Chapter 8: The Four Windows: The Johari Window as a Model of Spiritual Direction

What happens in the room where director and directee meet, and the fruit it bears for both

Rev. Fr. Michael Doyle · 16 Oct 2026

“Search me, O God, and know my heart!” (Psalm 139:23)

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” (Proverbs 27:6)

Summary

The first seven chapters have set out the call to holiness (Chapters One and Two), what holiness is and how it comes about (Chapter Three), the fixed centre of a life (Chapter Four), the moment of turning (Chapter Five), the map of the road (Chapter Six) and the tipping point at which the road is first entered (Chapter Seven). Each of them has pointed, sooner or later, to a person: the director, the guide, the midwife, the one who knows the road and stays. This chapter asks what actually happens in the room where that person and the directee meet, not once but regularly and over years, in a relationship to which both have committed themselves to each other and, most importantly, to God, who is the architect and inspiration of the whole encounter.

To answer, the chapter borrows from psychology, the discipline in which I was trained, a graphic model of how two people come to know and trust one another: the Johari Window, devised in 1955 by the American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham. The Window has four panes: the Open pane (what both people know), the Blind pane (what the other sees and I do not), the Hidden pane (what I know and have not told) and the Unknown pane (what neither of us knows). Read through the spiritual tradition they become four moments in the dance of direction: Sacred Ground, the Mirror, the Veil and the Depths. The chapter argues that the model, once corrected by theology, above all by the recognition that direction is an encounter of three in which God is the Third, describes accurately how spiritual direction works and why it bears fruit for the director as well as for the directee. It reads the road to Emmaus as the four panes on a single journey, weighs the strengths and dangers of the model, and draws out its theoretical and practical consequences for seminaries, priests and directors, parishes and every believer.

Introduction: From the Map to the Room

The argument so far has moved steadily from the Church to the soul and from the soul to the road. Chapter One asked what the Church must do if holiness is to be the organising principle of her life, and answered that she needs priests, and lay people and religious with them, trained in the cure of souls. Chapter Two showed that the call is addressed to every baptised person. Chapter Three described what holiness is: Christ formed in us, a birth with its conception, its labour and its delivery. Chapter Four named the fixed song around which a life is built, Chapter Five the moment at which a person first hears that a better song is possible, Chapter Six the four signposts of the road, and Chapter Seven the tipping point at which the road is first entered.

Every one of those chapters has, in the end, pointed to a person. The midwife of Chapter Three attends the labour and stays. The lay listener of Chapter Five hears a mother’s tears. The guide of Chapter Six is the one without whom the traveller becomes the disciple of a fool, and the Few of Chapter Seven are those whose small gestures turn a life. We have said what such a person must be, and why the Church needs him. We have not yet asked what he does when he sits down with another human being. What happens in the room?

It is a question worth asking carefully, because the answer is not obvious. A confession, as Chapter One observed, is a single encounter, complete in itself. Spiritual direction is something else: a commitment on both sides to a relationship that continues over time, that has a clear spiritual goal and purpose, namely that the directee grows in holiness, and that is meant to bear fruit. Two people agree to meet, to be honest with one another, and to attend together to what God is doing. They have made a promise to each other and, perhaps most importantly, to God, who is the architect and inspiration of the whole encounter, and without whom the meetings would be no more than agreeable conversations.

To describe that relationship I turn, once again, to psychology. I do so with the same care as in Chapter One. Psychology has real limits, and nowhere are they more evident than in the areas of holiness and spirituality: it cannot tell us what a saint is, and the Church has been right to warn against letting it displace the cure of souls.[1] But in the last century it has also produced careful descriptions of how human beings communicate, and of how an exchange between two persons can grow through healthy risk and honest feedback, in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect. One such description, the Johari Window, is simple enough to be drawn on a single page and true enough to experience that most people who meet it recognise themselves in it at once. In the jargon of psychology it is “user friendly”. I want to argue in this chapter that it is also, with the corrections that theology requires, an excellent picture of what happens in spiritual direction.

The timing is not accidental. Chapters One and Seven described the young adults now coming to the font at the Easter Vigil in growing numbers, and the lifelong faithful who have waited fifty years to be asked how they pray.[2] Both groups need a director, and are beginning to ask for one. A model of the encounter that can be taught to a seminarian in an afternoon, and yet is deep enough to occupy a director for a lifetime, is exactly what the Church’s programmes of formation have lacked.

The chapter proceeds as follows. It first introduces the Window and its makers. It then walks through the four panes in turn, each read through the spiritual tradition: Sacred Ground, the Mirror, the Veil and the Depths. It considers how the panes move, and why the director, too, is changed by the encounter; reads the road to Emmaus as the four panes on a single journey; weighs the strengths and the dangers of the model; and closes with its theoretical and practical consequences.

The Window and Its Makers

The Johari Window was devised in 1955 by two American psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington (“Harry”) Ingham, for a human-relations training laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. The name is simply their two first names run together: Joe and Harry.[3] They were interested in what happens when people who wish to know and trust one another begin to share themselves, and they found that the process could be drawn. The model was designed for the training of groups, and it has since been applied to friendships, marriages, teams and therapeutic relationships alike. That is its great merit. It describes something that happens between people, whatever the setting.

Imagine a window of four panes, separated and supported by wooden frames. The panes are fixed by two questions. Is this known to me? Is this known to the other person? Two possible answers to each give four possibilities, and these are the four panes:

• The Open pane holds what is known to both. It is what I show, and what the other has seen.
• The Blind pane holds what is known to the other but not to me: my habits, the effect I have on people, qualities of which I am unaware.
• The Hidden pane holds what is known to me but not shown to the other. It is what I conceal, for good reasons or bad.
• The Unknown pane holds what is known to neither: depths and possibilities not yet discovered.

