Acceptance and Contentment - Learning How to See Others from Spiritual Direction
Learning from spiritual direction how contentment and acceptance work together to help you be more of who you want to be with other people.
There is something almost unsettling when you watch two people just “be” with one another in a quiet moment. Whether it’s a couple sitting on a park bench sharing the sunshine or two people simply walking alongside one another, there is something about the unfrenzied nature of the encounter that feels alien.
In his hit book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer makes an extended case for a diagnosis of hurry sickness in our culture.1 Likewise, my favorite sociologist (if someone can have such a thing), Hartmut Rosa, argues that we modern people are so hurried because we need to do more and more per minute lest we risk falling behind and feeling alienated by others and within ourselves (what he calls “social acceleration,” which happens to also be the title of his landmark book).2 In an influencer-saturated, social media-structured, and algorithmically-animated world of today, all you have to do is open your phone to see that you are behind, have been behind, and are falling behind at an increasingly quick clip. If you are to believe the life-in-no-motion snapshots on Instagram or long and meandering testimonial posts on LinkedIn, someone (and, somehow, everyone) has figured life out and, well, you and I haven’t.
I think this is why seeing people “doing nothing” together feels so fraught – at least in part. It feels alien because, somehow, these folks aren’t in a hurry. They have taken the red pill and left the Matrix, and I sense the disturbance in my inmost being. There’s something “off” about it, and yet, if I am honest, I become mesmerized. The off-ness of it, its alien nature, seems to grab my attention and stir my longings.
For a fraction of a moment, I think, I want that.
As I reflect on the practice of spiritual direction, the historic Christian spiritual discipline of companioning another in their life with God, there are plenty of moments like this. Today, I want to explore how this shows up and what specific belief or faith frameworks might be animating the sort of unhurried pace that, in some ways, defines spiritual direction.
This post is part of a series exploring spiritual direction – what it is, what happens in spiritual direction, and why I think spiritual direction works the way it does. If you haven’t checked out the other posts in this series, I would encourage you to take a look!
Acceptance as a Spiritual Discipline
So, what is happening when two people are “just together”? It may seem odd to ask this kind of question, but humor me.
Say. for instance, that you observed two people sitting next to each other on a bench – let’s say a man and a woman. They are looking forward, sitting in what appears to be a relaxed posture, and seem to have soft expressions on their faces. They don’t have devices in their hands or headphones in their ears. They linger for quite some time.
Given their postures and facial expressions, we can likely assume they aren’t angry at one another (you know it when you see it). You can also assume they know each other, since it can seem strange to sit next to a stranger on a bench, at least where I live. I would also assume there’s some sort of connection they are fostering since, as a matter of course, they are choosing to be undistracted by technology in this very public setting.
Looking forward feels complicated because it seems like they might be ignoring each other, but once again, the lack of social or physical distance between them calls that into question. They seem to be there by intention, and they don’t seem to want to exclude each other via techno-distraction. However, they don’t seem to be “locked in” or in some way focused on communicating in a specific and concrete way with each other – it is as if sharing the space is enough.
As another example, let’s imagine a spiritual director sitting with a directee in an office or living room. We observe that they are simply in the same space together, and the director has an unhurried, nonanxious posture and a soft facial expression. Whether the directee is talking or not, the director maintains what appears to be an open expression: unshockable, unmoving, and somehow empathetic. There isn’t a rush between sentences, and the spiritual director’s responses to sharing come slowly. The space between isn’t distant, and it’s not distracted. You notice an air of intention to all of this, and the directee seems to as well.
I want to propose that what we saw with the couple on the bench and with the spiritual direction session are the same broad phenomenon that I want to call acceptance. If I were to define it, acceptance might be the practice of allowing someone to be exactly where they are without an attempt to control, coerce, manage, or motivate them. I don’t know that I love this definition, but it gets at something fundamental about the experience.
When I accept someone, I am not attempting to move them along.
When I feel accepted, I feel like I can be where I am without having to change to stay.
Within spiritual direction, the practice of acceptance (particularly on the part of the director towards the directee) is vitally important. Here’s why.
An Incomplete Summary of Directees
Acceptance is so important in spiritual direction because of who comes to spiritual direction.
For about as long as the practice has been around, spiritual direction has existed in a nebulous space between institutional churches (think local congregations) and “the world.”
