Episode 104: Danielle Shroyer on her role as a spiritual director

Danielle Shroyer describes how she felt "called out" by God to discover her new role as a spiritual director; and she gives listeners a crash course in two soul-nurturing practices you can try at home.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God; Conversations That Matter about Faith and Public Life. I am your host, George Mason, and I'm so pleased to welcome back to the program for another conversation, Danielle Shroyer, Danielle is a theologian and a pastor, and now a spiritual director. She's a writer and a great friend and colleague, too. So Danielle, welcome back to Good God.

Danielle Shroyer:
Thanks so much, George.

George Mason:
Danielle, we talked in the first episode a good bit about your early experiences of call, and we talked about some of your books that you've written. I want to pursue some of those questions as well, but you yourself have been on a journey. You were a pastor of Journey Community Church for 10 years, but your own personal journey has led you to different iterations in your understanding of your call. Can you trace those for us a little bit and how you believe you were able to make different pivots along the way in your ministry?

Danielle Shroyer:
The simplest way to say that is that I felt called into ministry by a sense of God sort of yelling me into it. You know, I was like, "Are you sure?" And I felt this very firm like, yes, this is what you're supposed to do. And it's very strange to say, but I felt called out. I felt like God honestly yelled at me and said, "I know you love this. And I know you love these people, but you have to go." It was honestly one of the most difficult, difficult decisions I've ever made and it actually helped me understand that sometimes doing the right thing still really hurts. I had no desire to leave. That was so much of my identity. And I love these people with my whole heart. I had given this church everything, and I knew I was tired and I knew probably I did need to do something different, but I just didn't want to go. And I don't think I would have, if I hadn't felt that sense of clear, no, you have to go.

Danielle Shroyer:
It will probably take my whole life to figure out why and what was going on and all of that, but the simplest thing is that I got called out and sort of entered into a time of real silence for myself and I've gone 90 miles an hour since I came out of the womb. And it was maybe the first time in my life that I slowed down. And that has ended up being really important in my development as spiritual director for me to know that sure, I can go 90 miles an hour, but I also have to learn how to sit at zero.

George Mason:
We're going to talk more about what it means to be a spiritual director in a moment. But I just want to pause and honor some things that you were saying about your discernment process to begin with. Because I think we talk about the Christian faith as one that involves a real personal sense of the presence of God, the living God, who is able to speak to us and spirit to spirit and to communicate with us. And then I think we get somehow to where we don't trust that, that we think that we have a career path that is something that we're supposed to follow. Now, here I am talking about that and I've been the pastor of the same church for 30 years. So I hope at least that I've been hearing that voice say yes, keep doing that. But I do think it is easy for us. Isn't it, to make decisions more on the basis of what's expected of us by other people or by our own sense of ambition than by that still small voice.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yes. And it's funny because one of the biggest things that I think I had to work through is that I have such appreciation and respect deep respect for pastors who stay at the same church for 30 years. And I thought, no, that's the kind of person I want to be. I want to be this like presence in the community. And I want to have stayed here and made long lasting change in people's lives and married them and I want to marry their children. You know, I have so much respect for that. And for me to have to say, okay, some people are called to that and it's not me, and so I have to really honor the people who are called to that and know that that's actually not the life I've been called to live. And letting go of your own expectations of what you would appreciate, I think that was really hard to say, "Oh, I'm not going to be that person." I'm going to be 10 years, I was in the pulpit and I'm out.

George Mason:
Right.

Danielle Shroyer:
It's a very different thing.

George Mason:
Robert Capon talked about the will of God and how there's sort of the cold side of the street and the sunny side of the street about this notion of the will of God. The cold side of the street is kind of, sort of a German Gestapo. "You will do what I want you to do.", that kind of thing, and we're just sort of supposed to capitulate. But the sunny side of the street is more about the will of God for you. That is, what God wills for you, what God wants for you and it's more personal. It's not a kind of institutional thing as much as it's more a desire for the best you that you can offer to the world.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yes, that's exactly right. You have to do what it is your soul needs the most. And you have to show up in the way that your soul is asking you to do that. And it's so often not what it is you expected.

