A Letter to Online UU's.

... I recently spent some time seeking the appellation of UU Lay Community Minister through the UUSCM with a designation of Spiritual Director.

This however is not the first time I have served as a commissioned minister or practiced the art of Spiritual Direction and as a committed UU, I would like to share... Why I continue to choose to focus on the path of Spiritual Direction in Community Ministry.

There is a cartoon I have recently been informed of that lovingly skewers the UU habit of avoiding depth in worship. The cartoon shows two doors — one is labeled “heaven” and the other is labeled “lectures about heaven.” The UUs in the cartoon are going to the lecture.

The Spiritual Director has chosen the door less traveled through. In my case this meant keeping a pledge for over 40 years to dedicate 10% of my 24 hour daily endowment of time to the practice of contemplation and related disciplines. There comes too a time when the desire is natural to "pay back" or "pay forward" the grace with which one has been blessed as a student beneficiary of several mentors and open oneself to the responsibility of the guidance of others as one has likewise been guided.

Having experienced deep healings along the way I have noticed many parallels between the physician and the guide as healer. Like a physician, a guide of experience and training stands ready to help guide others in choosing spiritual health. In connection with this the archaic term of "cure of souls" is most tellingly accurate and in keeping with my communities articulated vision of helping to heal the world. Alas the word is not always followed by the walk as the realities of institutions come into play.

And it is to be cautiously noted that Spiritual Direction like medicine, is a practice and not a science and a practice of relationship as well as anything else. The guide and the student need to form a fit of a high order for the relationship to succeed. This is not something that any one pastor nor one director can be expected to provide a diverse community. And yet the first item to attend to is the filling of the transformational space vacated with the near exclusion of the contemplative path of prayer.

In the Protestant traditions the idea of the priesthood of all believers is emphasized to the detriment of loosing the empowering model of one on one guidance. Like self diagnosis in the medical model, this is not recommended. In healing as in personal transformation, a partnership between guide and seeker is the ancient pattern. And far from being the authority, the guide, like a good physician, is there to encourage and assist the seeker in making good choices based in a larger perspective of knowledge and experience.

That Aldous Huxley could find in the diversity of religion a "Perennial Philosophy," suggests there is a common path of verifiable experience from which we may draw and more accurately than devotion to our favored  ideologies. The guide is a companion on a cross cultural and human journey taken together where both are committed to the greater well being of the seeker.

This is in contrast to teaching and preaching which leaves the seeker with little of a support structure - where diagnosis and treatment are left to fate and typically a return to what is comfortable and familiar - which is no permanent change at all - is the result.

Having taught a Religious Education class on the teachings of Jesus based in his native tongue of Aramaic and continuing that as a monthly offering called Red letter Sunday, I am all to familiar with this intellect based model to deepening spiritual insight . Change is here subject to memory and memory is short lived as the motivating excitement wears thin and thus any required accompanying discipline is dropped.

Even a change in belief not grounded in experience and being left unexamined invites a repeating pattern of avoidance of core issues on which hinge real transformation. And if transformation of the individual as well as society is not our goal, then I submit we have betrayed the foundations of our faith.

This seems an oddity to me in a religious movement that gives much lip service to diverse forms of worship. True there are religion based groups in some congregations, such as those who identify as Buddhists in my home "church." Yet the contemplative path is far more expansive than any single spiritual tradition. Expansive enough to string many solitary practitioners and small groups together in a networked thread to produce a necklace of rare and enriching value reflecting light on the human condition.

The contemplative path is also a path suitable for some of the "nones" and the "un-churched, those who have become disenfranchised with religion, and as an active yet non creedal spirituality the contemplative path frequently draws the young. Of this I am a witness as I am surprisingly affiliated now with a liberal evangelical community that thirsts after contemplative wisdom from sources outside their doctrinal tradition. Ah the flexibility of contemplative prayer to sooth the critical mind.

For this reason alone - for an infusion of new blood - UU congregations would do well to open its walls to this neglected aspect of the Spiritual traditions and reaffirm a history of cutting across the limitations of religious sectarianism which in one form of another has appealed to many who now identify with Unitarian Universalism.