Five pastors had a turn at providing spiritual direction for George Fox in the first months of his religious awakening. Each of them blew it.
Fox was in his late adolescence when he ran into this discouraging sequence of spiritual misdirection. He does not identify the nature of the trouble that prompted him to seek out the pastors. Sometimes he refers to it as “despair and temptation.” It is clear, though, that he was seeking for God. And not one of the five pastors noticed.
That the five did badly is not surprising. George Fox was complex. Spiritual direction is difficult, and pastoral wisdom is not available on prescription. Every person who comes to a pastor with a heart full of shapeless longings and a head full of badgering questions is complex in a new way. There are no fail-proof formulae.
Fox, who later founded the Society of Friends, tells the story in his Journal. Reflecting on these five unsuitable but representative responses from our pastoral colleagues of three hundred years past, we learn not only what not to do, but their glaring oversights suggest what we must cultivate in order to provide sound spiritual direction.
Nathaniel Stephens
After some time I went into my own country again, and was there about a year, in great sorrows and troubles, and walked many nights by myself. Then the priest of Drayton, the town of my birth, whose name was Nathaniel Stephens, came often to me, and I went often to him; and another priest sometimes came with him; and they would give place to me to hear me, and I would ask them questions, and reason with them. And this priest Stephens asked me a question, viz, “Why Christ cried out upon the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ and why He said, ‘If it be possible let this cup pass from me; yet not my will, but thine be done.’ ” I told him that at that time the sins of all mankind were upon Him, and their iniquities and transgressions with which He was wounded, which He was to bear, and to be an offering for them as He was man, but died not as He was God; and so, in that He died for all men, and tasted death for every man, He was an offering for the sins of the whole world. This I spake, being at that time in a measure sensible of Christ’s sufferings, and what He went through. And the priest said it was a very good, full answer, and such a one as he had not heard. At that time he would applaud and speak highly of me to others; and what I said in discourse to him on the week-days he would preach of on the First-days; for which I did not like him. This priest afterwards became my great persecutor.
Nathaniel Stephens turns a conversation of spiritual direction into theological inquiry. He talks like an intellectual dilettante, collecting opinions and savoring nuances of flavor (“the priest said it was a very good, full answer, and such a one as he had not heard”). The conversations were, no doubt, stimulating. Neither Stephens nor Fox would have spent so much time talking if they had not found the exchanges interesting. But regardless of the seriousness of the subject matter-God, the soul, temptation-the conversations themselves were not serious. Dialogue degenerated into chatter.
Stephens gives his game away when he preaches on Sundays the material he gathers from Fox on weekdays. Fox was his bin of illustrations. This inquirer, brimming with insights, is plundered for the purpose of sermonizing. Did it never occur to Stephens to ask himself or Fox why the questions were important or what difference they made in their actual living? Apparently not. He does not deal with dignity and respect toward a person asking serious questions and seeking answers of God.
The attraction of Stephens’ approach for pastors is enormous. Everyone who comes for help is a fascinating case study in living theology. We raise our heads from studying theology in a book and meet theology in the shape of this woman, the profile of this man. We shift our attention from book to person easily enough, but no corresponding shift takes place in us-we “read” the person as impersonally as we read the book. The effect is disastrous. To treat someone as a theological butterfly, no matter how much care we convey in pinning them to the mounting board and studying the markings of identification, is a violation. If we reduce a person to sermon material, we are agents of alienation.
This theological/intellectual relationship was not without attraction for Fox (“I went often to him”), but it finally failed. Can I remember this? If a person who has dared to think with personal passion about God realizes I see our encounter as only a spiritual diversion from the humdrum of duller parishioners (and a source of preaching material), disillusionment is certain. When someone comes to me for spiritual direction, it is not to enter a theological discussion but to find a friend in a theological context.
The Ancient Priest at Mancetter
After this I went to another ancient priest at Mancetter, in Warwickshire, and reasoned with him about the ground of despair and temptations; but he was ignorant of my condition; he bade me take tobacco and sing psalms. Tobacco was a thing I did not love, and psalms I was not in a state to sing; I could not sing. Then he bade me come again, and he would tell me many things; but when I came again he was angry and pettish, for my former words had displeased him. He told my troubles, and sorrows, and griefs to his servants so that it was got among the milk-lasses, which grieved me that I had opened my mind to such a one. I saw they were all miserable comforters; and this brought my troubles more upon me.
The ancient priest at Mancetter is a clerk in an ecclesiastical drugstore. He has a stock of folk wisdom that he mixes with churchly admonition and then dispenses like an apothecary. He probably thought of himself as a font of cracker-barrel remedies, respected in the community for his common sense.