George Mason:
Right. So how do you distinguish that from what could be a kind of pop psychology sort of do what makes you feel happy, just follow your bliss sort of thing.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yeah. I think the easy part in that for me was that it hurts so much. I knew it was the right thing because I just would never have left that church if God hadn't just yelled me out of it. Maybe I would have, I don't know, but I think it required that sense of I'm going to close all these doors and I'm going to open all these doors and then you just better walk. And all of the goodness of seeing that it's the right way to go didn't take away the pain of it. I mean, I'm still sad about it. I've told God forever. I'm still always going to be a little sad that you made me do that. But I think it was the right thing. I see now what you were doing. I see now that I did need to go.

George Mason:
I was talking to a spiritual director at a Benedictine monastery on a sabbatical one time and we were sitting there having a conversation and I was explaining to him about some of the frustrations that I have in ministry where it's not so much the big challenges. It's the small things, the being picked at, the kind of grabbing you and you can never so much look at one person and have a conversation without somebody trying to grab you. And, the guy says to me, this priest, he says it was a monk, I guess, but he says, "So I hear what you're saying, but how is it you take up your cross to follow Christ in ministry. Shouldn't there be some things like that in your ministry that are difficult for you that make this calling something that you have to sacrifice for?" And I'm like, "Oh yeah, there it is."

Danielle Shroyer:
Right. Yes, there it is. And I think that's part of the wisdom too, is that doing your own soul work, whatever that is, is always going to have these aspects that just chafe, they chafe. And that doesn't mean it's wrong work. That just means it's human life, I guess.

George Mason:
Right. So here you are now in another season of life and ministry, and we've been touching on it in this conversation and we've been using the phrase spiritual direction. You are now a spiritual director, tell people what that is and what it isn't.

Danielle Shroyer:
Spiritual direction is the ancient art of companioning someone's soul. So it requires deep listening and a shared hope and trust that God is at work in that person's life. And that, if that person listens, they will know how to follow that guidance. It's not like counseling or therapy, exactly, because it's a little more holistic, I'd say than that. It's definitely rooted in the spiritual first and then everything else kind of comes after. But of course, people say, well, can I talk about this, about my parents? And well, yes, like it's all connected. So it all comes up in spiritual direction, but the intention is in spiritual direction, isn't to get people to feel fixed or to feel happy. Half of my job, honestly, is helping people sit with the hard stuff and just let it form them before running through it, receiving the lessons, they're waiting for them in that. And so it's patience and quiet. And honestly, I think it's a lot of learning how to be human and how to be particularly Christian and human in ways that society just doesn't teach us in any way or form anymore.

George Mason:
Do you, I mean, obviously you can't say who your clients are, the people who come to you, but would you say that a good percentage of them are ministers?

Danielle Shroyer:
I would say maybe a third of them are ministers, maybe a third to a half, depending on kind of how the month is going. But yeah, I do think that clergy people in particular and that's traditionally been what it is, is that it actually was for priests only at the beginning of all [inaudible 00:10:24] but opened up to be not only clergy, but really anyone. So I have 25 year olds who come to me for spiritual direction, of very different things going on in their lives than the 65 year olds who are retired and are facing second half of life questions. And so, yeah, it's interesting to, to see who shows up and where they are in their journey and what brings them to spiritual direction. It's a very mixed bag for sure.

George Mason:
So who would be the kind of person who would say, instead of going to a therapist, instead of going to a psychiatrist, instead of going to hire a business coach or a life coach or some such thing, or to ask for a mentor, I should really think about spiritual direction. Who's the kind of person that should call you or someone else who is trained in spiritual direction.

Danielle Shroyer:
I think it's that sense of knowing that this is a soul question, there's sometimes you want to change jobs and that's really just about a career path that you're deciding. And sometimes this is about your vocation and it's different than figuring out the best sort of, most successful path forward. So a life coach will help you figure that out, but a life coach may or may not be able to help you figure out why your soul is stirring in this way and how best to listen to it, to help guide you into that thing. So I think that there's an inkling when people reach out that they know that there's something deeply spiritual about what they're going through, whether it's grief or a question about a faith deconstruction or a life change of some sort, they know that this is a soul matter and not just a head matter.

