CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Clark, K. D. (1999, May). Contemplative listening as communicative proceduring. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco.
© Kathleen D. Clark (1999).

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
The essence of my project is to have Sense-Making and contemplative spirituality interrogate each other usefully. I would like to explicate the “meta-theory”, “methodology”, and “method” of communicative proceduring within a Christian tradition of contemplative spiritual practice in some manner parallel to Sense-Making. I would like to see what happens, then, when looking back at Sense-Making from the practitioner perspective of a Christian spiritual director. I am at the very beginning of this project and would like to begin by examining contemplative listening, comparing it with Sense-Making “listening.” By Sense-Making listening I mean Sense-Making interviewing, thinking that is self-reflective and conscientizing aspects may be analogous in some ways to contemplative listening, but also reveal useful distinctions. Both have emancipatory potential.

Spiritual direction or companioning people who are seeking to “walk faithfully with God” has been a recognized ministry of the Christian church since Ignatius of Loyola made his observations of the “movements of the spirit” more than 450 years ago (several traditions of spiritual direction exist within Christian churches). Along with prayer and discernment, contemplative listening is one of the essential skills/arts of the spiritual director. Practitioners understand contemplative listening as helping directees move toward greater interior freedom with empowering consequences throughout their lives. While I am beginning with spiritual direction as practiced within the Christian tradition, I am aware there are other forms among other religious and philosophical traditions. Additionally, while I am looking at this practice within a certain community, I conjecture that some of its phenomena are not unique to that community, but are part of all human experience, and in particular, the communicative practices that permit cultivation of awareness of the deepest levels of our realities.

Elizabeth Liebert, one of my instructors at the seminary where I am in a certificate program to become a spiritual director, defines some of the basic terms in her book, Changing life patterns: Adult development in spiritual direction. I will use her extensively here, both because hers is the perspective with which I am most familiar and to maintain a continuity of voice. For the project itself I will, of course, be surveying a variety of authors and practitioners. “Christian spiritual direction is an interpersonal helping relationship, rooted in the church’s ministry of pastoral care. In this relationship, one Christian assists another to discover and live out in the context of the Christian community his or her deepest values and life goals inresponse to God’s initiative and the biblical mandate” (Liebert, 1992, p. 9). Liebert continues to define what is meant by‘direction’ and ‘spiritual’ in spiritual direction. “Direction, does not mean one person telling another what to do, even after careful seeing, listening, naming and celebrating (it refers simply to the seeker’s orientation). Thus ‘direction’ is the goal of this interpersonal relationship, not its means. Nor does ‘spiritual’ connote the ethereal or other-worldly. ‘Spiritual’ points to that intangible reality at the core of personality, its animating life principle. ‘Spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ are simply words that alert us to look for the deepest dimension of human experience. Spiritual direction is a process of uncovering and bringing to conscious awareness this deepest level of reality in which each person lives” (Liebert, 1992, p. 9).

In my dissertation project, studying the communicative proceduring of a women’s spirituality group, I derived a functional understanding of ‘spiritual’. In that small group, the women seemed to use ‘spiritual’ to mean some aspects of experience that were silenced or for which there was no place for expression in social structuring. From this, aided by the thinking of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Richard Carter, Sonia Johnson and others, I came to understand that social structuring silences and privileges not only certain voices and practices, but also experiences. I conjectured that the small group was a form of social structuring that permitted more of suppressed experiencing to be expressed in a social form. In a similar way, my preliminary conjecture about spiritual direction is that it is also a form of social structuring that permits for more of reality or experiencing to be expressed in a social interaction. Indeed, it goes farther and encourages a directee him or herself to become aware of that part of their reality that is often suppressed or silenced. In the passage below the term God is used. Liebert is writing for a Christian community where that is a widely accepted referent. I prefer to use the phrase “the mystery we call God.” I wish to add a disclaimer about this intellectual project. I am NOT endeavoring to equate deepest reality of all humans with a personified God. This is in keeping with spiritual directions, mandate to help the SEEKER to articulate and name/express his or her deepest reality in ways accurate/meaningful for him/her. That spiritual direction of the kind described here can be done outside a Christian context IS the controversial position I will be taking.