The problem was not only his “tobacco and psalms” advice but also the intent with which he gave it. He reveals his motives when he gets angry at Fox’s refusal to buy. Fox, a stubborn customer, refuses the prescribed medicine. That constitutes a rejection for the priest; the salesman has lost a customer. Anger is the appropriate, if tactless, response.
The priest doesn’t see Fox as a person to be directed but as a consumer of spiritual goods. The relationship is based on the buyer’s potential acceptance of the priest’s commodities. Rejection dissolves the relationship. After Fox refused the advice, not liking tobacco and not able to sing psalms, he knew by the priest’s anger that he had been depersonalized into a customer, a bad customer at that. The priest rejected Fox, refusing to tolerate such unresponsiveness. Fox was aggravating evidence of the priest’s incompetence. Best get rid of him by deriding him. The easiest way out is to hint among the milk-maids that there are matters of concern here about stability, immaturity, or neurosis.
Priest Living about Tamworth
Then I heard of a priest living about Tamworth, who was accounted an experienced man, and I went seven miles to him; but I found him like an empty hollow cask.
The daily difficulty for pastors in the work of spiritual direction is the insufficiency of technique, skill, and reputation. These can carry us through many a routine, but when a genuinely troubled person shows up, wrestling with the angels, grappling with the demons, our souls are on the line, tested in the desert. If we are unprepared to engage in honest, open, shared inquiry after God, then we are of no use: “an empty hollow cask.”
These inquirers are always an implied threat, for we never know when their relentless searching will expose some undetected shallowness, some unexamined platitude in us. We devise stratagems and roles that allow us to function smoothly and successfully, without pain, anguish, and undue expenditure of psychic energy. But none of this can be sustained in an acutely personal spiritual encounter.
A faddish interest in pastoral counseling is sometimes (not always) a role-the acquisition of a new technique at the expense of becoming a new person. A rigorous discipline aimed at excellence in the pulpit is sometimes (not always) a role-public performance that avoids the pain of praying with people. Instead of living ourselves into an integration of person and pastor, we learn techniques that give a facade of expertise in spirituality and a reputation for caring. It only takes a single George Fox to perforate the image.
Reputations do not count in spiritual direction. “Experience” is not enough in the pastor’s study. The stories we trot out to illustrate an experience, the insights we use to illuminate personality development, however impressive, will not survive the restless probing of a troubled soul. Seekers such as Fox will spot the “empty, hollow cask” every time, even if “accounted an experienced man.” Only a life committed to spiritual adventure, personal integrity, honest and alert searching prayer is adequate for the task.
This means our primary task is to be pilgrims. Our best preparation for the work of spiritual direction is an honest life. Prayer and the developing capacity for adoration and joy are the qualifications that matter.
Dr. Cradock of Coventry
I heard also of one called Dr. Cradock of Coventry, and went to him. I asked him the ground of temptations and despair, and how troubles came to be wrought in man. He asked me, “Who was Christ’s father and mother?” I told him, “Mary was his mother, and that He was supposed to be the son of Joseph, but He was the Son of God.” Now, as we were walking together in his garden, the alley being narrow, I chanced, in turning, to set my foot on the side of a bed, at which the man was in such a rage as if his house had been on fire. Thus all our discourse was lost, and I went away in sorrow, worse than I was when I came. I thought them miserable comforters, and saw they were all as nothing to me; for they could not reach my condition.
Dr. Cradock is concerned about orthodoxy, not only theologically but peripatetically. His concern is that Fox think straight and walk straight.
His anger when Fox stepped off into the flower bed was not an unfortunate lapse but a telltale expression of his mentality. Deviation from the straight and narrow is the cause, in Cradock’s mind, of what is wrong with the world. For him, human despair is rooted in wrong thinking. Fix a person’s theology, and you solve the person’s problem.
A dogmatician, Cradock’s response to a despairing inquirer is to ask the testing question. He operated as an examining professor, searching out what was wrong with Fox’s belief structure. When he found it, he would be able to instruct him in what to believe so that he would be whole again. He had only to find out how Fox diverged from the model of orthodox Christianity in order to set him straight.
Cradock’s progeny in the twentieth century are as likely to have psychological presuppositions as theological. Freud has preempted Calvin as the father of orthodoxy among many pastors. Today’s question has changed from “who was Christ’s father and mother?” to “what do you think of your mother?” but the intent is the same: get material for diagnosis, data to compare with the orthodox mode.