Most spiritual directors would trace our origins to the desert mothers and fathers who, rejecting the excesses of the Roman Empire and seeking a deeper walk with Jesus, left the trappings of society and snuck off to the North African and Middle Eastern deserts. These reclusive monks would drink deeply of God in solitude and silence and through demanding spiritual practices, hoping to grow in purity of heart and see God.3 As word of their fidelity spread, people would seek them out, hungry for a silver bullet for their spiritual problems. Often interrupted, these hermits would share their presence and their resources, and allow visitors to follow them around for as long as they needed to, provided those folks were teachable.
Like the desert mothers and fathers, many spiritual directors serve outside traditional churches, working with people who broadly fit into three categories.
Pastors (and other kinds of ministry leaders)
Many of the folks who come to spiritual direction are ministry leaders themselves, often shepherding their own congregations. These people may have no one in their lives for whom they bear no responsibility. Said differently, they are never not a pastor. Spiritual direction, which exists outside of but often alongside traditional leadership structures, provides a safe space for ministers to share even the bleakest of their spiritual experiences without the threat of removal or punishment. Spiritual direction might be the one place in their lives where they can share the full picture of their life with God.
Pilgrims
Not everyone who comes to spiritual direction is in full-time ministry, though. For many, they are wandering on the outskirts of institutional Christianity because the kinds of experiences they bring or the questions they ask have been met with resistance, bypassed with pleasantries, or rejected as dangerous. Those with doubts, church-related pain, and hanging-onto-belief-by-the-tips-of-their-fingers wanderers might find a spiritual director on their way out of the faith, hoping that someone can see them and not try to fix, solve, or save; in fact, many of these pilgrims desperately need to be seen.
Pariahs
A pariah is a social outcast, someone who is avoided by a particular community. There are some, unfortunately, who do not at all feel as though they can ever belong in a local church expression. In my context – the broadly conservative Bible belt in the USA – these can be folks whose politics, sexuality, disabilities, or socio-economic status leave them feeling othered when they enter a local church. It’s not to say that they necessarily are being othered, at least not consciously. But sometimes our places, spaces, symbols, and language inadvertently communicate that certain people don’t get to draw near to Jesus.4 For these folks, spiritual direction is perhaps the only kind of communal spiritual practice or discipleship space where they can find time and space to arrive at a place set up solely to welcome them.
While this map is by no means perfect, its heuristic nature might help us see why acceptance is so important. For people in all three of these categories, their very being is connected with connotations that make soul care seem impossible. In other words, their conversations are almost always loaded, as folks in these three categories tend to be treated as objects by others in their quest for spiritual actualization.
Pastors are objects onto which other people can project their concerns.
Pilgrims are objects onto which other people can project their fears.
Pariahs are objects onto which other people can project their biases.
What does acceptance have to do with hurry?
At the beginning of this piece, I was making a diagnostic case about the nature of hurry and how it makes acceptance feel alien to us when we see it. If you are anything like me (Lord have mercy), you may be wondering about the connection. In what way(s) does hurry make something like the picture of the couple on the bench feel out of place?
Often, when I am with others, I feel one of two dynamics is at play: either they are attempting to “help” me, or I am attempting to “help” them. The instinct is good, I think: helping one another, especially beyond kin connections, is one of the things that makes humans, well, human. But, almost inevitably, there is a dynamic of projecting one’s own value on how the other person’s life turns out. That is, as long as I can help make sure their life is okay, then I will be okay.
What happens in these moments is that I transfigure the person in front of me from a subject into an object (or, in the inverse, someone else turns me into an object). More commonly, we might use the language of treating someone like a “project.” A project, though, inherently doesn’t have subjectivity (its own point of view or agency); a project is something that someone else does.
Pay attention to the dynamic, though. When I turn someone into an object by seeking to “help” them, I am sometimes (subconsciously or preconsciously) helping them for my own sake. If my project turns out, then perhaps some of my existential dread might be relieved. The objectifying nature of helping someone in this way has as much (or more) to do with my lack of contentment as with actually seeing the other person’s situation improve.
Hurry operates on the same fundamental basis, especially when couched as social acceleration: I will only have enough if I pack more and more meaningful experiences into every moment, so I need to push to make everything meaningful, useful, manageable, and reachable.5 In my attempts to do these things – even to, and especially to, others – I cannot accept things as they are. I must make them into something else so that I can be “okay.”
To accept someone or something as that person or thing is, in and of itself, an embodiment of my contentment.
If acceptance is a spiritual practice, the underlying belief dynamic is contentment.
Contentment in the Bible
Contentment is a big idea, and the Bible has much to say about it. However, while it is a big idea, it isn’t that complicated.
