Writings On The Spiritual Life

About the Book

Abbot Andre Louf said that, when a person decides to get serious about the spiritual life, s/he should acquire a spiritual director. Wayne Proudfoot argued that the form of religious experience depends upon the tradition in which it is perceived. Georges Bataille searched out the meaning of his own intense inner experience in non-traditional ways. This book seeks to follow the meaning of traditional measures of the spiritual life learned through the experience of the author once his spiritual life decided to choose him.

About the Author

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. I trace my developing interest in the spiritual life to a chance discovery in the seminary library stacks of a daily office; I had never encountered one before and quickly found that it provided me with a balance and a settling into scripture on a regular, daily basis. Following that beginning, I followed my usual nomadic routine of interest in the love of God, finding threads that served to support my growth, often in a random sort of happenstance way. A spiritual director with whom I worked for a few years in the mid 1990s told me that the true director is the Holy Spirit, that her job was to help me see where I was being led by the Spirit. In the 1980s already, I was using my pen - actually, pencil - to composes materials to help me understand; some were incidentally to be transposed into typescript for the use with my congregation. These came to print as a pair of series of lessons on the subject of prayer and a series of letters to an imaginary early teen age girl named Anna on the spiritual life. They accompanied other rounds of devotional and academic and exegetical works that served to work out the details of what was happening within me. I am grateful for the writings and, even more, for the happenings they informed as I live out my life in retirement with my wife of 54 years, a pair of dogs and several cats.