George Mason:
Well, so when we talk about spiritual direction, it seems to have been rooted more in the Catholic tradition, the contemplative tradition, but it's kind of moved beyond that now, hasn't it? It's now finding its place in mainline Christianity and any of the contemplative movements.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yes, it's really exploded in the last, I would say 20 particularly, but even 50 years. Like I said, part of that is that it moved beyond just clergy and it has become something that lay people have had access to, which has been really new. But now I think because of the change in the landscape of religion in general, all of these spiritual, but not religious people, they don't have a pastor. They don't have you to come and see on a Monday and say, I'm having these questions. And so, so many of them don't have a faith tradition where they have somebody to go to and they go to a spiritual director and the Spiritual Directors International, which I'm a part of, it's a very diverse interfaith group. So you can be Buddhist, you can be Sikh, you can be anything in the end to be a spiritual director.

Danielle Shroyer:
And the other interesting thing is that I have a couple of people who come to me that aren't Christian. And of course they're okay with me being Christian, which is why it works for me to be their director. But my goal isn't to proselytize them in any way, it's to help them figure out what faithful spirituality looks like for them in their lives. And that's a very different role than being a pastor, for sure.

George Mason:
Well, it is. It seems a little bit akin to being a hospital chaplain, doesn't it?

Danielle Shroyer:
Yes. Yes. It's much more like ... I did that for a little bit and I think this is much closer to that for sure.

George Mason:
Very good. Well, I'd like to talk about in our second segment, we're going to take a break for just a moment, but I'd like to talk a little more about spiritual direction and some of the habits of the spiritual life, the practices that include prayer and a book that you wrote on that subject as well. So let's take a break and we'll come right back.

Danielle Shroyer:
Great.

George Mason:
Thank you for tuning into Good God. We're grateful that we get to be able to offer these conversations to you free of charge and especially now during this time of COVID-19, that is disturbing the peace for all of us. We know that there are a lot of people in organizations that need your funding. And so we're grateful to have the funding necessary to be able to present this to you, without asking you to support us at this time. Please give generously to your faith communities and also to those nonprofits that are serving to encourage us during these days.

George Mason:
And we're back with Danielle Shroyer, talking about spiritual direction. So spiritual direction, Danielle, is really about this interpersonal relationship with another person that is geared toward the practice of the life of the soul, you might say. And discernment about the nature of God's involvement in our life at any given moment. But there's more than just the occasional conversation that happens with a spiritual director, there's a larger question of how to nurture the spiritual life itself in between these conversations. What are some of the practices that you recommend? Some of the things that people can do on an ongoing basis to nurture their soul?

Danielle Shroyer:
Probably the ones I recommend the most are contemplative prayer and meditation, only because I do think that those are not things we happen into in today's life. Maybe more now that we're all quarantined at home, there's a little more quiet in our day than there was two months ago, but we aren't used to settling in. We aren't used to listening and we're not used to staying with our feelings. And so one of the ways that we can sort of cultivate a sense of knowing about how we are and where we are and how we're feeling is to just slow down. So meditation is really helpful.

Danielle Shroyer:
And then of course, contemplative prayer is the basic way that you get in touch with that sense of original blessing. That sense that God loves you and God is going to be ever present to you. And that within you, there is this place that is anchored to God, and you can get there any time. There's no way that that place ever gets severed from within you. You don't know that and you can't get there quite as quickly if you don't practice going there regularly. And so contemplative prayer-

George Mason:
So let's talk about the practices themselves. I think people have just heard you talk about meditation and contemplative prayer. In just a really brief way, can you just say if I wanted to meditate, if I wanted to pray contemplatively, what should I do?

Danielle Shroyer:
Yes. All right. We'll start with meditation. I was trained by Tibetan Buddhists, so that's the way I'll teach you, but it's certainly not the only way. Pick five or 10 minutes. Start with five, sit at the edge of a chair or on the ground with your knees below your waist, find a comfortable position, keep your back upright, but not uptight, as my meditation teacher says, and you keep your eyes open just about maybe five feet in front of you, really just a relaxed gaze. And all you're going to do is bring your attention to your breath. So you're not going to stop thinking. Everybody says, how do I stop thinking? Well, you, for sure don't ever stop thinking, you just don't want to zoom in on it. So let your thoughts be like background noise.

Danielle Shroyer:
And you just want to put your breath and the feeling of your breath going in and out of your body as the main song that you're listening to. That's the frequency that you're tuning into. And it's frustrating at first because you don't know how to do it until you practice it and so concentration is a muscle and it gets better. So that's a very quick intro into meditation.

