mysticism and the Addictive Soceity. New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1992.

Marcu, Marinel Laurentiu. “The Orthodox Christian Church Fathers and Pastoral Counseling: Specific Patristic Pastoral Approaches.” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 21, no. 63 (Winter 2022): 81–95.

Molinari, Paul. “Love Was His Meaning: Julian of Norwich--Six Centuries Later.” 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter, December 1971.

Oden, Thomas C. “Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition: Chapter 2, Why Gregory?” Religion Online, 1984. https://www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/chapter-2-why-gregory/.

Oden, Thomas C., and Don S. Browning. Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition Theology and Pastoral Care. Philadelpia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984.

Radler, Charlotte. “‘In Love I Am More God’: The Centrality of Love in Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism.” Journal of Religion 90, no. 2 (2010): 171–98.

Walshe, Maurice O’C., trans. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 2009. https://philocyclevl.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/meister-eckhart-maurice-o-c-walshe-bernard-mcginn-the-complete-mystical-works-of-meister-eckhart-the-crossroad-publishing-company-2009.pdf.

Wangsness, Lisa. “Growing Demand for Spiritual Directors.” Boston Globe, May 6, 2012. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/05/05/growing-demand-for-spiritual-directors/caxImzYEdDDbI8lEJ9OqQO/story.html.

[1] Richard Foster, “What Is Spiritual Direction?,” Renovare, accessed January 10, 2023, https://renovare.org/articles/what-is-spiritual-direction.

[2] Lisa Wangsness, “Growing Demand for Spiritual Directors,” Boston Globe, May 6, 2012, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/05/05/growing-demand-for-spiritual-directors/caxImzYEdDDbI8lEJ9OqQO/story.html.

[3] Thomas C. Oden, “Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition: Chapter 2, Why Gregory?,” Religion Online, 1984, https://www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/chapter-2-why-gregory/.

[4] Thomas C. Oden and Don S. Browning, Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition Theology and Pastoral Care (Philadelpia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 38–40 From lecture notes prepared by Peter Fitch.

[5] Oden and Browning, 18–19 From lecture notes prepared by Peter Fitch.

[6] From lecture notes from Peter Fitch. Oden and Browning, 19.

[7] From the lecture notes of Peter Fitch. Oden and Browning, 20.

[8] Brene Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead (New York: Gotham Books, 2012), 68.

[9] St. Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Care, trans. George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2007), 67.

[10] Oden, “Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition: Chapter 2, Why Gregory?”

[11] Marinel Laurentiu Marcu, “The Orthodox Christian Church Fathers and Pastoral Counseling: Specific Patristic Pastoral Approaches,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 21, no. 63 (Winter 2022): 86.

[12] G. R. Evans, trans., Bernard of Clairvaux: The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) From the Introduction written by Jean LeClercq and provided in course materials.

[13] G. R. Evans, trans., Bernard of Clairvaux (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 196.

[14] Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux: The Classics of Western Spirituality From the Introduction written by Jean LeClercq and provided in course materials.

[15] Paul Molinari, “Love Was His Meaning: Julian of Norwich--Six Centuries Later,” 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter, December 1971.

[16] Jeffrey D. Imbach, The Recovery of Love: Christian Mysticism and the Addictive Soceity (New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1992), 60.

[17] Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, trans., Julian of Norwich:The Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978), 64.

[18] Colledge and Walsh, 63.

[19] Colledge and Walsh, 67.

[20] Matthew Fox, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic--and Beyond (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2020), xiv.

[21] Colledge and Walsh, Julian of Norwich:The Classics of Western Spirituality, 343.

[22] Fox, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic--and Beyond, 60.

[23] Fox, 60.

[24] Maurice O’C. Walshe, trans., The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 2009), 39, https://philocyclevl.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/meister-eckhart-maurice-o-c-walshe-bernard-mcginn-the-complete-mystical-works-of-meister-eckhart-the-crossroad-publishing-company-2009.pdf.

[25] Walshe, 40.

[26] Walshe, 51.

[27] Walshe, 58.

[28] Charlotte Radler, “‘In Love I Am More God’: The Centrality of Love in Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism,” Journal of Religion 90, no. 2 (2010): 182.

[29] Radler, 186.

[30] Oliver Davies, Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings (London, England: Penguin Books, 1994), xxvii.

[31] James Finley, “Turning to the Mystics,” Julian of Norwich, n.d., https://cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/TTTM_Transcript_JON_D3.pdf.

[32] Peter Fitch, “Developing Intimacy with God” (Book Chapter, n.d.).