Liebert mentions several modes of communicative practice used during a spiritual direction session (Liebert, 1992, p. 7-8).
NOTICING: “…encourages seeker and director alike to become sensitized to signs of God’s activity in the frequently mundane flow of life (develops the eyes to see God’s activity).”
HEARING: “Spiritual direction develops an active listening which encourages, receives, honors and ultimately sets free the language of the soul, the hunger of the heart, the desires of the spirit, the integrity of the whole person.”
RESPONDING: “…to the seeker, to God’s work with the seeker, and to the imperative for action which God’s presence invariably sets in motion. God’s initiative always elicits a response, but not in any sense a predetermined one. Such seeing and hearing provoke questions: What ought I to do? Where ought I to be? Who am I to be?”
NAMING: “…giving voice to the experience of God in one’s own life and in that of others. Without language to express what is happening, this spiritual reality so easily remains submerged, half-grasped, largely private, even incommunicable. Naming brings to life, gives substance, creates the possibility of a shared reality and response.”
CELEBRATING: “…after awe, humility and speechlessness, comes worship. Liturgy, literally ‘the work of the people’ becomes the first work of spiritual direction as we respond to God’s presence with prayer or simple ritual.”
ACTING: (I am not going to quote Liebert here because her language is so religious) To complete the arc from discernment through to the act which complete it is how I might describe this element or mode of the process.

One last distinction that would be useful is to distinguish spiritual direction from pastoral counseling or secular therapy. Liebert says the goal of most helping relationships consists in removing some impediment or solving some problem. “Once the impediment has been removed or the problem solved, the helping relationship terminates. In spiritual direction, however, the goal is the continually deeper realization of what it means to be a human being, as one who lives in a particular place and time, within a particular web of human generally continues over time, though the intensity may change as circumstances evolve.” (Liebert, 1992, p. 13). Some of the similarities I see with Sense-Making is the mandate to privilege the Sense-Making of the individual, procedural constraints upon the interviewer/director to focus attention on the seeker, and the focus on a Sense-Making situation (mentioned elsewhere than above, is that spiritual discernment is always and only for the next step the seeker is to take). Differences may be between the notions of Sense-Making’s condition of gappiness and the assumption of God in all things as well as the aforementioned intention of the interaction/relationship. I’m sure others will emerge.

To begin this project, I would like to survey the literature whose audience is those training to be spiritual directors. I will focus on those aspects that are distinctly communicative, paying particular attention to those that have to do with listening and discernment of the next step (contemplative aspect of decision-making) since there is an established discourse on these kinds of communicative behavior in our field. The “how to do” spiritual direction literature provides a wealth of illustrative examples of the practices, often with clearly articulated comments about assumptions, how and when to use certain practices, how to deal with various situations, etc. I will use the meta-theoretic, methodological and methods concerns of Sense-Making to concoct an analogous articulation of these elements in the spiritual direction literature. After concocting this analogous framework, I will use this to permit a useful contest between it and Sense-Making. This would conclude this part of the process. In the future I may conduct Sense-Making interviews with directors to get a sense of the communicative proceduring they are using and with seekers to get a more direct understanding of the step in spiritual direction.

THE REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
As someone familiar with using Sense-Making as a tool for interviewing others and as a reflective tool for myself as well as someone beginning to learn and practice contemplative listening as a spiritual director, I find the similarities and differences intriguing and puzzling. The reason I took this road is in large part my personal desire to reconcile two paradigms in which I have been operating for many years. These are my academic endeavors in which I have used Sense-Making to examine a women’s spirituality group and my religious identity in which I have been a spiritual practitioner. In each case, I have spent much of the time bracketing parts of my understanding/knowledge/skills in order to proceed. This interrogation is an attempt to integrate and reconcile, or deal with this dichotomy head on. I think this interrogation will be intellectually interesting and useful for others as well.

