One of my preaching professors in Divinity School offered this unsettling warning to those of us who were planning to enter the pulpit one day. He said, “There are many sins you can commit in preaching. The most grave is to be boring.”
I suspect I often encourage Spiritual Directors to embrace their wild side because I have such a hard time doing that myself. At the same time, I have so much evidence that when I take a risk with clients, when I feel an inner edge and share it, my client sessions jumpstart into energy and insight that otherwise stays underground.
Of course we want to be care-full as we companion another human being into their vulnerabilities. It's also the reality that the Holy Spirit shows up as an energy with fire in it.
How do we tend to these seemingly contradictory dynamics, tenderness and candor?
Our care toward clients is rooted in the trust that we build with them. Trust becomes the strong container that can hold the unpredictable and the wild.
We speak to clients out of our deep intuitions and impulses. You can think of this energy as your playful or your wild side, and in both cases it enjoys some mischief-making.
Or, you can think of it as unleashing your inner Barbarian! Here’s how Stephen Buhner thinks of it:
Barbarian in essence means someone not of the cities, someone with wildness inside them…[and] when this work is taken up, when you begin shifting your perception - as a way of life - when you begin a different kind of thinking, a Gaian way of thinking, by definition you begin to become 'not of the cities.' A certain wildness begins to re-enter the self. Speech begins to change. A deep connection with the sacredness and intelligence of the Earth begins. You begin to become 'of the heath,' wild, once more. (Stephen Buhner)
Spiritual direction sessions at their best have a certain wildness to them. There is an untamed Spirit at work that dares to think new thoughts and to go in daring directions. It doesn’t mean we are outlandish or doing somersaults. It means we are honest and brave, because that’s when the soul comes out to play.
The more we are able to boldly tend to trust and access our inner wild side, the more we invite clients to do the same.
So the next time you get a whiff of a session tending toward boring (and this happens all the time), trust the trust you’ve built, unleash your barbarian, and have some fiery fun with your client. The Spirit and your client will thank you for doing so.