BEGINNINGS

HOW I STARTED

When I went to church that Sunday, I never dreamed my life would be altered, but interestingly, the change did not happen during the religious service. The transformation began, although I was barely aware of it at the time, in a conversation with a wonderful woman friend after the church service. That combination of belonging to a church and yet finding a closer connection to the Divine through personal, spiritual interactions has become a constant element of my journey.

I have felt for decades that I stand both inside and outside traditional religion. This borderland is the only place I can be, but it can feel countercultural and a bit isolating. In church, as I hear prayers, preaching, and hymns, I am often agreeing and disagreeing in my head, thinking, Hmm, yes, but ... Both outside and inside church, I must choose carefully with whom I share my experiences of the Divine since there are people who would peg me as crazy or arrogant to think that the Holy One would even deign to bring experiences to me. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you how it started that Sunday so many years ago.

I was speaking after church with Emily, a dear friend in the choir, who started describing her latest experience in a new church gathering called simply "the spiritual direction group." Everyone in the group had been encouraged one evening to ask in meditation for help with some personal goal they were trying to achieve. Emily told me that she was trying to lose weight. She described her meditation. "And then, in my mind, I saw all these helping hands reaching out to me, supporting me in my journey,"

Wow, I thought, people see things at these meetings? I have to try this!

So I went to the very next Monday night meeting. There, even though I had never meditated before, I responded to the instructions of the group leader, Pamela, and dutifully closed my eyes. I was immediately struck by a sense of a holy, spiritual power that seemed present in the room. It was as if I had opened a door inside myself to an immense space that had always been there but I had never known about. Both that inner room and the physical room in which I was sitting seemed filled with something powerful, something with substance, something like a thickness in the air. I think of that immense space now as "the universe of imagination" and that substance as "spirit."

On that first evening, as instructed, I put myself imaginatively into the suggested Bible story and spoke to God in my mind, heart, and imagination. To my complete surprise, I heard words coming back to me. I began to see images and to take part in unfolding scenes. I remember worrying that I must really have an overactive imagination and that none of this could possibly be from God. However, during the time after meditation, our shepherdess, Pamela, spoke as if she truly believed that the Divine One was speaking with each of us in our contemplations, and she somehow related all our comments — both about our meditation and about our lives — back to God. She didn't preach, she didn't tell us what to do or think, she didn't even say "God" that often, but she spoke as if our thoughts in meditation and the mundane happenings of our everyday lives were important to the Holy One.

I was so excited! I was in my late thirties and had been a churchgoer all my life, but I had never felt connected to God outside Sunday services. I had never imagined a Holy One who cared about every little aspect of my life and of everyone else's life. However, after that first meeting and meditation, I felt as if I had finally found a spiritual home. Years earlier, I had found my musical home inside the amazing, enveloping sound of an orchestra. Now there was another, spiritual world waiting to envelop me. Like the line from the Broadway musical that says, "Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly," I knew I had to swim and fly in that dense air of spirit and imagination. I was meant to exist in that space. It was my native land.

It's nice to feel so sure of all that right now in my life. Back then, some thirty years ago, I felt a mixture of excitement and doubt. I worried for quite a while that what came to me in meditation was only the result of stray firings of my overwrought brain cells. It took quite a few meetings and meditations, probably a year or so, before I was convinced that what was happening to me was really shared imagination. I was envisioning with the Divine.

With Pamela's gentle guidance, I gradually became convinced that my meditations and those of all the group members were a synthesis of individual imagination with God's imagination. Experiencing and believing in that process changed my life. I not only received spiritual scenes and the group members' gentle comments to ponder over time, but I also heard the other participants' wondrous visual images, which I could hold silently in my heart as additional touchstones of the Holy One. Over time, this envisioning process branched out for our group members in ways that might have seemed crazy at the beginning but became for us amazing signposts on our spiritual journeys.

How did such a life-changing group begin? The following tale will describe the unlikely and inauspicious start of Pamela's three-part meeting format.

"OUT OF THIN AIR AND BY THE HOLY SPIRIT"

"Out of thin air and by the Holy Spirit" is how Pamela Barnett explained the genesis of the spiritual meetings that she started and where I first experienced shared imagination. Pamela and I were dear friends at church, and she was pursuing a master's degree in spiritual direction from a nearby seminary. At our church governing board meeting, she was asked to organize and lead spiritual direction meetings. Later, she told me how she "fell into" inventing a group format.

