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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Spiritual mentoring is a particular kind of friendship in which, according to Keith R. Anderson, "two or more people walk together in heightened awareness of the presence of yet Another"—the Holy Spirit. "Spiritual mentoring is not a complicated process that requires technical training and complex protocol," Anderson continues. "It is essential, authentic, and maybe even natural human speech that is focused, disciplined and nurtured by training for one of the hardest natural things we do: listening reflectively to another. It is sacred companionship as life is lived and story told. Available to almost all, it requires deliberate recruitment, preparation and practice."These pages unfold a vision for mentoring that invites us to read our own lives as narrative and to learn how to enter the narrative of another life. The book covers the scope of the mentoring relationship through various seasons, offering helpful and inspiring metaphors for mentoring. All are invited to enter the mentoring story.
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Reading Your Life’s Story
AN INVITATION TOSPIRITUAL MENTORING
With profound thanks for the entire great cloud of witnesses,especially Doc Dalton, Garth Rosell and Dan Erwin:you got me started.
And Brennan Manning: you helped me find my way back.
Contents
Introduction
Mentoring Matters
The books the Holy Spirit is writing are living, and every soul a volume in which the divine author makes a true revelation of his word, explaining it to every heart, unfolding it in every moment.
The day started as others before had for the college student. He ate breakfast standing at the counter, gathered books and notebooks, drove to campus, walked hurriedly to the classroom building, and then it happened. Papers were returned with bright red comments and grades crisscrossing the pages, and his had a note that said something unexpected: “Excellent thinking! A.” I was that student, and for the first time in my life, a trusted teacher recognized my work and, more importantly, told me so. That afternoon, I went to him and the unexpected happened again. He said to me, “I would like to meet with you periodically to talk about your academic work.” The invitation was startling but welcome. It began what turned into a long relationship of professor and student, friend and friend, mentor and mentee. I didn’t know then what a mentor was, but I was eager for the afternoons to meet with Dr. Rosell for conversation. His questions weren’t complex but rather ordinary and provocative in their simplicity: “What have you been working on? What are you thinking about? What are you reading that interests you?” The questions weren’t as important as the invitation. The conversation wasn’t even as important as the authentic curiosity it expressed. I was changing from an underachieving student into a “scholar” or, as I fancied, an “intellectual.” He didn’t seek me out for my intellectually stimulating questions, of that I am sure. Instead, he seemed to see something in me that he believed had value, and he nurtured a soaring sense of agency in me, a deep recognition that I was someone to be valued and heard. That changed me.
There is a singular human need common to us all. Because we are created in the imago Dei, in the image of the trinitarian God who is, by nature, relational, we share a universal human need for relationship. There is no solitary individual; we are persons, by our very nature created for relationship. Biblical text is clear from the beginning: God calls us into relationship. Telling our story and being heard is a human need common to us all. To be human is to tell one’s story to another. Narrative is the essential form of human speech. We tell each other the ordinary story of our day or the extraordinary story of an epic event, but we need others in our life who care to listen. My grandchildren are moving from the earliest form of narrative, “Read me a story, Papa” or “Tell me a story” to “Let me tell you a story, Papa.” Two ears for listening, one voice for speaking—we understand the mathematics of our human anatomy—but we have one heart and soul that doesn’t just long for conversation but needs to be heard by others. Telling our story is to our spirit what the flow of blood is to our body.
True to our relational nature, we are created for dialogical speech.
True to our spirituality, we yearn to live our stories aware of the presence of God.
True to our psychological nature, we seek the bond of human recognition and human touch.
True to our communal makeup, we need human companionship.
True to our emotional character, we desire trusted intimacy.
True to our kinship character, we are naturally drawn to be storytellers with others.
True to our created nature, we are created to reveal our spirit to others through story.