Two movements change the shape of the window. When I disclose something of myself, a piece of the Hidden pane passes into the Open. When another person tells me what he sees in me, a piece of the Blind pane does the same. A third movement, discovery, is rarer and less under our control: something in the Unknown pane comes to light for both people at once. And here is the point on which the whole model turns. The frames are movable. In a new relationship the Open pane is small and the others are large. As trust grows, disclosure and feedback enlarge the Open pane at the expense of the other three, and the relationship becomes easier, freer and more fruitful.

Luft drew from this a number of principles, and four of them are of particular interest to anyone who directs souls.[4] A change in any one pane changes all the others. It takes energy to hide, to deny, or to be blind to what is happening between two people, and that energy is released when the hiding stops. Threat reduces awareness, whereas mutual trust increases it. And forced awareness, in which a person is exposed to what he is not ready to see, is undesirable and usually ineffective. Anyone who has directed souls for a few years will recognise each of these from experience.

Why should a priest borrow from this? Partly because it is user friendly: it makes sense, and it reflects human experience as it is lived. Partly because its language and method, devised for the encounter between two people who wish to grow in trust, adapt easily to the encounter between a director and a directee. And partly because it belongs to a psychological tradition that has already given us a word we have used. Chapter Four spoke of congruence, the agreement between what a man believes at the deepest level and how he lives. The word has a second home in the work of Carl Rogers, who named congruence, together with empathy and unconditional positive regard, among the conditions in which a person is most likely to change.[5] A tradition does not need to be right about everything to be useful about something.

A word of caution, which I shall develop in the Discussion below. The Window is a teaching model, not a scientific instrument, and it has no place for God. It is a diagram of two persons, whereas spiritual direction is an encounter of three. Taken as it stands, it would describe a friendship or a therapy and not the cure of souls. What follows is therefore an adaptation, and the adaptation is where the theology lies.

The First Window: The Open Quadrant, or Sacred Ground

The first pane is the one that both people can see. It holds what the directee feels free enough to tell his director about himself, and about the spiritual journey he has made so far and has begun to take more seriously. In the first meetings it is small. The directee has not yet decided whether this is a safe person, and the director has not yet earned the right to be told. Over time, as trust in the director grows, the directee begins to reveal more through self-disclosure, and the pane widens. The purpose of this first window is to establish a baseline of trust between the two. Without that self-revelation, which by its very nature involves risk, the whole enterprise of spiritual direction is defeated and no progress can be made.

I call it Sacred Ground, and the name is meant literally. When Moses turned aside to look at the burning bush, he was told to take off his sandals, for the place on which he stood was holy ground.[6] Pope Francis took up the image when he described the art of accompaniment, which teaches us to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other. What a directee says in the first pane is holy in a double sense. It is holy because it is a person’s own life, which God has made and in which God is already at work. And it is holy because it is offered at some cost. The director’s first task is therefore not to teach, to diagnose or to correct, but to receive. He listens as one who has taken off his shoes.

This is the pane to which the scene in Chapter Five belongs: a young woman who stopped singing to ask why her mother was crying. It is what Chapter Seven asked of every priest who meets a convert: ask how it began, and listen for the accumulation. And it is where direction begins in the seminary, in the page or two in which a man tells the story of his own turning to a director who has promised to hear it.

Why should anyone take the risk of disclosure? Because God has already taken it. The Church teaches that in revelation the invisible God, out of the abundance of his love, speaks to men as friends.[7] In the Gospel Jesus calls his disciples friends precisely because he has made known to them everything he has heard from his Father. The Open pane between God and humanity was widened by God first, as the Hound of Heaven of Chapter Five had already shown: grace begins the pursuit. Our disclosures in direction are a small answer to a very large self-disclosure. And what the directee discovers, usually with some surprise, is that being known and received is less dangerous than he had feared.

Three conditions govern the growth of this pane, and the tradition and the psychology agree on all of them. The first is confidentiality. Direction is bound by a grave and strict discretion, as Chapter One said, and the director must keep the internal forum rigorously apart from any external judgement, above all in a house of formation, where the opinion of a man’s spiritual director may never be sought in decisions about his advancement.[8] The second is freedom. Nobody can be made to disclose, and forced exposure is not only wrong but, as Luft observed, ineffective. The third is patience. Trust cannot be hurried any more than the gestation of Chapter Three. A director who presses for the deep matters in the first month teaches the directee only that this is not a safe room.

Two cautions belong at the edges of this pane. Over-disclosure is a real danger. Some people pour out their histories in a first meeting, and what feels like trust is sometimes a way of staying on the surface and avoiding the harder work of the later panes. And disclosure is not an end in itself. Sidney Jourard, who made self-disclosure the centre of his psychology, held that the capacity to be known is a mark of health.[9] The spiritual tradition agrees, and adds that it is also a mark of faith. The purpose of speaking is not catharsis, nor the satisfaction of being understood, valuable as that is. It is to let the director see the person as he is, so that he may help him to see the person whom God has made.

The Second Window: The Blind Quadrant, or the Quadrant of the Mirror

The second pane is where the spiritual director comes into active play. It holds what the directee does not see about himself but what the experienced director sees, on the strength of his own increasing progress along the road to holiness: the progress that has been made, and what still needs to happen if the directee is to go further. It is the Quadrant of the Mirror. Just as the directee takes a risk in revealing more of his life and of his spiritual life, so the director takes a healthy risk in speaking of what he has become aware of. He holds up a mirror, and shows what he, out of his experience and spiritual wisdom, has observed in listening to the directee over time.

