Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spiritual Direction - Gerald May
Ruah's back! And I hope to keep up better with the required reading this year.
When I started the class, I assumed doing the reading would be one of my favorite parts, but I've been disappointed, or I've disappointed myself. Generally I've found the books (some of which I'd read before and deeply enjoyed) boring and frustrating. Overwritten. Uninspired. Blah Blah Blah. I'm projecting my depression onto them, I know! But, still, it's not like I haven't enjoyed other books over the past year.
I think I'm in a mental and spiritual spot where theology is baloney, sermons are intolerable, nobody knows what they are talking about. I'm in the mood, spiritually, for specific instructions, silence, or riddles.
All that said, these two books were good, if a bit wordy. Specifically I appreciated Rolheiser's main thesis, that spirituality is how we respond to our deepest desire, our divine madness, our natural maladjustment. We're not happy creatures that sometimes have problems, we're problematic creatures that sometimes get happy. Spirituality is about staying in touch with and channeling this deep longing in healthy ways.
May's book is helpful in distinguishing between psychotherapy and spiritual direction, while maintaining links between the two. He is all for cross-pollination, but encourages practitioners to hone their specific purposes. Psycotherapy is geared toward identifying and solving psychological problems. Spiritual direction aims to help the directee to hear God in their life.
May is both a psychiatrist and spiritual director, which is awesome and gives him great tools to write this book. But I'd love to read a book studying spiritual direction techniques and its effects written by a non-religious psychiatrist or behavioral scientist. Are there such books?
notes
Holy Longing
- God-given fire, desire, longing, madness, eros: what we do with that is spirituality, how we channel it
- "energy is not just difficult to access, it is just as difficult to contain once it enters"
- "pray, fast, and give alms"... 4 non-negotiables "a) private prayer and private morality; b) social justice; c) mellowness of heart and spirit; d) community as a constituitive element of true worship"
- "To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less"
- "Our loved ones live where they have always lived and it is there that we will find them."
- "John Shea once suggested that the heavenly banquet table is open to everyone who is ready to sit down with everyone."
- "Shower those you love with flowers and affection while they are alive, not at their funerals."
- "To deal with Christ is to deal with church."
- Pascal cycle
- Name your deaths (crucifixion)
- Claim your births (resurrection)
- Grieve what you have lost and adjust to the new reality (40 days of appearances)
- Do not cling to the old, let it ascend and give you its blessing (ascension)
- accept the spirit of the life that you are in fact living (pentecost)
- "When we fail to mourn properly our incomplete lives then this incompleteness becomes a gnawing restlessness, a bitter center, that robs our lives of all delight."
- sexuality as basic fire: lead to creativity, co-creation with God
- "What Janis Joplin is saying is that, in our sexuality and our creativity, we are ultimately trying to make love to everyone."
- "the primary danger in bringing these dimensions together [psychotherapy and spir direction] is that mental and emotional concerns may kidnap the gentle spiritual attentiveness required of both director and directee
- four forces in human spirituality
- longing for God
- God's longing for us
- internal fear and resistance
- evil
- unitive experiences - can't be aware of it in the moment (otherwise wouldn't be "unified"), can't achieve it or cause it
- "in the absence of clearly identifiable disorder, it is terribly destructive to encourage the dulling or denial of this deepest existential discomfort, for this is one pain we are not meant to anesthetize ourselves to...
- basic trust and mistrust (Erikson)
- self-image
- strength - how stable and defined/fixed is self-image
- quality - how do you evaluate self (good or bad, high or low esteem)
- importance - how attached are you to it; how much do you depend on it
- "we maintain neuroses because hey represent an unconscious "solution" to deeper psychological threats
- attend to relationship between spiritual experience and social/family life
- required physical labor and voluntary exercise usu. have different psychological effects
- dark night experiences usu not associated with loss of functioning (as opposed to depression)
- "it is my belief that the primary task of spiritual directors is to encourage within themselves this moment-by-moment attention towards God as frequently as possible during spiritual direction sessions
- condensation - feelings condense around other feelings
- referals
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