Storytelling is an essential act of human friendship. Early in the world of Roman philosophical thought, Cicero penned a classic dissertation on the nature of human friendship. In De Amicitia, he asserted that, except for wisdom, friendship is the greatest gift given to humankind. He pondered the advantages of friendship and wondered aloud if it arises from weakness but concluded, “Wherefore it seems to me that friendship springs rather from nature than from need, and from an inclination of the soul joined with a feeling of love rather than from calculation of how much profit the friendship is likely to afford.”1 In his text he describes the ideal location and purpose to gather friends: it is a garden setting with a semicircle of chairs as a gathering place with a wise friend and “only a few of his intimate friends.”2 What would be the topic of conversation for such discourse? Cicero’s answer is decisive: “What is sweeter than to have someone with whom you may dare discuss anything as if you were communing with yourself? . . . Friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way.”3
As Jesus prepared to leave his students behind, he no doubt startled them with what may be his most unexpected words. After many months with his student-disciples, he declared, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (John 15:15). The relationship transformed from that of student or disciple to friendship. Remarkable. Jesus offered friendship to his students. A new kind of companionship had been formed—the functional relationship of teacher-student converted to friendship. Still their teacher, still their rabbi, still their Lord, but now also their friend, companion and trusted confidant (“I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”) I opened an email from such a friend who I haven’t seen in some months and read his heart through his tender words, “I am eager to be in the room with you as well. Look you in the eye, and tell you I love you.”
The book you hold in your hand is about a particular kind of friendship called spiritual mentoring. It is a particular kind of companionship in which two or more people walk together in heightened awareness of the presence of yet another, the Holy Spirit, who is the living presence of God promised by Jesus who said, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Spiritual mentoring is not a complicated process requiring technical training and complex protocol. It is essential, authentic and maybe even natural human speech that is focused, disciplined and nurtured by training for one of the hardest things we do: listening reflectively to another. It is sacred companionship as life is lived and story told. Available to almost all, mentoring requires deliberate recruitment, preparation and practice. One of our wisest spiritual teachers today, Eugene Peterson, said, “The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped—it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him.”4
WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT
I struggle to call this book a handbook, but it offers insights that can be used by a first-time mentor. I hesitate to call it a guide, because the true guide for all spirituality is the Holy Spirit; this book merely points us to the Spirit. In my ministry and work I have taught courses, seminars and conferences on spiritual mentoring. I am always most comfortable speaking of my work primarily as an introduction to spiritual mentoring because it seems to me that all of our work in spirituality is only that—an introduction, a handshake and a brief encounter. Just as a topographical map does not contain the experience of trekking, hiking or mountain climbing, so this book cannot capture the deeply sacred work of spiritual mentoring. It would be arrogant to say otherwise. Even an entire course on spiritual mentoring only offers a prelude to this richly nuanced work, but it can offer enough for one to get started. This volume is an invitation to learn to read your life as story in the companionship of spiritual friendship and to come alongside others to read their life as story. Whether you are mentor or mentee, the task is the same: you learn to read life as story and invite others into prayerful conversation; it is an invitation.
A spiritual mentor is anyone who guides us in our spiritual formation. Some guidance occurs naturally in the shared life of good friends, and there is great value in this. But there is a distinctive form of guidance in the steps taken intentionally as part of relationships with spiritual directors, mentors and spiritual friends. Common to all of these relationships is a mutual commitment to spiritual growth. Whether old or young, living or dead, ancient or contemporary, known personally or from afar by reading or listening, spiritual mentors are guides. They point the way. They offer their experience of the journey. They help us read the story well, to see what we might otherwise miss. Story is meant to be read in companionship and in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ parting promise to his followers was that the Spirit would come to his disciples after his ascension into heaven. Instructions were given “through the Holy Spirit to the apostles” (Acts 1:2) in the early hours after the resurrection. It was only the beginning of the companionship intended for all flesh, sons and daughters, young men and old men on whom God promised to pour out God’s own Spirit (Acts 2:17-18).
There are many who provide spiritual guidance. In this book, however, the invitation is to mentoring as an intentional, planned, repeated and focused set of conversations about the life of the mentee in the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is not the same as the classical, hierarchical style of spiritual direction, and it is more than the spontaneous conversations of spiritual friendship. And yet, while the practices discussed in coming chapters refer to this particular form of ministry called spiritual mentoring, the skills, intuitions and instincts can also be useful for spiritual directors and spiritual friends. Much is made of the differences between these forms of spiritual formation, but I believe we are best helped by gleaning wisdom from all sources rather than emphasizing the differences between them.
