Ineda P. Adesanya - Kaleidoscope: Broadening the Palette in the Art of Spiritual Direction

Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope

Broadening the Palette
in the Art of Spiritual Direction

edited by

INEDA P. ADESANYA

Copyright 2019 by the Contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Church Publishing
19 East 34th Street
New York, NY 10016
www.churchpublishing.org

Cover design by Marc Whitaker, MTWdesign
Typeset by John Turnbull

A record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-1-64065-164-7 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-64065-165-4 (ebook)

The Spiritual Directors of Color Network began forming in March 2008. A classmate, the only other person of color in the Shalems Winter 2008 Spiritual Guidance Program, and I began to question where other contemplatives of color were. At our first networking opportunity, approximately ten of us, from the United States, Cameroon, South Africa, and Korea, lamented the small number, collectively, of people of color from our various cultures that attended the Spiritual Directors International ( SDI ) educational event and the spiritual-direction formation programs in which we were enrolled. We instinctively knew that people of color across our cultures were also contemplative. We knew we could not be the only contemplatives of color. Yet we were underrepresented, both in presence and in voice.

At that networking table, we considered writing a book as spiritual directors of color, but after the conference we tabled that idea and went in our separate waysexcept for me. I was coming to the end of my eighteen-month spiritual-guidance formation program with the Shalem Institute and I was already considering research on the contemplative spirituality of black people as my final paper. I left that conference in 2008 feeling determined to uncover the contemplative nature of black people and how it intersected with the readings from the almost exclusively European sources used in my formation program. I uncovered twenty additional books exploring the spirituality of black people to help inform my writingauthors like Barbara Holmes, Thea Bowman, Gayraud Wilmore, Peter J. Paris, John Mbiti, Albert Raboteau, and others, and I began imagining a network of spiritual directors of color. I began to reimagine the idea that was expressed at that first networking opportunity to write a book together, an idea that had been forming unarticulated within me. My final paper, Black Spirituality and the Art of Spiritual Direction, was written, accepted by Shalem in 2008, and published in sdis Presence journal in December 2009. Our network began to slowly form, with friends and colleagues sending potential new members and supporting the effort themselves, and we continued to gather a networking table at sdi events. We grew slowly from ten conference attendees to more than one hundred spiritual directors of color across the globe. In March 2014, our first book was published, edited by Sherry Bryant-Johnson, Rosalie Norman-McNaney, and me. Embodied Spirits: Stories of Spiritual Directors of Color, was a compilation of the stories of thirteen members on our journeys into contemplation and formation as spiritual directors of color. Barbara Holmes encouraged me to go further with a second volume, which I edited solo, entitled Aint Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Stories of Contemplation and Justice, which shared stories of the marriage between contemplation and action through a social-justice lens, ranging from prayer and compassion to the ongoing demonstration for peace and healing on Jeju Island in South Korea, to the civil rights of women, written by an Islamic womanist. Its timeliness and efficacy were affirmed as I garnered an Indie Author Legacy Award as author of the year in the area of social awareness in 2018.

The Spiritual Directors of Color Network, Ltd., incorporated in 2014, is served by a board of five members. For this, our third volume, board member Ineda Adesanya was selected as editor. Finally, an effort that was foundational from the beginning to create a curriculum that centered the spirituality of people of color has been realized. In this volume, members of our network present methods of traditional spiritual direction alongside aspects of spirituality particularly evident in the cultures of people of color, but often devalued in the traditional contemplative spirituality of people of European descent.

This volume, like our previous two, breaks new groundfirst as a published curriculum of any kind on forming spiritual directors, and even more so as the first publication of its kind to center the contemplative spirituality of people of color. May the Life-giving Spirit and our souls meet in agreement as we drink more deeply from Wisdoms cup.

Founding Managing Member
Spiritual Directors of Color Network, Ltd.

My formation in spiritual direction began as a student of the Program in Christian Spirituality at San Francisco Theological Seminary. For two and a half years, I studied history, theology, theory, and spiritual formation and spent hours upon hours in a supervised spiritual-direction practicum both in class and in communitythis, in addition to my Master of Divinity studies. I am forever grateful for that depth of study and practical immersion.

At this writing, I am in the latter half of my studies toward a PhD in Spirituality and Religious History. In this, the latter half of my earthly years, my intent is to author and edit books toward the expansion and diversification of contemplative studies within the religious academy. I am grateful for this opportunity to provide the first of such literary resources in Kaleidoscope: Broadening the Palette in the Art of Spiritual Direction. The challenges of editing Kaleidoscope have culminated in one of my most rewarding projects. I thank the Board of Directors of the Spiritual Directors of Color Network, Ltd., for their support, confidence, and encouragement from the conception of this volume into the pangs of the gestation process through the labor and birth of Kaleidoscope. I especially thank our Managing Member, Therese Taylor-Stinson, for her vision and commitment to develop a people of colorcentered spiritual-direction curriculum.

I extend gratitude to the contributing authors for valiantly offering up both their professional expertise and personal experience toward a text that is both instructional and relatable. Addie L. Walker assisted in providing the glue, in the form of introductions, that would tie together each of the chapters. Diana L. Hayes provided not only the afterword for this volume, lending her name and influence, but also invaluable guidance and mentor-ship for me along the way.

I am indebted to my dean and faculty advisor at the Graduate Theological Union for graciously allowing me to extend the defense of my doctoral comprehensive exams in order to meet the publishing deadlines for Kaleidoscope, thereby honoring its role in my formation as a scholar. The staff at Church Publishing have been more than helpful, and I offer special thanks to my publishing editor, Milton Brasher-Cunningham.