On the 20th Anniversary of the Center for Spiritual Direction—Homily “Bring Them to Me”

20th Anniversary of the CSD
July 28, 2024
Consecration Service

Sermon Title: Bring Them to Me

Scripture: Psalm 23 and John 10:11-14

Verse 14 “I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me.”

20th Anniversary Thoughts: I want to begin by acknowledging the miracle that it is that we are here today, twenty years after the start of the Center for Spiritual Direction. You see, we only planned for five years.

When the seminary and the ECC denomination agreed to write a joint proposal to the Lilly Foundation for a million-dollar grant, the vision was for five years of programming. Helen Cepero wrote much of the seminary’s portion of the proposal on its dream to train spiritual directors. This came out of two decades of work in spiritual formation and spiritual direction by John Weborg, Fran Anderson and Jane Koonce at the seminary level. This was rare for a Protestant seminary at the time, and it still is rare today.

After getting over the shock of seeing a million dollars written on the grant check, the Dean of Faculty, Steven Graham, convened a group of us to create a Center for Spiritual Direction. We met in the third-floor conference room of the library to begin charting the way forward. Helen Cepero, John Weborg, Paul Bramer, Richard Carlson, Stephen Graham and I all contributed to the visioning process. Dan Piatzyk was hired by the ECC as the grant manager. Paul Koptak contributed in those early years, particularly during his time as interim dean. A Leadership Team was put in place for oversight.

Eventually, Richard Carlson and I were appointed co-directors by Dean Linda Cannell. During her tenure, Richard, Deidre Robinson, Dean Cannell and I held a fund raiser and celebration at which time we formally named the CSD for C. John
Weborg. We also honored Jane Koonce, Fran Anderson and surprised Richard by including him as an honoree for the decades of work the four of them had done at the seminary. The 11th anniversary of Richard’s death from esophageal cancer was this past Friday. I miss him still. This consecration service was designed by Richard and each summer reminds me of his impact on the Center and me. During his illness, I was appointed Director and four years ago, thankfully, Rob Peterson accepted the position.

So, welcome cohort 20 and congratulations cohort 18. This whole endeavor is a tribute to the goodness of God.

“I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me.” John 10:14

On a shelf at home, I have had a book for several years, unread. It was published in 1963 and has a price on the jacket of $3.00, hardcover. I found it in a bin at some sale. Clearly, no one else had ever read it either. Howard Thurman is the author, and the title is Disciplines of the Spirit. The book comes from two lectures and a class he taught for nine years in the 1950s at Boston University in his role as professor of Spiritual Disciplines and Resources. Martin Luther King was also in Boston in the 1950s and refers to Howard Thurman as a spiritual mentor.

In the forward Thurman writes, “I wanted to utilize the raw materials of daily experience as the time and place of the encounter with God.” While he does not use the term “spiritual direction”, the book could well be on our reading list as directors. His five chapter titles are Commitment, Growing in Wisdom and Stature, Suffering, Prayer and Reconciliation.

In the fifth chapter on Reconciliation, Thurman writes what feels like to me a definition of a spiritual director,

“We cannot be in a hurry in matters of the heart. The human spirit has to be explored gently and with unhurried tenderness. Very often this demands a reconditioning of our nervous responses to life, a profound alteration in the tempo of our behavior pattern. Whatever we learn of leisure in the discipline of silence, in meditation and prayer, bears rich, ripe fruit in preparing the way for love. Failure at this point can be one of unrelieved frustration. At first, for most of us, skill in tarrying with another has to be cultivated and worked at by the dint of much self-discipline. At first it may seem mechanical, artificial, or studied, but this kind of clumsiness will not remain if we
persist. How indescribably wonderful and healing it is to encounter another human being who listens not only to our words, but manages, somehow, to listen to us. (Everyone needs this and everyone needs to give it as well-thus we come full circle in love.)” Page 127

Twenty-two years later, in 1985, John Weborg’s book Alive in Christ, Alert to Life was published. His focus is the interplay of the heart, the head, and the hand in such chapters as Life is a Journey, A Model for the Spiritual Life and Love the Questions. You have heard directly from John in your course work in CSD and his heart for pietism that led him to develop a spiritual formation curriculum with Fran Anderson and Jane Koonce here at NPTS. These decades of work laid the foundation for the Weborg Center for Spiritual Direction.