My life has been touched by spiritual directors, mentors and guides in formal and informal ways. Some are people I’ve never met except as I’ve listened to their voices in their writings; they have taught me to listen, see and read more fully what I cannot read as well on my own—the still, small voice of God’s Holy Spirit. Some of my best mentors have been people dead for centuries, whose texts, prayers, sermons, poetry, art and stories have served as guides, correctives and shaping voices to me because their voices are animated still. Brother Lawrence, Teresa of Ávila, Thomas á Kempis, Julian of Norwich, Richard Baxter, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Catherine of Siena, Jeanne Guyon, John Calvin and Simone Weil are some whose words have touched my life. There are other, more contemporary guides known to me through conversation or reading, such as Henri Nouwen, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, James Houston, Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and Barbara Brown Taylor. Some have been friends, colleagues, brothers and sisters with whom I have shared life and ministry. A large group includes students and mentees who I have been privileged to know, many of whom I now consider my mentors—Rod, Linda, Guy, JP, Trygve, Tom, David, Steve and dozens of others. My mentors have included a woman trained at Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, a Jesuit priest trained in Ignatian practices, a Baptist minister trained in psychology and pastoral care, a seminary president, a university president and pastor, a de-frocked Catholic priest, writer and spiritual teacher, and a multitude of Benedictine sisters trained in abbeys as nuns. And finally, some are the voices of family, especially the one I am most blessed to spend my life with—the most important voice in my world—Wendy Lee McJunkin Anderson.
READINGON PURPOSE
This book is about a specific kind of mentoring in which there is an intentional companionship of listening together to the living voice of the Holy Spirit in the text of one’s life. Much of what I am writing can apply to life’s many forms of friendship mentoring and the mentoring that comes from books, occasional conversations or casual discourse, and shared meals, but my focus here is on spiritual mentoring as a specific and disciplined form of one individual guiding another in the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is what I have come to think of as learning to read one’s story in companionship with the Holy Spirit on purpose.
The metaphor of mentoring as reading story acknowledges three essential factors: author, reader(s) and text.
First, there is an author who intends to do something in the writing of the book. He or she is not merely writing a collection of words; in good writing an author has something purposeful in mind—entertainment, biography, science, comedy, tragedy, fiction or fairy tale—there is intentionality. In good stories, the author is usually unnoticed in the background because you are caught up in the story. At times, however, the author may be in front of you, figuratively, as you ask, “What is the point? Where is she taking me in this twisted turn? What does he think he’s doing by the introduction of this character?” Loud or quiet, visible or not, the author is a partner in reading the story. God is writing our story in providential moments of our lives.
Second, there is a reader, or multiple readers, ready to engage the work of the author. There are many ways to read, possibly as many ways as there are readers. But good reading involves a spirit of curiosity on the part of a reader. The page-turner that you can’t put down keeps you waiting, almost breathless, to see what happens next as you turn the page to the next chapter. Poetry might be read slowly, reflectively and repeatedly. You ponder and wonder what meaning is implied or captured in the imagery and vocabulary of the poem on the page. Technical reading may be done as study with a dictionary, other texts for comparison and another reader who can help you see the author’s design. Reading with a young child requires stops along the way to laugh, learn the meaning of words, puzzle over the plot or just enjoy the story as it unfolds in the imagination of the reader. In biblical studies, we use the word exegesis to describe the process of reading. On a quest to discover meaning in the text, hermeneutics help us notice literary type, vocabulary, sentence structure, context and what we bring to the text by way of interpreter’s bias, assumptions and perspective. Regardless of the type of text, readers bring one essential skill to any kind of reading: curiosity. A mentee is the primary reader, but the mentor becomes a coreader whose questions, insights and musings help the mentee read his or her own story with more evocative thought and sometimes with greater clarity.
Finally, there is a text. I know that sounds obvious, but it needs to be said. Reading is rooted in a text. There are words on a page that you will learn to take seriously if you proceed reading. There is content, in other words, that comes in specific words and a particular form. In this metaphor, your life story is the text that has shape, specificity, design, vocabulary and progression of thought. The text sets boundaries in place that limit what it says and, therefore, what it means. If the text is a life, reading requires careful, respectful engagement. Reading, it turns out, is a holy task. Reading a story engages the mind (body) but also emotions, relationships and the soul. Reading is anything but passive; it engages the whole person. Reading life as a story is a way of relational engagement with a sacred purpose. The text I’m talking about includes all parts of life; that cannot be overstated. The text is not just some selected so-called spiritual moments; all of life is text to read.