George Mason:
And it really does, when you meditate, it really does calm you down and help you feel more alive, doesn't it? That is, when you're thinking about your breath or maybe attending to it more than thinking about it. There is this feeling of gratitude that I think, when I do meditate in that fashion, I just, instead of feeling like I have to justify my existence, it is just a sort of wave of gratitude that I just am living at all in this moment and life is a gift.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yes, yes. I can't remember which meditation teacher said it, but it's a peaceful abiding, which sounds like such a Christian thing. It's a peaceful abiding. You just, you are. And in the same way that you are, you're connecting to the is-ness of the world and this God who is who God is. The beingness of the world is what you come into contact with in meditation.

George Mason:
So now contemplative prayer.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yeah. So the contemplative prayer for me is different because in meditation, you're not focusing on anything, but the breath really. It's about sort of moving into that universal beingness, whereas contemplative prayer, your focus is on God. And you're thinking about and abiding in your relationship with God. So you could take a word. Some people use Maranatha. John Main suggested that, because it's a word we don't hear on the street. So if you think of Maranatha as your mantra word, that one works pretty well. But you could also just say, I am beloved or peace or faithfulness, and you can hold a word with you and you close your eyes for this one, because I think you go inward, but you do the same thing. You sit, you find five or 10 minutes, you set a timer and you allow that word to be your home base.

George Mason:
And we should probably clarify.

Danielle Shroyer:
Use that word as this way to [inaudible 00:20:39]. Go ahead.

George Mason:
Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, we were cutting out a little bit, but yeah. So you mentioned Maranatha and somebody might say mara-what? Yeah. So Maranatha.

Danielle Shroyer:
Maranatha means, come, Lord Jesus in Aramaic. And yeah, John Main suggested that because it's not a word that has a lot of mental intellectual baggage. I can't pick a word like grace, because I just think of all the books I've read about grace. And I start writing a paper about grace, so Maranatha is nice because it doesn't have all that heat to it.

George Mason:
Yes. Very good. Well, another kind of prayer though, is the Lord's prayer, which is an ancient practice for us. Jesus taught his disciples to pray the Lord's prayer. And you've actually written a book using the Lord's prayer as a guide. And I think it's so much fun for me to think back upon the fact that that book came out of a pilgrimage that you and I took with about, oh 10 or so 12 other colleagues when we went to the Holy Land. What year was that, about 2012-

Danielle Shroyer:
I think it was 14. I think it was 14. Yeah.

George Mason:
Great. And so what motivated you on that trip, aside from all the conversations on the bus that you and I had, but which were fun too.

Danielle Shroyer:
So fun. That was such a great trip. Just a highlight of life. Yeah. The timing of that was so helpful because I had just stepped down from being the pastor of Journey. I knew I was under contract to write Original Blessing, actually. I had no intention of writing this book on prayer, but I knew that I just needed to cultivate quiet. And so on the pilgrimage, I made this promise to myself that I would not pray with words. And what I found instead was when we were sitting in the first chapel there in Capernaum, I felt the Lord's prayer bubbling up. And I haven't really in my life, had a practice of doing that, at least to that point I hadn't done that regularly in my own private life. And so I thought, well, I think I'll take that as an invitation.

Danielle Shroyer:
And so I took the Lord's prayer and I prayed it everywhere we went. When we stopped somewhere, every church that we stopped at, every time I had a time to sort of go off by myself and look at wherever we were and take a moment to pray the Lord's prayer I did. And it ended up being such a deeply transformative experience for me. And so when I came home, I sat down, I told myself, you can't write while you're there, you can't write, which was just so hard, no books and no writing. And so when I got back, I just wanted to make sure I got it all down before I forgot all these feelings that I had and all these experiences I had. And a few days into that process, I had this very clear sense that it was to be shared.

Danielle Shroyer:
I don't know if you remember Carl Travis telling us that he had had a friend suggest to him that we should take some of it for our preaching ministry, and then we should keep some of this experience for ourselves. Do you remember that?

George Mason:
I don't, no.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yeah. So I was like, I thought, Oh, this is what I'm keeping to myself, this experience of praying the Lord's prayer. And then that day in my office when I was typing it out, I thought, oh no, I'm not allowed to keep this for myself. So that's how the book came about is I realized that it was not meant for me to just hold, but for me to share.

George Mason:
Well, you know, that reminds me a little bit of Rick Steves, who of course is the travel guy, he is also a very committed Christian. And he really talks about how he tries to move people beyond being tourists when they go places and instead, somehow get involved with where they are and move to the idea of being pilgrims. This notion of pilgrimage, we mentioned that we went to the Holy Land, but we didn't just go on a tour of the Holy Land. It was a spiritual pilgrimage. What would you say that means, to be a pilgrim instead of a tourist?