Sixty years after Thurman’s book, Cindy Lee wrote Our Unforming:De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation (now on the CSD syllabus). She writes that “Spirituality, the divine-human relationship, starts with an ache. Our souls ache each time we recognize that there is something missing in our experiences of the sacred.”

A couple of thousand years ago, John quoted Jesus’ words regarding spiritual direction, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me.”

If we were on retreat this morning, I would have us use lectio divina with these two sentences. We could reflect, journal, draw, and talk for hours on 14 familiar words. However, as it is a consecration service for cohort 18 and a blessing service for cohort 20, I want to suggest that today’s take away can be both personal and professional, related to our shared ministry as spiritual directors.

Sometime about 1999 I was asked to lead a women’s weekend retreat. I lived in Liverpool, NY outside Syracus at the time and worked as a spiritual director at the Spiritual Renewal Center where I had been trained. I didn’t really do weekend retreats; I was more the presenter/workshop/classroom type person. I said “yes” knowing I would be doing things quite differently than this group was used to. I wanted to offer the retreat in a formational way rather than a teaching format. As I was preparing, I had one of those mystical experiences that I have never told publicly before. This group will understand. I heard God say to me, “BRING THEM TO ME”. At the top of each page of my notes, I hand wrote the phrase “bring them to me”.

For 25 years these four words have been the cornerstone of my life as a spiritual director. For all my personal deconstructing of faith and religion and Bible interpretation through the years, I still trust the Good Shepherd. For all the seasons of personal doubt, I still truly believe that God knows me-me, Ellen. And for the times of darkness and cloudiness in my soul, the “soul ache” that Lee names, fundamentally, I have desired to continue to know and experience my God, our God.

My guess is that this is true for you, too, or you would not be here today.

You see, our work, our ministry is as daunting and as simple as bringing people to God, the good shepherd, who already knows them and who as image bearers long for what is real in life, that which only God can ultimately satisfy. As a spiritual director I am a witness to the back and forth of the directee and God as that relationship forms and re-forms.

Sometimes we forget. We forget God, we forget the Imago Dei. Sometimes people choose desolation, to use Ignatius’ word, for whatever disappointment, trauma, ache or doubt overtakes them. In spiritual direction, directees walk into the room—zoom or actual—with a heart that is saying “bring me to Them”, to the Trinity. Bring me to God, to Jesus, to the Spirit. I’m ready for the More of life, but only in bits and pieces, month by month. Not too much at a time. Their hearts will say, listen to me patiently and then remind me that God knows me. Nowhere else in this world will I get listened to in this way. Don’t go too fast because God can be scarry. Let me come month after month, maybe for years, because I can only take transformation in small doses.

As directors we know, because we have tasted the richness of the Shepherd, that God will lead us to still waters. God will restore our souls. Surely goodness and mercy will be available all the days of our lives and afterwards we will live in the house of the Lord forever. Because we have grown into this truth ourselves, we know it can be true for our directees.

Friends, for thousands of years women and men have been creatively putting words and music to the enlivening ways we can experience first-hand Jesus’ words: “I know my own and my own know me”. We know them as desert mothers and fathers, saints of the church, in modern times we name Thurman, Weborg, and Lee.

And now we join tens of thousands of the Church’s spiritual directors in listening for the movement of God with their directees. You have God’s invitation: “bring them to me”. The souls’ ache will keep directees and directors hungry and thirsty for the encounter with the Holy.

Blessings on your new journey. AMEN.