The mirror is a biblical image. James says that the man who hears the word and does not act on it is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror, goes away, and at once forgets what he was like.[10] The first mirror, then, is the Word of God itself, as the second signpost of Chapter Six, lectio divina, has already suggested. The director’s mirror is a second and subordinate one, held beside the first, and its purpose is to help the directee look at the Word without turning away.

The great scene of the Mirror in Scripture is Nathan’s visit to David.[11] David has taken another man’s wife and arranged the man’s death, and has gone about his business with every appearance of an easy conscience. In the language of the Window, he is quite blind. Nathan does not accuse him. He tells a story about a rich man who took a poor man’s only lamb, and David, furious, pronounces sentence on the rich man. Then comes the sentence that has echoed ever since: you are the man. David’s reply is one of the shortest and most important in the Bible: I have sinned against the Lord. Look at what Nathan did. He was sent by God, so he did not speak from his own opinion. He took a real risk, since David was a king and a killer. He did not begin with a verdict but with a story that let David see for himself. And the mirror produced, in the end, not despair but repentance.

The Blind pane contains things of three kinds, and a good director learns to tell them apart. There are faults the directee does not see: the pride that dresses itself as zeal, the resentment he takes for righteousness, the complacency of Laodicea, to which the Lord says that you do not know that you are wretched.[12] There are patterns the directee cannot see because he lives inside them. Chapter One observed that in direction sin appears as a pattern and not as an act, and it is the director, who has listened across months or years, who notices that the same fear lies behind four unrelated stories. And there are goods the directee cannot see. This third kind is the most neglected. Humility often prevents a person from seeing his own growth, and the saints’ own accounts show how much of their progress was invisible to them. The mirror should show what is good more often than the directee expects, and a director who holds it up only for faults has mistaken it for an instrument of accusation.

Chapter Four’s idea of congruence returns here. The director is often the first to see the gap between a man’s cantus firmus and his conduct, between what he says he believes at the deepest level and how he lives. Chapter Six’s third signpost, conversatio morum, depends on this pane. The self-directed man, we saw, fights the faults he finds comfortable to fight and spares the ones he does not wish to see. The mirror shows him which ones they are.

The risk lies on the director’s side, and it is a real one. He may be wrong. The directee may be hurt, or may leave. And the director, however experienced, can hold the mirror at the wrong angle. So the tradition surrounds the act with conditions. It is done in charity: speaking the truth in love, and in a spirit of gentleness, as Paul says, because the wounds of a friend are faithful only when they are the wounds of a friend.[13] It is done at the right moment, after the Open pane has grown enough to bear it. It is more often done by a question than by a pronouncement, and the Lord himself gave the model: three times he asked Peter whether he loved him, and let Peter find in his own answers what he needed to see. And it is offered as something to be tested and not as a verdict to be accepted.

That last condition requires a word about an expression often heard. It is sometimes said that in the Blind pane the spiritual director becomes the voice of God, illuminating the inner corners of the directee’s heart. There is truth in this, if it is rightly understood. God ordinarily works through mediation, as Chapter Six argued from Philip and the Ethiopian official, and he can and does speak through the words of a director who has listened in prayer. But the director is an instrument of that voice and not its owner. The final judge of what is said is not the director but the directee’s own conscience, which the Council called the most secret core and sanctuary of a person, where he is alone with God.[14] The director’s insight, however well founded, is a hypothesis to be taken to prayer, to Scripture and to conscience, and the directee must always be free to say that it does not ring true. John of the Cross’s warnings about incompetent directors, and Teresa’s insistence that a director needs learning as well as experience, are the safeguards that keep the Mirror from becoming a throne.[15]

Finally, the director has a Blind pane of his own, and no one sees his own. Before the log is removed from his own eye he is poorly placed to deal with the speck in another’s. The conclusion of Chapter One returns here with force: the director must himself be directed, and supervised, so that there is someone to hold the mirror for him. A director who is accountable to no one has, in effect, made himself the disciple of a fool.

The Third Window: The Hidden Quadrant, or the Quadrant of the Veil

The first two panes are those in which most direction takes place. The other two are where it is most deeply tested. The third pane holds what the directee knows about himself and has not told. It is the Quadrant of the Veil, and it is as old as the Fall. The first thing the man does after he has eaten the fruit is to hear the voice of God in the garden and to hide, and the reason he gives is that he was afraid because he was naked.[16] We hide from God, from one another and from ourselves for the same reasons: shame, fear of rejection, fear of what the other will think, and a stubborn instinct for self-protection.

The tradition’s answer is openness, and it is remarkably consistent. The psalmist who kept silent about his sin found that his bones wasted away, and that when he acknowledged it and ceased to hide it, he was forgiven.[17] The Book of Proverbs says that whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, and John says that if we walk in the light we have fellowship with one another. The desert fathers made the manifestation of thoughts the heart of spiritual direction: the young monk brought his temptations, spoken aloud, to an elder, and Cassian reports the elder’s conviction that a thought brought into the open loses its power.[18] Benedict’s Rule asks the monk to disclose evil thoughts to his spiritual father, and makes the refusal to conceal wrongs committed in secret the fifth step of humility. Ignatius gave the same teaching a sharp edge. The enemy, he says, behaves like a false lover who wants to remain secret and not be revealed, and he is much grieved when the person lays his deceits open to a good confessor or other spiritual person.[19] Secrecy is the ally of temptation, and light weakens it. Luft had arrived by another road at the same conclusion: it takes energy to hide.