Fortunately, Fox did not have to endure the inquisition very long-Cradock showed his hand, flaring in anger over the garden trespass. Fox, an impossible candidate for any procrustean bed, sorrowfully went looking for other help.
Orthodoxy cannot be imposed. The spiritual director is in an enviable place to observe the endless variations of grace, the fantastic fertility of the divine Spirit bringing faith into creation. But as Bonhoeffer said, “We can never know just how Christ will be formed in another.” If we should mistakenly do our work in the dogmatic schoolmaster style of Dr. Cradock, we will well deserve the epitaph “miserable comforter.”
Macham
After this, I went to another, one Macham, a priest in high account. He would needs give me some physic, and I was to have been let blood; but they could not get one drop of blood from me, either in arms or heart (though they endeavored it), my body being, as it were, dried up with sorrows, grief and troubles, which were so great upon me that I could have wished I had never been born, or that I had been born blind, that I might never have heard vain and wicked words, or the Lord’s name be blasphemed.
Macham is an activist. He will not waste time with idle talk or useless listening. Something has to be done. No matter what, do something: “Give him a physic, and take some blood.”
The suggestion to do something is nearly always inappropriate, for persons who come for spiritual direction are troubled over some disorder or dissatisfaction in being, not doing. They need a friend who will pay attention to who they are, not a project manager who will order additional busy work.
Precipitate actions are usually avoidances. They distract for the time being and provide temporary (and welcome) relief. The attraction for “giving a physic and letting blood” is nearly irresistible in a highly ambiguous situation. The sense of definition provided by clearcut action provides tremendous satisfaction. But there is no growth in the spirit, no development into maturity.
Pastors are particularly imperiled in this area because of the compulsive activism, both cultural and ecclesiastical, in which we are immersed at this time in history. It takes wary and persistent watching to avoid falling into the activist trap.
George Fox needed a pastor who was secure enough to absorb, reflect, and tolerate the ambiguity of his troubled despair and temptation and strong enough not to do something to him or for him. That would have provided space for the Holy Spirit to initiate the new life. That might have made a difference.
Avoiding Such Malpractice
Is there anything that I can do to avoid perpetuating the malpractice of George Fox’s five pastors? Are there ways to prepare myself for the next George Fox who waits after a meeting until everyone has gone and ventures a shy question? Or catches me on the street and asks if she can have a few minutes over coffee? Or writes a letter? Or, more deliberately and formally, arranges for a series of conversations to “get at what’s bothering me”? The negatives of Fox’s experience suggest some positives.
For a start, I can cultivate an attitude of awe. I must be prepared to marvel. This face before me, its loveliness scored with stress, is in the image of God. This fidgety and slouching body confronting me is a temple of the Holy Ghost. This awkward, slightly asymmetric assemblage of legs and arms, ears and mouth, is part of the body of Christ. Am I ready to be amazed at what God hath wrought, or am I industriously absorbed in pigeonholing my observations? Is what I see enhanced by faith-instructed imagination or reduced to what can be sorted and fit into the file folders of biology and psychology and sociology?
Why is it, the minute a person comes to me whose face is an unconvincing image of God, or whose body is a parody of the Holy Ghost’s temple, or whose words and actions show no evident coordination with Christ’s body, that I so quickly abandon the spiritual orientation and the texts I have pondered and preached and taught for all these years, and take up half-digested slogans and formulae that I pick out of the air of contemporania?
My basic orientation as a pastor is that the significance of what I see before me is not what I see before me but what Christ has said and done. Far more relevant than what I feel or think, or what this person feels or thinks, is what Christ has said and done. This is a person for whom Christ died, a person he loves: an awesome fact! This is a person preserved alive until this very moment in a world of hurtling automobiles, ravaging diseases, and psychotic menaces. Am I prepared to admire? Am I prepared to respect? Am I prepared to be in reverence?
When I am cast in the role of spiritual authority, only incessant vigilance prevents me from responding with condescending paternalism. If they are going to look up to me, how can I keep from looking down on them? Not in contempt, to be sure, but in a kind of I-understand-what-is-best-for-you reductionism. When I do that, they leave benignly belittled.
For many years now, I have paid special attention to pastors when they talk about the people they baptize and give the Word and body and blood of Christ. What do they really think of them? How rarely do I hear any awe or marvel in their speech; how seldom I detect any applause for the glories no one else notices, the grace everyone overlooks. George Fox was a remarkable person, a sensitive soul, but not one of his five pastors had the faintest inkling of it.
Every meeting with another is a privilege. In pastoral conversation I have chances that many never get as easily or as frequently-chances to spy out suppressed glory, ignored blessing, forgotten grace. I better not miss them.
