Coming Home to a Calling [Calling Stories]

On becoming a Spiritual Director...

As friends have asked me to describe my experience becoming a Spiritual Director, the phrase I’ve used most often in response is “coming home”. That theme of feeling at home - in relationship with God, myself, faculty, curricula, and cohort - overwhelmed me for most of the two years of my certification. 

During our first session in June 2017, the Director, Susan, invited us to share a symbol of what spiritual direction meant to us. She placed a miniature of Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, others placed items like a candle, flashlight, and various meaningful figurines. To be honest, I’d forgotten about this assignment until fifteen minutes before we began. Rummaging through my luggage, I picked up a hand-knit, yellow tote bag my friend had given me for my birthday this year. When I’d left my house in Connecticut I’d noticed the tote, and on a whim added it to my luggage. 

In hindsight, I believe the Holy Spirit turned my attention toward the bag because it, in fact, represented perfectly my sense of what spiritual direction - this course, at this time and place - means. When I placed the tote on the table I said that it depicted spiritual direction in that the tote was handmade (personal) and used for the purpose of gathering up loose items (prayer) while remaining porous, flexible and sturdy (listening to the Holy Spirit). In the times I’ve received spiritual direction, these qualities describe my experience very well. 

More than that, though, I realized later that the yellow, knitted tote bag represented something new - a new work of the Holy Spirit. In Scriptural terms, I think we’d use the word “wineskin”. The bag was given to me by a new friend from our new church in our new home, city, and state in a new season of life in which all of my children have grown away from home and my husband and I are learning how to minister as Rector and wife in a new congregation. 

Another important significance the bag took on for me was its material - a sunny, yellow crochet yarn. About fifteen years ago, I experienced a season of deeply emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. Throughout my journals, during that season I’d used the metaphor of being “unraveled” like a spool of thread, or ball of yarn. In the subsequent years, the Holy Spirit restored much of what I’d lost during that crisis, but there was still this particular area of personal devotion - the way I experience intimacy with God through prayer and contemplation - that had remained largely unspooled. 

During those years God taught me new ways to know His Presence in prayer, liturgy, corporate worship, and healing ministries. But this quietest, deepest, holiest place of my personal devotion still felt unwound and shapeless. It had been in that place of spiritual communion I’d felt deep disappointment that led me to doubt my ability to hear God for myself.

Quietly, often unpredictably, and sometimes painfully, God has been reconstructing me, but I haven’t known even what to hope for this part of my life that felt lost. More than any other learning I received during Orientation (and there was much!) it was this sense of being restored - and not only to original shape (a ball of yarn in the metaphor of my journals) but something completely new, useful, and even beautiful. This is a grace I can not even comprehend. 

While there were moments throughout that first residency and the following two-years of certification that I felt a bit lost, uncertain, insecure, and even frustrated, the pervading sense was that I was coming home to my rightful self. The person who has grown to become more like Christ, and in so doing, more like the Tamara He’s always imagined.

You can read a bit more about this journey into calling here: The Call That Rose Up Like A Road To Meet Me