The New Testament talks about contentment in terms of having enough.
For instance, In John 14, as Jesus is delivering his final teaching to the twelve disciples, Philip exclaims that if Jesus can “show us the Father…that will be enough for us” (John 14:8 NRSVUE). In his comment, the assumption is that what Jesus has done and said so far in John has not been enough, and if Jesus can only give more evidence, then the disciples will hit a critical mass and finally have what they need to trust him.
Similarly, when Paul is struggling with some kind of serious and critical issue (we don’t know what the issue is, but it must have been significant), he cries out to the Lord three times, asking to be delivered. Paul writes about the response he heard in prayer:
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me (2 Corinthians 12:9 NRSVUE).
Paul is only able to boast in his weaknesses because God gives him something that is enough to meet him in the midst of his need. He can proclaim to love his weaknesses because God gives him something in the midst of them that he otherwise might not receive (or at least not be conscious of).
The Old Testament paints a similar picture, but seems to have a radically realistic bent about what happens when we have enough. Case in point: God is warning the people about what entering the promised land will actually mean for them:
“When I have brought them into the land flowing with milk and honey, the land I promised on oath to their ancestors, and when they eat their fill and thrive, they will turn to other gods and worship them, rejecting me and breaking my covenant” (Deuteronomy 31:20 NRSVUE).
At the center of the Abrahamic covenant is the idea that the land God gives the people will provide them with enough. However, in a sobering turn, God underscores the human drive to move beyond enough: as soon as they have their fill, they will want more and look for a way to get it. Rather than finding contentment in having food in their stomachs and in communion with God (a common theme in the Psalms, such as Psalm 17:15, Psalm 65:4, or Psalm 132:15), he seems to know that people are oriented toward wanting more than they need.
That is, enough is never actually enough.
This is where the Bible seems to make a distinction between the wicked and the righteous. For the wicked, it seems that they are inclined to take what they want, whereas the righteous are inclined to receive whatever the Lord gives them.6
Receptivity and acquisition. Contentment and Control.
Contentment in Spiritual Direction
As a spiritual director, I seek to be in a state of receptivity to God and in a place of not needing anything from my directee. As I stay open to God’s provision, I practice some sort of synthesis of confession and receptivity, living a prayer that goes something like
God, I don’t have all that I want; help.
In that, I am orienting my heart and mind to look to God to get what I need. I don’t always feel like I have everything I need (I rarely do), but as I position myself to be available to God, I become more aware of how he is with me. This, I think, is a good way to conceptualize the grace Paul was talking about in 2 Corinthians 12: God’s with-ness.
As I do that, I can also notice and let go of my agenda for the person I am meeting with. I can notice how I am attached to fixing, solving, saving, or managing that person’s experience, and I can begin the work of releasing the outcomes of their life to God. In this, I am living a prayer that goes something like
God, you give them everything they need; help.
It’s a simple prayer, and I don’t always pray it the same way, but as I position myself in a posture of letting go of outcomes, I can, hopefully, accept the person I am meeting with exactly as they are, not as they aren’t.
The gift is that you don’t have to be a spiritual director to do this. Simply entering into conversations with an awareness of your neediness (we’re all needy) and your desire for specific outcomes (we all have them) is a starting point for conversation with God. This kind of conversation, perhaps a bit tender at first, is what God can use to slowly loosen your grip on control such that you can accept the people in your life as they are, trusting that God loves them far more than you ever can and knows them far better than you ever will.
John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2019).
Hartmut Rosa trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013).
This summary comes from a class I audited with Fr. Ron Rolheiser at Oblate School of Theology on the spirituality of John of the Cross. Early ascetics really seemed to latch onto the idea that purity of heart (single-heartedness towards God) would allow them to see him and hear from him with clarity. Working with texts like Matthew 5:8 and Psalm 24:3-4 and with what might be considered a very low view of the material world (a Neoplatonic interpolation, perhaps), they would seek to bring their bodies into submission such that their bodily urges no longer clouded their heart’s pursuit of God. For a good introductory text that provides not only preserved sayings but also presents a theological and historical foundation, see Laura Swan’s The Forgotten Desert Mothers, 2nd Edition (Mahweh, NJ: Paulist Press, 2022).
I might try to generate a piece on this someday, but space won’t allow for exploration of this now.
There’s no time to get into it here, but an interesting Bible study project would be to examine how the wicked’s relationship with possessions is described throughout the Old Testament.