But not everything in the Hidden pane is shame. It holds treasure as well. Our Lord asks that alms be given and prayer be made in secret, because the Father who sees in secret will reward it.[20] The hidden prayer, the hidden act of charity and the hidden life of Jan Tyranowski in Chapter Two all belong in this pane, and no director has a right to them. A director also has no right to what belongs to other people, whose confidences are not his directee’s to disclose. Part of the art of direction is the discernment between what is hidden out of shame and ought to be brought into the light, and what is hidden out of reverence and ought to be left in the dark. The tradition’s rule of thumb is that what is evil in us is to be disclosed and what is good in us is to be guarded.

What can the director do about this pane? Not a great deal directly, since by definition it opens only when the directee decides to open it. But he can create the conditions in which that decision becomes possible, and his first reaction to a hard disclosure is, in my experience, the single most important moment in the whole relationship. He must not be shocked. He must not moralise, or hurry to reassure, or change the subject. He thanks the person, receives what has been said with the calm of one who has heard worse and who knows the mercy of God, and lets the silence do some of the work. The Jansenist temperature of Chapter One is the great enemy of this pane. A person who has once been met with harshness may keep it closed for decades. Luft’s principle that threat reduces awareness while trust increases it has, here, a moral edge.

Two distinctions keep the director from error. The first is between honest disclosure and scrupulosity. The scrupulous person appears to be disclosing everything, but he does so endlessly, and without relief, because what drives him is the free-floating guilt that Chapter One distinguished from true guilt. For him the invitation is not to disclose more but to trust the judgement of his director and, where it is needed, to seek skilled help. The second is between the Hidden pane and the sacrament. This is the place where direction and the Sacrament of Penance converge. Chapter One observed that people tell the truth in confession, and that the priest who also directs holds both ends of the thread: in the sacrament he applies the remedy, and in direction he treats the causes. Whatever in the Hidden pane is sin belongs in the sacrament, which gives the grace. For lay and religious directors, who cannot absolve, a principal task in this pane is to help the person bring what is hidden to a confessor and to accompany him afterwards. And the forums must remain distinct. Nobody should feel that access to absolution depends on submitting to direction, and a director who hears something grave outside confession must not treat it as if it had been heard in confession, and must say so.[21]

The Hidden pane has a darker meaning at the level of institutions, and it would be dishonest to pass over it. The abuse crisis that Chapter One described was in large part a story of things kept in the Hidden pane by those who had the power to keep them there. The Gospel is plain about the logic: everyone who does evil hates the light, and what becomes visible is light.[22] The safeguards that Chapter One asked for, supervision for every director and clear protocols for how direction is conducted, are in effect ways of shrinking the director’s own Hidden pane in the dangerous sense. A man who has nothing he would be unwilling to show his supervisor is a man whom the directee can safely trust.

The fruit of this pane is relief. Augustine saw that confession tells God nothing he does not already know, since the abyss of the human conscience lies bare before him, and that its purpose is to stir up love in the one who confesses.[23] The directee who brings the hidden thing into the open discovers what the psalmist found: that the burden lifts. What had seemed unspeakable becomes something that can be prayed about, worked on and forgiven. Directors who have worked for years often say that the most fruitful moment in a whole direction was a single disclosure that took a long time to come.

The Fourth Window: The Unknown Quadrant, or the Quadrant of the Depths

The fourth pane holds what is known to neither the director nor the directee. For the psychologist it is the territory of the unconscious: buried memories, motives never examined, abilities not yet discovered. Freud and Jung mapped parts of it in different ways, and the Church has said that psychological insight can serve priestly formation well, within limits that Chapter One described.[24] The spiritual tradition says something larger. It holds that this pane is not empty, and that it is full of a person’s story with God, which God alone sees.

Scripture returns to this again and again. The psalmist asks to be searched and known by the God who already knows him, and prays to be cleared of hidden faults, since who can discern his own errors?[25] Jeremiah says that the heart is deceitful above all things, and that it is the Lord who searches it. Paul, who had a clear conscience, adds that this does not acquit him, because it is the Lord who judges him. The letter to the Hebrews says that nothing in creation is hidden from the sight of God, and that all things are naked and laid bare before his eyes. The Catechism puts the same truth in a sentence: the heart is our hidden centre, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others, and only the Spirit of God can fathom it and know it fully.[26]

The Unknown pane has two faces, and both matter. The first is the shadow: motives we have not examined, wounds we have not looked at, a self deeper than the self we know. Teresa laments that we hardly understand what a soul is, and are strangers to ourselves.[27] John of the Cross names self-knowledge as the first and chief benefit of the dark night, which strips away what had been concealing us from ourselves.[28] The second face is the gift: what God has in mind for this person, the vocation not yet heard, the capacity not yet used, the name not yet received. God knew Jeremiah before he formed him in the womb. We were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, what God has prepared. And to the one who conquers, the Lord promises a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.[29]

This is the pane in which Chapter Three’s gestation takes place. A child grows in secret. Neither the mother nor anyone else sees it, and for a long time nothing seems to happen. Then comes the quickening, the first stirring that tells her that the child is alive. The soul, too, is being formed in the Depths long before anyone, including the soul itself, can say what is taking shape.

How does this pane open? Not by the director’s technique but by grace. It opens in prayer, in the Word that reads us as we read it, as Bernard knew, in the sacraments, in trial, and in shared experience over time. The cannonball at Pamplona opened a pane in Ignatius that he had not known was there, and what he discovered when he lay on his back at Loyola was something about himself that he learned only by noticing the aftertaste of two sets of daydreams. The director’s contribution is attention, prayer and patience, and one tool above all. The discernment of spirits is the art of reading the evidence that the Unknown pane sends up to the surface: consolation and desolation, the movements that leave a person at peace and those that leave him dry. A director who knows how to read it is not looking into the Depths. He is watching what rises from them.