Second, I can cultivate an awareness of my ignorance. There is so much about this person that I don’t know. There are layered years of experience that I have no access to. There are feelings of anger and joy and faith and despair that will never be articulated. There are dreams and fantasies of vanity and accomplishment, sexuality and adventure, that will never see the light of day. Bits and pieces will be hinted at in conversation, but most of it will remain uncharted territory. One gets the impression that George Fox’s five pastors had him figured out, and God’s will for him figured out, in the first ten or fifteen minutes.
It is difficult to retain an awareness of my ignorance. Pastors have passed so many examinations, heard so many lectures, read so many books, and have so much experience in the raw material of truth-death, grief, suffering, celebration, guilt, love-that we easily assume a posture of all-knowing. But there is so much more that we don’t know. We are barely across the threshold of comprehension.
“In no other century of our brief existence,” writes Lewis Thomas, “have human beings learned so deeply, and so painfully, the extent and depth of their ignorance.” All the same, it is hard not to be impressed about what I do know. I have read and studied the Scriptures for years and am ambitious to share what I have learned. I have been taught and trained in theology and am eager to pass on what I know. Given the stimulus of a question, I spill out answers and commentary. I want to get the fullness in my head into the emptiness in the other head. But what if it is not heads that are involved here but hearts, lives? There is far more, then, that I don’t know than I do know. “It is the mark of an uneducated mind,” says von Hugel, “to be more dogmatic than the subject allows.” I had better be quiet for a while and listen and watch. There is more here than meets the eye. There is a lot that hasn’t been said. What is it?
An even more sobering dimension to my ignorance regards God. What has God been doing with this person before he or she showed up in my study? What messages have been received, distorted, missed? God has been at work with this person since birth. Everything that has taken place in this life has in some way or another taken place in the context of a good creation and an intended salvation. Everything.
When this person leaves my presence, the good creation and the intended salvation will remain; God’s grace is in operation and will persist. My words and gestures and actions take place in the midst of a great drama, the details of which I know little or nothing. In no way does that mean that my part is unimportant. I take with absolute seriousness whatever part I play, but I am a supporting player, not the lead. I do my very best but in no way speak or act so that the person’s response to me is the center stage action. God wants to meet with this person; this person wants, unfocused as the want may be, to meet with God. I must not manipulate the conversation or the setting so that I am perceived to be in charge, or I merely delay the things of God.
Third, I can cultivate a predisposition to prayer. My undergirding assumption in all pastoral encounters is that what the person really wants from me is to learn how to pray or to be guided to maturity in prayer. That assumption is not always confirmed by later developments, but less is lost in making the assumption wrongly than in not making it.
It is easier to talk about ideas or people or projects. For the moment it is usually satisfying enough. But if it is God with whom the person really wants to deal, all I have done is divert the search or delay the meeting. I have mistaken myself as the primary partner in the conversation when what the person is really looking for is conversation with God. If I dominate the conversation, either ignoring God’s Word and presence and mercy, or consigning him to a merely ceremonial position, then I am getting in the way.
It is God with whom we have to deal. People go for long stretches of time without being aware of that, thinking it is with money, or sex, or work, or children, or parents, or a political cause, or athletic competition, or learning that they must deal. Any one or a combination of these subjects can absorb them and give the meaning and purpose that human beings seem to require. But then there is a slow stretch of boredom. Or a disaster. Or a sudden collapse of meaning. They want more. They want God. When a person searches for meaning and direction, asking questions and testing out statements, we must not be diverted into anything other or lesser.
Clement of Alexandria called prayer “keeping company with God.” Keeping company involves gesture and silence, relaxed musing and intent speaking. Other persons can join and leave the company without disrupting the company. More often than we think, the unspoken, sometimes unconscious, reason that persons seek out conversation with the pastor is a desire to keep company with God; if they are unlucky enough to come to a pastor who is not active in the company, they are going to be disappointed as George Fox was, for whom none of his pastors gave any direction in prayer or was perceived to be a person of prayer.
This does not mean the pastor’s task is to get people on their knees with the least possible delay. It doesn’t mean we have an instruction manual on prayer from which we assign lessons. Many times there will be no formal or verbalized prayer. Often there will be no explicit reference to prayer. But there must be a predisposition toward prayer, a readiness for prayer.
Spiritual direction, then, is conducted with an awareness that it takes place in God’s active presence, that our conversation is conditioned by his speaking and listening, his being there. This cannot be reduced to procedure or formula. It is not accomplished so much by what we do or say to another, but in the way we are when we meet another.
Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
