New Skete Monasteries News

written by Brother David In my previous articles on Spiritual direction, we considered the nature of spiritual direction itself: how it is essentially a telling of one’s continuing story with special emphasis on one’s relationship with God; how this continuous exercise in self-revelation can be likened to the directee showing the director through the directee’s garden and giving the director the authority to question and challenge the directee concerning said garden; and how spiritual direction is not therapy, even as it is therapeutic and uses many of the same tools. We looked at the qualities and skills of the directee: that the directee strives to grow in the courage and openness it takes to reveal accurately what is going on in her/his life; that the directee “does the work” of reflection and prayer; and that s/he comes to each meeting having reflected on what has happened since the last meeting. We also looked at some of the qualities of a good spiritual director: that...

By Brother Stavros   Today. August 28, 2013, I was listening to the commemorative speeches from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Here in Cambridge it was hot, sunny, and muggy, and I was taken quickly back to a similar day 50 years ago. Somewhere on the northwest side of the reflection pool, close enough to see the speakers without field glasses, I was packed in with co-workers from Georgetown University, where I had a summer job. My aunts and uncles in DC, southern in culture and attitudes, warned me not to go: “There’s gonna’ be big trouble.”   But on the contrary, the atmosphere was like one colossal church picnic. The converging traffic in pre-Metro Washington was like reverse evacuation. The locals disappeared as endless streams of buses flooded in from all over. So we walked down from the East Campus, then the site of the School of Foreign Service and Language Institute, where I worked as an office boy and runner well before computer networks.   ...

A birthday gift on turning seventy: a leap from a mountain named Tiger to hover raptor-like in thermals above Issaquah, and see the length of Lake Sammamish,   and on the north horizon, Fuji-like, the snow  cone volcano tamely named Mount Baker.   My instructor calls in my ear, “lean left” and smoothly we roll, and there rises Seattle to the west. Looking down brings a rush of exhilaration—my feet seem to tread at speeds my creaky knees would never cede upon the spiky tops of Pinus ponderosa , Sitka spruce and Douglas fir, madrone and lodgepole— jade, sea green, and emerald.   A graceful loop to gain some altitude, and we, like mating dragonflies, come ’round to face the mighty massif, the white-maned Tahoma, (Rainier to most of us), fifty miles away, yet immanent as a tsunami to a clam.   We band of gliders, twelve or more, must look like moths around the peak aflamed by late-day sun. Just on...