The pane also teaches the director his place. A director who claims to see into it has confused himself with God. When the risen Lord asked Peter for the third time whether he loved him, Peter did not claim to know his own heart. He said: Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.[30] Even the love of Peter lay partly in his own Unknown pane, and he appealed to the One who sees it. The director’s proper stance before the Depths is reverence. The person in front of him is a creature made capax Dei, as Chapter One argued, and that capacity is never exhausted. He is also a mystery that will not be mastered, and a good director will not try. Where the matter touches on clinical conditions, he refers, as Chapter One required; where it touches on the soul’s story with God, he prays.

This fourth pane is the deepest reason why the Window, as the psychologists drew it, needs correction. If the Depths are known to God alone, then in the Unknown pane neither of the two persons in the room is the one who sees. There is a Third.

The Dance: How the Panes Move, and for Whom the Fruit Is Borne

The four panes are not four rooms to be visited once and in order. They are the stages of a dance, the dance of spiritual growth, in which the director takes the lead and the directee follows, and in which, as in any dance, the lead is a form of service. The director leads first by making the floor safe. Then he leads by listening, by offering a mirror when it can be borne, by receiving what is brought out of hiding, and by standing with the directee at the edge of what neither of them can see. The movement is more of a spiral than a line. A person who has disclosed a great deal will, a year later, find a new Hidden pane behind the old one, and a director who has held up many mirrors will find that the directee has grown a new Blind pane at the very place he was most proud of his progress.

The frames move, as Luft said. At the first meeting the Open pane is small and the other three are large. After months of honest meeting, disclosure carries pieces of the Hidden pane into the Open, and feedback does the same for the Blind. After years the Open pane is very large indeed, and the relationship has the ease and freedom of old friends. But it never fills the whole window, and it ought not to. The Unknown pane stays, and rightly, because the person is a mystery before God. The aim of direction is not total transparency to the director. It is a growing transparency to God.

Seen in that light, the four panes have a destination. Before the Fall, the man and the woman were naked and not ashamed, which is to say that nothing in them was hidden from one another or from God.[31] Paul promises that at the end of the road we shall know fully, even as we have been fully known. In heaven the four panes become one: nothing hidden, nothing blind, nothing unknown, because all is seen in the light of God. Spiritual direction is, in this sense, a rehearsal. Every disclosure and every mirror, every moment at which the Depths yield something to grace, is a small advance towards the state of the saints, whose life is open to God without remainder.

The four panes also fit the map of Chapter Six more closely than might be expected, and the table sets out the correspondence.

Pane	Name	What moves it	Signpost (Chapter Six)	Typical danger
Open	Sacred Ground	Trust and disclosure	Habitare secum: entering the heart and telling what is there	Display without depth, or a flood of narrative
Blind	The Mirror	Feedback in charity	Lectio divina: the Word as first mirror, the director as the second	Harshness, flattery, or a director who overreaches
Hidden	The Veil	Courage and mercy	Conversatio morum: what I hide I cannot turn from	Shame and secrecy, or scrupulosity mistaken for honesty
Unknown	The Depths	Grace, prayer and time	Quaerere Deum: the search that never exhausts its object	Prying, psychologising, or claiming to see what God alone sees

The pairing is not exact, and no person passes through the panes in tidy fashion. But it shows that the four signposts of the road and the four panes of the Window describe the same journey from two sides: the signposts say where the traveller is going, and the panes say what must happen between the traveller and his guide if he is to get there.

The Fruit for the Director

The whole argument of this book has been that the cure of souls is the substance of priestly life. It would be strange if it bore fruit only for the person on the other side of the table. The Window shows why it does not.

The director’s own panes are changed. The person across the table is a mirror for him too. What irritates him in a directee often discloses something in his own Blind pane, and what he finds hard to hear is frequently something he has not yet heard in his own direction. His Hidden pane is touched by the knowledge that he is asking of another what he must himself be willing to give. He learns, as Chapter Three said of the soul in labour, from standing in the room.

He receives humility and awe. A director who has sat on Sacred Ground and watched Christ being formed in another is not likely to think much of his own contribution. He sees at close quarters what the Holy Spirit does, and he sees it more often than he is able to see it in himself.

He grows in holiness. The Council taught that priests attain holiness through the exercise of their ministry, if they carry it out in the Spirit.[32] Direction is one of the places where this becomes literally true. It demands the priest’s prayer, his honesty, his patience and his willingness to be wrong, and a priest who has sat with a few souls over a few years knows more of the interior life than a library could teach him.

He recovers his confidence. Chapter One described a generation of priests who had lost the sense that they had anything to give to a soul. There is no better cure than the experience of having been given something to give, and of seeing it received.

And he is given a friend. Aelred of Rievaulx opened his treatise on spiritual friendship with the words, “Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, between us”, and went on to argue that God himself may be called friendship.[33] The relationship of direction is not a friendship between equals, since the roles are different, but it is a spiritual friendship in the sense that matters: two people who have promised one another the truth, in the presence of a Third.

This mutuality rests on commitments that both sides make, and it helps to state them plainly:

• The directee commits to come regularly and on time, to tell the truth as far as he can, to pray between meetings, to try what is suggested, and to say honestly when something does not ring true.
• The director commits to listen before he speaks, to pray for the directee by name, to keep confidence, to offer what he sees as something to be tested and not as a verdict, and to be directed and supervised himself.
• Both commit to the God who stands behind them: to seek, in every meeting, not their own satisfaction but his will.