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
What has helped is the openness of my non-Christian, even non-“spiritual” Sense-Making colleagues to my struggles, passion and committments. Their appreciation, respect, support, and encouragement for this endeavor as I have mulled this over in their presence has been crucially important to my even attempting this. Also, the training and literature of spiritual direction lend themselves to this kind of interrogation.

WHAT HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY HELPFUL:
What has helped is the openness of my non-Christian, even non-“spiritual” Sense-Making colleagues to my struggles, passion and committments. Their appreciation, respect, support, and encouragement for this endeavor as I have mulled this over in their presence has been crucially important to my even attempting this. Also, the training and literature of spiritual direction lend themselves to this kind of interrogation.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH:
What has hindered me is my own involvement. It has taken much time and experience to feel that I grasp Sense-Making well enough to engage it to the extent I want to for this project. Also, it has taken much time to come to the point where I can be a “participant observer” of my own religious understanding and spiritual experience. I also feel hindered by choosing a “charged” topic. I have already had some heated discussions about the role and purpose of spiritual direction and other related topics that I did not expect. I think this is a practice that has great potential and think others might agree if they could hear me as I intend!!! But I may be suffering a misapprehension about the utility and righteousness of my project.

I have also struggled with getting outside myself enough to lay down intellectually solid ground work for this exploration in a way that gets at the phenomena of human experience and does not get stuck in semantic or paradigmatic differences. For the purposes of beginning this exploration, I will be focusing on people for whom “God” has come to refer to something experienced rather than an idea or belief in which one holds a conviction. My current thinking is that one does NOT need formal religious understanding or training in order to experience all the phenomena of human existence. However, since there is an extensive and well-articulated discourse and practitioner knowledge base in Christian religious tradition that focuses on certain phenomena, this is a productive place to begin.

WHAT WOULD HELP NOW:
What would help now is to get feedback about what in this project makes sense to a variety of perspectives. What language, presentation, conceptualization and focus would work for a heterogeneous audience. I think that any one interested in Sense-Making would be a potential audience, as would any academically ensconced seeker.

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
I would like to put the practice of contemplative listening into contest with the meta-theory of Sense-Making allowing them to interrogate each other helpfully. I propose to interrogate the literature by practitioners of spiritual direction using the lens of communicative proceduring to focus on contemplative listening as practice consciously informed by theory. I will compare and contrast the assumptions, practices and experiences of spiritual directors as practitioners with Sense-Making meta-theory, methodology and methods. Spiritual direction or companioning people who are seeking to “walk faithfully with God” has been a recognized ministry of the Christian church since Ignatius of Loyola made his observations of the “movements of the spirit” more than 450 years ago. Paraphrasing Barry and Connolly (1986) spiritual direction is “help given by one [person] to another which enables that person to pay attention to God’s personal communication to him or her, to respond to this personally communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God, and to live out the consequences of this relationship.” Along with prayer and discernment, contemplative listening is one of the essential skills/arts of the spiritual director. Practitioners understand contemplative listening as helping directees move toward greater interior freedom with empowering consequences throughout their lives.

REFERENCES:
(For references to works by Dervin and colleagues, see Dervin’s writings: Chronological listing.)

Barry, W. A. & Connolly, W. J. (1986). The practice of spiritual direction. San Francisco, CA: Harper.

Farnham, S. G., Gill, J. P., McLean, R. T. & Ward, S. M. (1991). Listening hearts: Discerning call in community (Revised edition). Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing.

Gidens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Guenther, M. (1992). Holy listening: The art of spiritual direction. Cambridge/Boston, MA: Cowley Publications.

Liebert, E. (1992). Changing life patterns: Adult development in spiritual direction. New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Lonsdale, D. (1992). Listening to the music of the spirit: The art of discernment. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistclark.html