It’s more than a poetic metaphor; if I see my life as story, I am moved to read it with curious eyes. I read my life as precious and sacred. I look for signs of the author’s pen in events and moments. I ask better questions than “How was your day?” or “What did you do on your vacation?” If I see my life as story, I know it to be an invitation to enter the great adventure, battle and drama of the unfolding narrative of my life in a world that is inhabited with the presence and voice of God.
If you have picked up this book you are looking for something to help you become either a mentor for others or to be mentored yourself. The answer is not far off but within. Thomas Kelley was a Quaker, teacher, writer and philosopher who described what he called an inner sanctuary of the soul. It is a living place, a dynamic center where God’s voice may be heard. He declared it shekinah, the Hebrew word for dwelling or settling, an experience of the very presence of God grounded in the soil of life. His image of the inner sanctuary is how I imagine my work as a mentor. I join the mentee in a holy place as we find the voice and face of God waiting to be revealed.
Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-worn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and complete, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illuminates the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men [and women]. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst.5
This is where I believe we go to uncover the story of the mentee.
Part One
UNCOVERING YOUR LIFE STORY
1
Reading with aConsecrated Purpose
Learning to read was both natural and easy for me as a young child. Words became like pictures that offered a portal into a world of color, beauty, imagery and a strange kind of power. Yes, the ability to interpret the meaning of the lines on a page was power, even for a small boy. By second grade I loved words even more because they had moved from simple vocabulary to story. They had become a direct doorway into imagination. The Hardy Boys mysteries, the Sugar Creek Gang and other stories acceptable in my Christian home became frequent companions at night under the covers with a smuggled flashlight but also outside on a summer’s day or in the private world of boyhood imagination. Books from school were allowed, so I read To Kill a Mockingbird, Black Like Me and The Red Badge of Courage. At home we also listened to stories on the radio—missionary drama and rescue from addiction on the mean streets of the cities. Of course, the constant companion in my family was the Bible, with its stories of women and men of faith, courage, conviction and obedience. Only later did I discover these people also had stories of disobedience, fear, deception and failure. Later also came my “intellectual period” with Russian writers Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The Beat Poets and Ferlinghetti were companions for a time and, by contrast, so were Dag Hammarskjöld, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. Now I am eager for Wendell Berry, Billy Collins, David McCullough biographies, and even pulp fiction.
At one point I traded fiction and poetry for what I deemed to be more scholarly work as I studied history, political science, theology and spirituality. But somehow my calling as pastor, teacher and preacher kept stories close. You cannot preach gospel well without story, just as you cannot live the meaning of gospel well without engaging your own story. We often say at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology that you cannot take others farther than you have been willing to go yourself. One of our signature programs is the Story Workshop, which takes people into the crucible of learning to tell their story of tragedy to a small group. A trained facilitator is present to assist in “reading” the story well together because we believe our spirituality is shaped by narrative and how we tell the stories of our lives. Story is not only fiction or history, chronology and timeline; story is meaning making in its most formative sense. We are formed by our story and we are formed as we tell our story to others and as we learn to read our life as story with others. We who are mentors might be considered selfish people. We mentor others because we love story, and we read the lives of our mentees because we receive so much as we do. On our best days, we know it is about the other, but on all days we are deeply touched because we’ve been invited into their life.
Spiritual mentoring is learning to read all of their story—desire and tragedy, beauty and shame, glory and failure. It is not simply to mark change in the way we chart the upward growth of a child in pencil on a doorway in the bedroom; not simply a timeline to chart years passed, moments experienced and events undergone. In spiritual mentoring we recognize all of life as story. Mark Twain said his first rule in story writing was that “a tale should accomplish something and arrive somewhere.”1 Others point out that a story has, at least, a beginning, a middle and an end. Reading a story, then, starts with an understanding of how a story actually “works.”
THE ELEMENTSOF HOLY NARRATIVE
What are the elements of a story? At its simplest, there are at least five elements of a story.
There is an author.
There is an unfolding plot, a theme, question or issue that gives coherence to the story. In classical stories this may be the conflict that initiates the story.
There are characters.
There are events, ordinary and surprising, that form the backbone of the story in context as the plot develops.