Danielle Shroyer:
I do think that there's something about the word tourist that makes it seem like it's transactional. You're on the outside and you're, or it's a commodity, there's this commodification in it. There's capitalism involved a little bit, whereas pilgrim, you are being invited into a different space and you're actually saying yes to allowing that space to somehow transform you or inform you in ways that might change you. And having that sense of openness, I think is a very different way [inaudible 00:25:34] or when you are open to allowing the wisdom of that place to seep in.

George Mason:
And it is a place where Jesus walked. And so there is something about being there in the Holy Land. And even though some of the sites are places that we would say are sort of dubious in terms of Jesus did this here or there, they were going to be very close to wherever that was and there was a sense that we are seeing the same Sea of Galilee. We are seeing the same hills, the same squalls come up over the sea. We're seeing the same Jerusalem on that hill, at least if not the same Jerusalem, per se. So there were many, many things that we were able to experience and say, okay, so this wasn't just an idea that someone came up with, this was like lived experience of what it was like Jesus himself to be on pilgrimage in a way spiritually.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yes. And I think that's one of the gifts that I received most fully is this, this lived in sense of Jesus as a human. After all those years of reading and studying Hebrew and it's all up here in my head to walk through his hometown and think of him laughing and think of him making dinner and really mundane, everyday human things. It felt, so it felt like that got into my bones. It felt like the incarnation got into my bones during that pilgrimage in a way that it just wasn't there before. I don't know if it can be, if you don't go there.

George Mason:
A lot of people say that when you go to listen to someone preach from the gospels, if you have been to the Holy Land, you can tell whether the preacher has been, or hasn't been because there is a sense of just changes your experience of the text, doesn't it?

Danielle Shroyer:
It does. It does. I have not experienced Holy Week the same since I was at Gethsemane. I mean, I remember how cold that marble is. I remember the smell of the trees outside. Those will never leave. Those impressions are just not going to be going anywhere.

George Mason:
So we've talked about this idea of using the Lord's prayer as one of the means of grace for us in terms of nurturing the spiritual life. Someone has made this point about this time in which we are living, where we're washing our hands all the time. That people say, "Well, it should be 20 seconds and that's about how long it takes to sing happy birthday, so sing happy birthday. But it's also about the length of time it takes to say the Lord's prayer. So here I have been for weeks now, when I'm washing my hands, I find myself saying the Lord's prayer. And it's really a fascinating experience.

Danielle Shroyer:
How has that been for you? What's come up?

George Mason:
Well, it's one of those things are sort of like lectio divina in the sense that different words pop out to me at different times. So I can just sort of string together these phrases and then all of a sudden I get stuck on forgiveness. Well, don't we always get stuck on forgiveness, I suppose, or about our daily bread and the provision of it. I find myself changing the word, depending upon my denomination of the moment, whether I'm going to say trespasses, debts or sins. And just all those sorts of things are making me more mindful of my relationship to God as I do it.

Danielle Shroyer:
Yeah. I think that was one of the strangest, most mysterious things that happened is when I came back, I had taken no notes. I was just trying to get it all down before I forgot. And I realized when I did take notes, that that same thing had happened that I had all these times when I had prayed it and this phrase had popped out or this word had popped out, and somehow by the end of the two weeks, the whole prayer had been covered, like nothing got left out. And I just thought, well, I couldn't have planned that myself. If I had sat down and tried to make it happen, that just wouldn't have happened. But it's funny because when I came home, I thought, well, okay, so it's one thing to feel that when I'm on the Sea of Galilee, but can I pray it in my normal life? And I remember trying to take it to [inaudible 00:30:34] and it was a very different experience. But I do think you're right that these words or moments pop out to us, these phrases that sort of inform our day. I love that idea and I have to steal that, George, I'm going to start praying while washing my hands.

George Mason:
All right. Well, terrific. Well, I'm not washing my hands of you like Pontius Pilate, I'm just grateful that you are a gift to the church and to all people who are seeking to follow a spiritual path and being a great companion of the soul to us all. Thank you, Danielle, for joining me again on Good God and God bless you and your continued ministry.

Danielle Shroyer:
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 3:
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