When she first sat at her mentor’s table, she couldn’t precisely tell you why she was there. Her life wasn’t falling apart, her prayers didn’t feel hollow, her faith hadn’t been shaken, but she was looking for something more. “I think I have settled for shallow waters along the shore, and I know deep waters are calling to me, I know that deep calls to deep.” She didn’t expect answers, but maybe good questions, presence, and trusted words to help in reading the stories she knew. God was still writing with her. In the weeks that followed, she experienced a slow, steady uncovering of grace in the deeply personal, ordinary, sacred steps of her journey.
Spiritual mentoring, or simply call it spiritual friendship, is an intentional and deliberate process of sacred conversations for the purpose of soul formation. From my own experience with the mentors of my own life, I know it to engage at least three common experiences…
There is an assumption of presence.
Jesus’ words in Matthew 28 can’t be heard too many times: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” CS Lewis wrote, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with God. He walks everywhere incognito.”[1]
Mentors don’t make something happen as much as engage in an intentional process of helping people see what is already there and hear what is already being spoken. Mentors, in other words, are good listeners. They are attuned to your story. But at the same time, attune to the presence of God’s spirit at the table. I have sometimes set an empty chair in the room to remind me and a mentee of God’s active presence in our time together. It’s not a bible study, sermon, devotional, or study time, but rather a slow, steady uncovering of grace. We listen together to sense God’s presence and perhaps to hear God’s voice in our conversation.
My morning prayer usually says, “May I sense you every hour and make my whole life a prayer.” Psalm 5:3 is my witness. David prayed, “O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice…” How does that develop? It is my response to Romans 8:26, “Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intersects with size too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is in the mind of the spirit, because the spirit intercedes for the Saints according to the will of God.” It’s been said that the Holy Spirit has a 24/7 prayer meeting for you.
There is an awakening to the holy in our story.
Too often, I think we skip past words. In First Corinthians 6, on our way to other hermeneutical issues, we must not rush past this image: “… Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” By these words, Paul declares that God lives in your story. Your body is a temple. You are an altar in the world. Don’t make this hard to see: your body is a temple, God moves with you in all the events of your life, i.e., in your story. John Mark Comer’s picture of following Jesus as rabbi tells us to “be with Jesus,” he’s half right. In spirituality, our work is to pay attention to how Jesus is already with you.
Mentors help us read our story as we look for the often-quiet presence and whispers of God in the ordinary events. It is what Tish Warren calls a litany of the ordinary. Jesus, incarnated into a human body, is now present to us in the engagement of the Spirit in our story.
There is access to our own chosenness.
- Dr. Rosell believed in me as a young college student.
- A mentee told me, “You are the first person to believe in me.”
- A spouse told me, “You are the first person to see what he is capable of…”
- The hardest words I often hear are, “If you only knew my whole story…” That sentence breaks my heart.
- The greatest words I often hear are, “If you only knew my whole story….” Those words enable me to become the voice of God, saying to a spiritual friend the words of Abba to Jesus, “This is my son” or “you are my daughter,” whom I love, whom I choose.
A mentor’s uncovering
Mentors give sacred access to our chosenness, our truest identity. You are chosen, loved, welcomed, and given belonging. For several years, little Don Don came into the coffee shop to “the table” with a truck to share. He learned his colors by naming the M&M’s or Skittles. Don learned his chosenness by our excited hugs at this presence. He has since moved away, but we all still look up in hopeful anticipation when the light bounces off the window as the door opens.
So many of us do not know our chosenness, but a mentor does. We too often live in “the places that have not known love” or “what we expected but did not receive.”[2]
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Keith Anderson, D.Min., is a Faculty Associate for Spirituality and Vocation at VantagePoint3 and President Emeritus of Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and is the author of several books, including Reading Your Life’s Story (IVP, 2016), A Spirituality of Listening (IVP, 2016), and Spiritual Mentoring (IVP, 1999). Keith’s newest book, On Holy Ground: Your Story of Identity, Belonging and Sacred Purpose, will soon be released from Wipf & Stock Publishers. In his writing, teaching, and mentoring, Keith seeks to set a table for people looking to enter the “amazing inner sanctuary of the soul” in the most ordinary and extraordinary moments of life.
[1] CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
[2] Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, pages 31 and 54.