There may be a resolution, climax or denouement—or not. In contemporary American fiction, a new popular form is an abrupt conclusion that only hints at how the story will actually end, but there is a movement or flow as an author narrates to a moment of conclusion.
Each of these will aid us as we learn the role of mentoring another. Reminded of authorship (authorization and authority), we will keep the focus on God’s primary role in cocreating the story. Reminded of plot, we will learn to read for intentionality, themes and meaning in the seemingly random events of life. Reminded of characters, we will see development, formation, malformation, regression and surprising growth in ourselves through interaction with others. Reminded of the place of events, we will look to both the ordinary and extraordinary as formational and generative and lived in a particular context of time and place. And reminded of resolution, we will learn that there is no final telling of our story in this life but rather in eternity. Reading story as holy narrative is a nuanced metaphor for the richness, individuality and complexity of a person. It is a sacred task to be done carefully, respectfully and in holy curiosity. It is reading with a consecrated purpose.
My Life as a House is the story of a man who is dying of cancer, but only he knows his diagnosis. I’ve seen the movie at least a half dozen times. It draws me in by its plot but more, I suppose, by the emotions it evokes in me. He is divorced from his wife and estranged from his self-loathing and rebellious teenage son, who considers his father a relic of something long since forgotten. He owns a piece of property that overlooks the California coast that once contained a ramshackle house built by his own father. Fired by his architectural company, in a rage he destroys all of the architectural models he has created over his career but keeps the design of a house he once crafted. In an act of undetermined motivation he decides to build a new house based on the one remaining model to replace the house his father had built years before.
After his death there is a voice-over in which the architect, George, speaks to his son about his life and house. “I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn’t need to be big; it didn’t even need to be beautiful; it just needed to be mine. I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. . . . I built myself a house.” Building a house was the plot for the father, George (Kevin Kline), to read the final chapter of his own unfolding story.
We live in what we have built. The stories of our life become a house we inhabit with its limitations, eccentricities, mistakes, hidden meanings and crafted beauty. In this book I hope to offer ways to help us all read the story of our life through the centuries-deep practice of spiritual mentoring. Stories are a way to find coherence and meaning in what seems random, episodic or even chaotic. Alan Jones’s words are irrepressibly stunning: “My drifting is consecrated in pilgrimage”2
“Passion for pilgrimage,” the title of Jones’s book, is one way to describe our human longing for meaning. What the spiritual teachers of my life share in common, along with generations of others named and anonymous, is that they practiced spiritual friendship on a common quest for identity, community and purpose. Spiritual mentoring is not a form of evangelism, catechism or pastoral care, per se; it is an embodiment of spiritual companionship. The mentor chooses to walk alongside another in what Celtic spirituality calls anamchara—soul friendship—seeking to find meaning on the journey. It may be as simple as two friends who share a common hunger for faith who know they need companions for the journey. It is enriched by centuries of wisdom distilled from spiritual directors, monastics, clergy, priests, and very ordinary women and men who reached out to another to sit at the table of spiritual nurture in this ministry of reading the story of each other’s lives. It is the recognition that I can be helped through the wisdom of one who has climbed this mountain trail before and is willing to sit by the fire and tell the stories of their own trek across terrain I now will walk. The book that will be read is the life story of the mentee.
Mentors are, most often, people we know who live alongside us as companions of the sacred in the most ordinary ways. Pilgrimage is a metaphor that speaks of an earlier era or a dramatic spiritual quest. Lacy Ellman is a spiritual director who once was a student of mine. She says:
Though ancient in its roots, the practice of pilgrimage is alive and well today, beckoning a new generation of seekers to journey beyond the edge of daily life into terrains of mystery, wonder, revelation, delight, acceptance and transformation. But you don’t have to leave home to begin living like a pilgrim. To live as a pilgrim at home, all you need to do is to see your life as a journey and your role as a seeker of the Sacred.3
Yesterday two men spoke to me at a conference with eyes glistening with joy. “You know our best friend, PJ.” They were correct. I knew PJ as a student who I was privileged to spend time with frequently over his college career. “You gave him tenderness as a new follower of Jesus.” That same day a woman at the conference said, “You know my pastor. She was your student.” I knew immediately who she was. In both cases I lit up with anticipation to hear about their work and ministry. I was humbled to be remembered by PJ and Georgia after so many years. I tell these stories to say it is an immense privilege to be asked to walk alongside a mentee. But I remember the gift of relationship with them both. Their stories are as different as can be, but the common thread was intentional time spent learning to read each story. It is a holy vocation, this calling to mentor another. The privilege is not to be taken for granted.