Emmaus: The Four Panes on One Road

Chapter Seven ended on the road to Emmaus, and the image that opens Chapter One is the same scene. It is worth returning to it, because the story is a perfect small instance of direction, and the Lord himself is its director.[34]

The two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, disappointed, and a stranger falls in beside them. Notice first what he does not do. He does not begin with a lecture. He asks a question: what are you discussing as you walk? And when they stand still, looking sad, he asks another: what things? He knows, of course, perfectly well what things. But he lets them tell it, and they pour it out: the prophet mighty in deed and word, the condemnation, the crucifixion, and the sentence in which the whole disappointment is gathered, we had hoped. This is the Open pane. It is Sacred Ground, and the stranger has taken off his sandals. He has listened before he has spoken.

Then he holds up the mirror. O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe. The rebuke is frank, and it is not unkind, and it is followed at once by something better than a rebuke. Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interprets to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. This is the Blind pane, and the mirror is the Word. They had been looking at the same events as he had, and had not seen what the events meant. The Gospel has already told us why: their eyes were kept from recognising him. The mirror shows them what they could not see about themselves, and, more important, who has been walking beside them all the time.

As they near the village he appears to be going further. He does not force himself upon them. This is the Hidden panerespected. What the two have not yet said, perhaps even to themselves, is what the walk has stirred in them, and the stranger leaves them free to open that door or to leave it closed. They open it: stay with us. Disclosure that is invited cannot be coerced, and Luft’s principle that forced awareness is ineffective is here a matter of Gospel courtesy. Their words afterwards show what had been moving beneath the surface, in a pane they could not yet see into: did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road?

And then the Unknown pane gives way. At table he takes the bread, blesses and breaks it, and their eyes are opened. What neither of them could have produced, the recognition of Christ himself, is given by grace in a moment, and then he vanishes. The director vanishes. The moment of recognition is not the director’s gift, and he does not stay to receive thanks. As Chapter Three said, he prepares, encourages, recognises, stays and gets out of the way. And the disciples, as Chapter Seven recorded, get up that same hour and run back to the community they had been fleeing.

The story is also a reminder of what the secular Window lacks. There are three on the road. The two disciples are walking and talking as friends, and between them, unrecognised, is the Third, who is the Director of the whole encounter. Any human director is a pale and partial copy of the stranger on the road. His task is to walk alongside, to ask, to listen, to open the Scriptures, and to let the Lord do what only the Lord can do.

Discussion: Strengths, Limits and Dangers

A model borrowed from one discipline and put to work in another needs to be tested, and it is better to do the testing openly.

What the Window Does Well

It gives a language. A seminarian or a lay director who has never been taught what direction is can be given the four panes in an afternoon, and will thereafter have words for what he is observing: this person has not told me; he cannot see this; we are not yet at the point where this can be said. Chapter One complained that direction is assumed rather than taught, and that a man leaves the seminary with almost nothing in the one art his people will most need from him. The Window is a modest start on a remedy.

It is dynamic and relational. Direction is not a technique applied to a passive subject. It is a movement between two persons, and the Window shows that movement as one in which both take risks: the directee by disclosing, the director by offering a mirror.

It names the right conditions. Trust, freedom, patience, the refusal to force: these are not merely good manners. They are, as Luft saw and the tradition always knew, the conditions in which a person is able to see more of the truth about himself.

It explains why the director grows. A model in which only one party is changed would be a poor description of what the saints and the long-serving directors report. The Window shows that two windows are involved, not one.

And it vindicates, in an unexpected way, the tradition. The psychologists have discovered, in the secular language of the laboratory, what the desert fathers practised in the fourth century: the manifestation of thoughts, the fraternal mirror, the danger of the self-directed life. That is not a coincidence. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, as Aquinas said and Chapter Five repeated.[35] The Window is a fragment of natural wisdom about persons, and grace is the building that is raised on it.

Where the Window Falls Short

It has no place for God. This is the decisive limit, and it deserves its own heading below. In its secular form the Window is a diagram of two persons, and the light that falls through the panes has no source.

Its goal is different. The Window aims at self-awareness and better relationships. Direction aims at holiness. Self-knowledge matters to the tradition, because, as Chapter Six said, knowledge of self and knowledge of God are inseparable, but it is a means and not the end. A director who pursued self-awareness for its own sake would have drifted into the territory that Rieff called the triumph of the therapeutic, in which the self is managed and not converted.[36]

It is a heuristic and not an instrument. The Window is a teaching device, widely used in training and not tested as a diagnostic tool. A director who treats it as a science, or who begins to speak as if he could assign a directee’s experiences to panes with confidence, has stopped listening. The model is for the director’s attention, never for his verdicts.

Transparency is not an absolute good. The Window was born in a culture that prized self-disclosure, and it can leave the impression that the ideal is the largest possible Open pane. The Christian tradition has always held openness together with reserve. It prizes discretion, silence and the hidden life, and it holds that there is a part of every person that only God should enter. The conscience is a sanctuary. No director may demand the keys to it.

The Third in the Room

The Window, as Luft and Ingham drew it, has two persons and four panes. Spiritual direction has three persons. This is the correction that turns a borrowed model into a spiritual one, and it can be stated simply. The light that falls through the four panes is God’s. The Open pane is open first because God has opened himself. The Blind pane is a mirror that reflects what God sees. The Hidden pane is hidden from the director but not from God, who is also the one before whom disclosure is finally made. The Unknown pane is the pane in which God alone sees, and through which he forms Christ in the soul. The director is not the source of any of this light. He is, at most, a frame.