"This was purely out of thin air and by the Holy Spirit as far as I was concerned," Pamela confessed to me. "I didn't know what the heck I was doing! I knew about individual spiritual direction, but I didn't know anything about group work. I had a vague idea of how I would structure the meetings, I guess. I didn't know much about meditation at that point, but I did know I wanted a meditation time, and then discussion, and then end with Compline (a close-of-day prayer service)."

Emily, my choir friend who later interested me in coming to the gatherings, remembered being at that board meeting where the group format was first discussed.

"I asked Pamela what spiritual direction was," Emily told me. "Pamela replied that it was sitting down one-on-one with someone and helping that person understand his or her relationship with God. I was intimidated at the thought that I would have to sit down with one person and try to talk about my relationship with God. I didn't know if I even had a relationship with the Divine. I went to church, I had what I considered a faith, but I wasn't on any particular journey. I certainly didn't understand the words spirituality or religiosity. Those terms were confused in my mind. But I had experience in group work based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was used to being in a collective gathering where people shared their own stories and where we knew that whatever was said in the room stayed in the room. I was comfortable in that milieu of a confidential trust relationship. So I told Pamela that I thought spiritual direction would be easier in a group. She replied that she thought that would be dreadful!"

Emily laughingly continued. "But then Pamela said, 'Well, I don't know how that would work, but why don't we have a meeting?' So we did."

What a seemingly accidental beginning for a group format that has deeply affected so many lives! The Holy Spirit truly must have been at work.

Initially, the meetings were open to both women and men, but after nearly a year of very few men showing up, Pamela decided to officially make the group an all-woman gathering, renaming it the Women's Spiritual Direction Group.

Emily explained that shift to me. "At the first organizational meeting, quite a few men came, as well as women. The men wanted to base the meetings on a book or a case study. They seemed comfortable with that because it was factual. The women who showed up didn't seem interested in that direction, and Pamela suggested that we base the meetings on meditation." Chuckling, Emily continued her tale. "At one meeting when it was still open to both genders, a man came to the meeting and threw us women off because he was uncomfortable with the lengthening quiet time we women had grown accustomed to and had learned to even enjoy."

I suspect it was pretty uncomfortable for that lone male also! I have used meditation with men in individual spiritual direction and in mixed-gender groups at retreats and conferences. Men are quite capable of using imagination in meditation and discussing their own deep, spiritual lives. However, all my long-term gatherings have eventually self-selected into being all-women, probably because I'm a woman and because there may be an increased ease of sharing in single-gender groups.

Under Pamela's shepherding, the initial group added specific practices to her three-part format of meditation, discussion, and prayer. She helped us women focus on becoming quiet by sometimes having us enter the room in complete silence. On other occasions, she would begin by going around the circle and asking each woman to briefly describe how she was feeling that night. Pamela invented a method of helping us relax our bodies from our toes up while breathing in God's "light, love, strength, and healing power," and then breathing out to God "all worries, cares and burdens, all things to get done, and all things we wish we had not done." I still light a candle, as Pamela did, and then use the following relaxation talk and physical guidelines for becoming receptive during the quiet period. The talk alternates between consciously relaxing parts of the body and breathing in God's love and power.

Relaxation Talk

Find a comfortable spot in the chair or on the sofa, with your hands open and receptive and your feet resting easily on the floor. With your eyes closed, begin to scan your body for any tension, tightness, or dis-ease. Beginning at your feet, flex and relax the muscles in your toes, the arches of your feet, your ankles. Let go of any tightness in the calves of your legs; relax any tension in your thighs and let your stomach muscles just go slack. Begin to take in a few deep breaths, and as you inhale, breathe in God's light and love, God's strength and healing power. As you breathe out, imagine surrounding yourself with that light, love, and healing power, much as the candle flame on our table is surrounded by light.