WRITTENON LIFEBYTHE SPIRIT
Long before there was a category of narrative theology there was spiritual guidance offered to princes and kings, laborers and maidservants, woman and men in agriculture, business, education, health care, and the arts. Teresa was a spiritual guide to her monastic community in Ávila, Spain. She described spirituality as a seven-room castle and said our work is to learn to open the doors and move deeper and deeper into the interior castle, which is our own soul. Richard Baxter taught his congregation in Kidderminster, England, in the seventeenth century that their mission was to spend time in each other’s homes as living images of Christ to one another. He insisted on careful attention to individuals as a shepherd, schoolmaster or doctor would. At the very core of his insistence on such a particularized approach to people was a deep pastoral love for people.4 Aelred of Rievaulx was a Cistercian monk in England in the eleventh century who wrote a remarkable book about a most ordinary topic: friendship. He said, “No medicine is more valuable, none more efficacious, none better suited to the cure of all our temporal ills than a friend to whom we may turn for consolation in time of trouble, and with whom we may share our happiness in time of joy.”5 Mentoring is holy listening in companionship—mentor, mentee and the Holy Spirit.
The apostle Paul chose the word letter to describe what I call “story,” and his writing is startling in its clarity. He said to a congregation in Greece, “You are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”6 This verse contains an entire volume of Paul’s theology; the progression insists on our attention:
Christ is the source, the originator and the one whose work in their lives comes first.
The readers are “prepared” in koinonia, solidarity, partnership or mentoring by others.
The Spirit of the living God etches God’s presence on their hearts, souls and lives.
It’s true that you can’t love in abstraction. The grammar is straightforward: there is an object of one’s love. Love is embodied in presence and voice, written “not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” The story of Jesus in a person’s life is not an abstraction, concept or cognition; it is a story, a living relationship written by the Holy Spirit and embodied in those who come alongside to help “prepare” them. There are relationships all around—inside all parts of our story as Christ writes himself into our lives; within as the Spirit writes on our hearts; alongside as others help us read what is being written; beyond, to those with whom we tell the story of what has been written.
What I bring to this book is time spent in the presence of the living God with people on a shared “long walk of faith.”7 I make no claim to be a master teacher of spiritual mentoring but rather am a student of those who have shaped my faith by their faith. I make no claim to be other than I am—a failed, flawed, finite and limited human being with an endless curiosity to hear the voice of God in my story and others. For every story that can warm my heart as a mentor, I suppose there are stories where I missed the point or read or listened less well than I intended. I write to give voice to the voices I have been gifted to listen to over a lifetime. As much as anything else I will tell what I have received from gifted soul friends, mentors and mentees in my life. I write to invite you to learn to read your story in companionship with others whose accents and intonations you know well because they have already spoken into your life. I write to tell the experiences I have been privileged to have as a mentee to gifted mentors and to invite others to find someone to come alongside to help them learn to read the unfolding story of their lives. I chose the language of “learning to read” because it takes us back to a time and place of basic curiosity about “all those lines and circles”8 on the page, the mystery of meaning contained in words. It takes us back to a place of humility as we start at step one—learning letters, then vocabulary, sentence structure, and eventually plot, character development and the flow of narrative. It takes us back to the ABCs of reading; similarly, in spirituality we are always children taking the next step.
The creed that has guided my work in pastoral life in congregations, Christian universities and theological graduate school is captured by Paul’s words early in Ephesians: “It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for” (Ephesians 1:11 The Message). He says to the community in Asia Minor that in Jesus we discover three essential meanings: We learn who we are. We find others to help us read the story of our life. And we find out why we exist. We learn those facts as we take notice of the unfolding story of our lives together. All of Paul’s writings are written to communities. North American individualism makes it hard for us to read biblical texts well; they are written to communities, churches, congregations, house churches and neighborhoods. They are about the work God is doing to make things right in the world, to bring together whole communities, and not only for personal gain and self-development. Mentoring is ultimately about something larger than one individual.