The frames of Luft’s window are wooden. A Christian cannot look at wood that supports what lets the light through without thinking of the Cross, from which the greatest light has come. The director’s service is to hold, as a frame holds, and to do so without obstructing. His authority, if he has any, is the authority of a thing that is there for the sake of the light.

This is also the answer to the objection that the Window turns direction into therapy. The difference lies not in the technique, which may overlap, but in the object, which is God; in the measure, which is holiness; in the means, which are prayer, the Word and the sacraments; and in the Third, who is present in the room and is the true Director. John of the Cross says as much when he reminds directors that the principal guide of souls is not the director but the Holy Spirit, whose instrument the director is.

Dangers to Guard Against

Three dangers follow from the model, and each should be named.

The first is the abuse of the Mirror. The Blind pane is where the director’s power is greatest, since he claims to see what the directee cannot. A director who is vain, controlling or simply tired can do great harm with it, and a priest, who carries the weight of a sacred office, is especially placed to do so. The safeguards are those already named: the director offers what he sees as something to be tested and not obeyed; the directee is always free to leave, and in the seminary is explicitly free to choose his confessor and his director;[37] and every director is himself directed and supervised.

The second is the pressure to disclose. An atmosphere in which everything is expected to be brought into the Open pane can become coercive, and in a house of formation, where a man’s future depends on how he is judged, it can corrupt the whole enterprise. This is why the separation of the internal and external forum, insisted on in Chapter One, is not a technicality. It is the condition under which the Open pane can grow at all.

The third is mistaking the map for the territory. The four panes are a way of attending to a person. They are not the person. A director who gives a directee a diagram in place of the attention he owes him has misunderstood the model. Francis de Sales asked that a director be full of charity, knowledge and prudence, and warned that if any one of the three is lacking there is danger.[38] A diagram supplies none of them.

Seen at the Level of the Whole Church

One last observation, offered lightly. The Window is also a useful picture of the Church’s own position as directee of the Holy Spirit. The lacuna of Chapter One, the gap at the heart of seminary formation, is a Blind pane: something the Church could not see about herself until it was shown to her. The abuse crisis was, in large part, a Hidden pane. And the generation arriving at the font is the Unknown pane, the future that God is preparing and that the Church has not yet understood. In each case the Church needs a mirror, and the thousands of young adults now coming to the Easter Vigil, with their questions and their hunger, are holding one up. She would be wise to look into it.

Theoretical Consequences

If the foregoing is accepted, a number of consequences follow at the level of theology itself.

1. Direction is a covenant that unfolds in time, and not an event. Chapter One distinguished Penance, which is episodic and complete in itself, from direction, which is cumulative and by nature unfinished. The Window supplies the reason: the panes move only as trust accumulates, and trust is the work of years. A theology of direction therefore needs a theology of fidelity, of the promise two people make to each other before God, and not only a theology of counsel.

2. Direction is triadic, and God is its true Director. The secular Window has two persons. The spiritual one has three, and the Third is not an addition but the source of the whole encounter. This confirms from the side of method what Chapter Three argued from the side of the soul: the director is a midwife and not the one who gives birth, and the Holy Spirit is the principal agent. A theology of the priest as spiritual father must therefore include a theology of instrumentality, in which the priest serves a work that is not his.

3. Self-knowledge is a means and not an end. Chapter Six held that knowledge of self and knowledge of God are inseparable. The Window now shows how self-knowledge is actually acquired: not alone, but in the company of another who discloses and receives, and in the presence of One who sees all four panes. The difference from therapeutic introspection, which Chapter One described, lies in the object, and the Window sharpens the difference without abolishing the overlap.

4. Truth passes in both directions, and each costs something. Disclosure is the risk of the directee, and feedback the risk of the director. The structure is that of grace and freedom cooperating, which Chapters Three and Five set out: God has already disclosed himself, and each human act of disclosure is an answer. A theology of conversion that has nothing to say about the interpersonal medium in which most conversions are completed will be incomplete.

5. Nature and grace are in right order. Psychology supplies a natural scaffold, an accurate description of how persons come to trust and to be known. Grace perfects it. This is the theological ground on which the Church may use psychological insight without surrendering to the therapeutic settlement, and the Window is a modest instance of what a theology of complementarity, called for in Chapter One, might look like in practice. It also corrects a possible error in the theology of conscience. The Mirror forms conscience and never replaces it. The director’s judgement is a hypothesis offered to a conscience that remains, in the Council’s phrase, the sanctuary where the person is alone with God.

6. The person is a mystery that cannot be exhausted. The Unknown pane guards the doctrine of capax Dei against the temptation to suppose that anyone, including the director and including the person himself, could comprehend a human soul. It supports an apophatic humility in pastoral practice: the director does his work with reverence for what he does not see, and holds his conclusions lightly. This is the pastoral form of the truth that God is hidden so that he may be sought.

7. The fruit of the cure of souls is reciprocal. The Council taught that priests are sanctified in the exercise of their ministry. The Window shows how this happens in the particular ministry of direction: the director’s panes are enlarged by the encounter, and his own holiness grows by serving another’s. A presbyteral spirituality that treats ministry only as an expenditure of the priest’s resources, and not also as a source of his sanctification, will have misunderstood both. The same is true of lay and religious directors.

8. Every director needs a mirror, and the Church needs structures that supply it. No one sees his own Blind pane. Bernard’s sentence applies to every director as well as to every directee, and the theology of the director’s authority, called for in Chapter One, must include the structures of supervision, accountability and ongoing direction by which that authority is kept honest. This is a point about the nature of the ministry, and not merely about prudence.

