L. Roger Owens - Abba, Give Me a Word. The Path of Spiritual Direction

the path of spiritual direction

L. Roger Owens

Abba, Give Me a Word: The Path of Spiritual Direction

2012 First Printing

Copyright 2012 by L. Roger Owens

ISBN 978-1-55725-799-4

All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise noted, are taken from The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Owens, L. Roger, 1975

Abba, give me a word : the path of spiritual direction / L. Roger Owens.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978-1-55725-799-4 (trade pbk.)

1. Spiritual directionChristianity. I. Title.
BV5053.O94 2012
253.53dc23 2011051650

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press
Brewster, Massachusetts
www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

For my father, Max Owens

(19202009)

I make the drive every month. Ive been doing it for five years. It used to be only five miles, now its forty-seven. Its still worth it.

I get in my station wagon after lunch, put a Diet Rite in the cupholder, and toss an apple in the passenger seat for the trip home. I back out of the driveway and away from all the things I have left inside the housetask lists, briefcase, half-written sermon, as many worries as I can. I leave my wife, Ginger, with whom I just had lunch, after I tell her that I will be back in time to pick up the boys from school. I drive a mile and a half to get out of the subdivision, then onto the bypass, then onto the interstate. Finally I feel as if Im on my way.

It takes a while to get out of Durham, North Carolina, since the limits of this city of nearly 230,000 seem to expand farther every day. But in fifteen minutes I pass over Falls Lake, and then my mind begins to quiet from all I have left behind. Crossing the bridge feels like a point of transition for me because when I see the ospreys and the bald eagles, I am reminded of why Im doing thisto become like the ones the prophet Isaiah talked about, who wait on the Lord and mount up with wings as eagles, and run and run and never tire.

Just past the lake, I turn off the interstate and onto country roads and through towns that even sound rural: Butner, Franklinton, and, finally, Louisburg. Louisburg, the Franklin county seat, with a population of 3,000, has one grocery store worth going to, a small coffee shop and bookstore called the Coffee Hound where the people in town who like books can connect, and a couple of boutique shops that are closed every Monday. Theres a declining two-year college in town, a monument to the Confederate dead, and a plain brown office building on Church Street with a parking lot across the street.

Thats where I always park.

The sign on the brown building next to the door tells me that I can find an appraiser and a lawyer inside, neither of whom I see very often. The sign outside doesnt say anything about the office at the end of the hallway, the one with a navy blue sofa and a candle already lit, with the bookshelves full of Bible commentaries and books on prayer, and contemplative music playing. The sign doesnt even have Larrys name on it, even though hes had this office since he retired years ago as the pastor of the Baptist church two blocks away.

It doesnt say hes there waiting for me or even hint at the odd and beautiful thing that will happen within as he listens to me and I listen to him and we both listen together in silence to the other Someone in our midst.

Heres why I see a spiritual director.

A few weeks ago I did a funeral, as we say in the ministry business. It was a graveside service, short and simple. The cemetery was a mile from the Raleigh-Durham airport, and every few minutes a jet roared over our heads.

Ill always remember this funeral as the one where the casket began to roll away from me as I placed my hand on it and spoke the words Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The funeral director leapt to his feet and steadied it from the other end. He assured me afterward we had been in no danger, but I have my doubts. I saw the look on his face.

I had never met Betty, the deceased. She was the mother of a member of the church where my wife and I are the pastors. She died of complications associated with Alzheimers at the age of eighty-one. Bettys son told me shed never been a churchgoer, but she made peace with God in her own way. I wondered if the handful of people there, the ones seated under the tent and the ones standing in the wind, thought death was like getting on one of those planes and taking off to a better placepeace with God being the boarding pass.

The Scripture passage I read that morning could certainly suggest as much. In my Fathers house there are many dwelling placesthats how it reads in the prayer book I was holding, but I said mansions because thats how people who have ever listened to southern gospel or read the King James Version remember it. Its easy to think about death as boarding a flight, landing at a resort, and then checking into your mansion in the sky.

But I reminded them that, whether we know it or not, from the day we cry our first breath to the day we struggle for our last, Gods own love is our home. God himself is the mansion in which we live here and now. In God we live and move and have our being, as Scripture says. Whether we know it or not.

I reminded them of that, but I think I might have been reminding myself.

I dont know if Betty knew it, but I know one thing: I want to. I want to know what its like to live in the house that is Gods own presence, to live there today and tomorrow, this minute and the next. And I want to be familiar with it. I want to be able to find my way around that house of love even in the dark, negotiating my way around the corners, up the stairs, into the room where I can rest. But how? How do we learn to live in this mansion now? How do we spend our days attentive to this love that surrounds us?

Thats why I sit on that sofa every month in the last office just past the bathroom with the retired Baptist pastor twice my age sitting across from me, the coffee table with a candle on it between us. I do it because it helps me to see and find my way through this house of love in which I live.