Feel the chair or sofa supporting your back. Relax the muscles in your shoulders. Release any tension in the muscles of your upper arms, your lower arms, your palms and fingers. Feel any tightness flowing out the tips of your fingers. Breathe in God's light, love, strength, and healing power. Breathe out all things that seem heavy or burdensome. Hand over to God all cares, worries, and responsibilities, things that need to be done and things we wish we had not done. Let God hold all those things during these moments, so that we don't have to.

Let go of any tension in your neck and jaw. Release any tightness around your mouth and around your eyes. Imagine you can even relax behind your eyes. Let your forehead smooth out and picture all the rest of the tension in your body flowing out the top of your head. One more time, breathe in God's light, unconditional love, and power to heal whatever needs healing in you this very evening. As you exhale, breathe out the things of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, so that we might meet God in God's eternal now, where only these moments matter.

This relaxation talk is also extremely important in anchoring the group's meditations in God. Breathing in the Holy One's light, love, strength, and healing power not only infuses each member with God's Spirit but also keeps the meditations grounded in the Divine. When I first joined the group, I worried about whether my imagination might take me into unsafe spiritual waters. That worry subsided over time as I noticed that my meditations (and those of the other women) were positive and reassuring — almost never frightening. Pamela counseled us to look squarely at anything that did seem unsettling in our meditations, to see if that thing would change to something more positive. She also instructed us to ask any frightening thought or image, "Is that really you, Jesus?" Untrustworthy spirits flee from that question, she said. For a more detailed description of Ignatius's discernment of spirits, see the chapter "Testing the Fruits and Spirits, Checking with Others" later in this book.

With time, experience, and wise counseling from our shepherdess, Pamela, I felt quite safe letting my imagination go in meditations. I came to "see" in my mind's eye Jesus as an anchor in the middle of the room, with all of us attached to him by lengths of light beams. We could not go too far afield in our thoughts and imaginings, because we were connected to Jesus.

For meditation topics, Pamela brought in stories from the Bible as well as meditations from books on spirituality she was reading. (See Appendix B: Meditation Topics, for helpful books.) Once we had closed our eyes and gone through Pamela's relax-and-breathe-in-God exercise, she would read us the Bible story or meditation, which we would enter imaginatively that evening.

Pamela used the method that was invented in the sixteenth century by Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuit order) of entering a meditation in imagination. To help us use all our five senses in imagination, Pamela would ask questions like, "What does the landscape look like?" "How does the weather feel — hot, dry, and dusty, or cloudy, rainy, and damp?" Can you hear any sounds, perhaps people speaking or birds singing?" "Are there any smells you notice?" "What does Jesus (or Mary, or a disciple, or a person in the crowd) look like?" "Look down at your feet and notice what type of shoes you are wearing." "What does your clothing feel like against your skin?" "If you are at the seaside, can you taste the tang of saltwater in the air?" "If you are eating a meal, what flavors do you experience?" Then Pamela would leave us in silence to let the story or meditation play out in our minds however it would.

After the quiet time — at the first meetings this lasted only a few minutes but increased as the group became accustomed to meditating — Pamela would bring us out of the quiet by saying, "And when you're completely ready, I invite you to wrap up your meditation, open your eyes, and become present in this room again." Then she would ask, "How did that time go for any of you?" She would wait, staring patiently at the pattern of the carpet, until a woman felt like sharing what had come up for her during the quiet time.

After someone spoke, Pamela modeled the nondirective way we could speak to each other, something she called "talking across the circle." By her example and directions, our shepherdess encouraged us to ask gentle questions about another person's meditation and make open-ended suggestions on what a meditation image might mean. We were guided to avoid using the word "should" when speaking to another person or when talking about ourselves. And always Pamela encouraged us to check within ourselves to see if another person's comments to us resonated with our deepest self or not. Comments that did not resonate inside us, no matter how gentle the comment or how well-meaning, could be simply disregarded.

I learned much later, in other confidential group settings, that talking directly to another person is often not allowed. In those meeting formats, this type of speaking is negatively called "cross-talk" and is forbidden to avoid anyone giving advice or commenting on the validity of another person's sharing. Avoiding cross-talk is a blessing in many groups I attend. However, it was also a blessing to be able to talk "across the circle" in these spiritual direction meetings, using the gentle, nondirective ways into which Pamela guided us. My own encapsulation of those discussion guidelines can be found in Appendix A: Aids for Meetings in this book.