Practical Consequences

Theology that changes nothing on Monday morning has not been believed. The following measures build on those proposed in Chapters One, Three, Five, Six and Seven.

For Seminaries

• Teach the Window explicitly in the first year of formation, as the framework within which a seminarian understands what is being done to him in direction and, later, what he will do for others. A man who has been given the four panes at the start will recognise his own experience as it unfolds.
• Build the practicum of direction around the four panes. Give separate, supervised practice in each: receiving(listening on Sacred Ground without distracting, explaining or referring too soon), offering (holding a mirror in charity, by question as often as by statement), welcoming (responding to a hard disclosure without shock or moralising) and waiting (resisting the pull to pry into what is not yet shown).
• Use written case studies and anonymised accounts of direction, discussed under supervision in the manner of clinical training, with the internal forum scrupulously protected. Nobody should be ordained having never once been observed attempting this art.
• Ask each seminarian to reflect, with his own director, on the four panes in his own experience: what he has told, what his director has seen that he had not, what he is still holding back, and what has surprised both of them. A man who has been mirrored will know what it costs to mirror another.
• Keep the forums distinct, as Chapter One required. The opinion of a student’s spiritual director is never to be sought in decisions about his advancement, and students are to be free to choose their confessor and their director.
• Teach the classical sources of the Hidden pane in their own words: Cassian on the manifestation of thoughts, Benedict’s fifth step of humility, and Ignatius’s thirteenth rule for the discernment of spirits. Read them, and do not merely read about them.
• Teach the limits. A director should know the signs of conditions that lie beyond direction, and should have a clear protocol for referral, so that the Unknown pane is not treated as the director’s territory when it belongs to a clinician.
• Appoint formation staff who are themselves directed and supervised, and who can speak honestly of what it is to have been mirrored. A house in which nobody admits to having a Blind pane will teach men that they have none.

For Priests and Spiritual Directors

• Begin on Sacred Ground. Spend the first meetings asking how the directee came to be here, and listen for the accumulation. Do not hurry to the mirror.
• Explain how direction works. A directee who knows the four panes, and knows that what he tells will be held in confidence and what the director sees will be offered as a question, is freer to take the risks that direction requires.
• Earn the right to hold the mirror. Offer what you see only after trust has been established, in the form of a question where possible, with the balance of the good that you see as well as the fault, and with the plain invitation to say if it does not ring true.
• Receive the hidden with calm. Whatever is said, the first response is thanks and mercy. Send what is sin to the sacrament, keep the forums distinct, and tell the directee when something has been said that you will not treat as under the seal.
• Distinguish the scrupulous from the honest. When a person discloses endlessly without relief, the answer is steadiness and, where it is needed, referral, and not more listening.
• Do not pry into the Depths. Attend to consolation and desolation as the evidence that rises from them, and pray. Where you are uncertain, ask the directee to take it to prayer and to the Word.
• Pray for the directee by name before and after each meeting, and for yourself.
• Examine your own panes. Ask honestly what your directees are not telling you because of the kind of listener you are.
• Agree the terms: how often you will meet, for how long, how either party may end the relationship, and what each of you is promising. The covenant should be spoken aloud.
• Be directed, and be supervised. Do not do this alone.

For Parishes

• Offer an evening on spiritual direction in plain language, using the four panes as the picture. Many people have never been told what direction is, and cannot ask for what they cannot name.
• Train lay and religious directors in all four skills of receiving, offering, welcoming and waiting, and place them under supervision, as Chapter One required.
• Make the Open pane possible in small groups. A dozen people who read Scripture and pray together over several years are a context in which a convert, as Chapter Seven argued, can begin to be known.
• Preach on the Word as a mirror, with James, so that people learn to look into it and not turn away, and on the sacrament of Penance as the place in which the Hidden pane is met with mercy.
• Keep a church open for silence. The Depths cannot be reached by programmes, but a quiet building gives the Spirit room.
• Make sure that new Catholics are not left to sit in the first pane alone. A named companion for several years is the parish’s way of saying that someone will listen.

For Every Christian

• If you have a director, ask yourself what is in your Hidden pane that you have not brought. Name it, and take it to him, or to the sacrament.
• Ask your director, once, what he sees in you that you do not. Then receive the answer for a week without defending yourself.
• Do not look in the mirror only for faults. Ask what is good that you cannot see.
• If you have no director, begin to look for one. Francis de Sales advised choosing one in a thousand, and the advice was meant seriously.
• Find a friend, in Aelred’s sense, in whose company a Third is present, and to whom you can say what is true.
• Pray the psalm: search me, O God, and know my heart, and see if there is any wicked way in me.

For the Individual Priest, Beginning This Week

• Draw the Window on a single sheet. Write in each pane what you know. Take the sheet to your own director, and ask him to fill in the Blind pane.
• Ask one question of your own director: what do you see in me that I do not see?
• Read 2 Samuel 12 and Luke 24:13–35 slowly, with a pen, and note where you stand in each.
• Explain the four panes to one person you direct, or to one you hope to direct, in five minutes.
• Choose one person who has told you something hard, and pray for them by name this week.

Conclusion

A window exists to let in light. That is the first and simplest thing to say about the Johari Window when it is read by a Christian. The psychologists drew it to show how two people come to see one another more clearly, and it does show that. But a window is not made to be looked at. It is made to be looked through, and what the tradition adds is that the light which falls through all four panes, through the Open, the Blind, the Hidden and the Unknown, is the light of God.

In the room where a director and a directee meet, that light is working on both. The directee takes the risk of telling, and finds that Sacred Ground is safe. The director takes the risk of showing, and finds that the Mirror, held in charity, helps another to see. What has been hidden is brought out and met with mercy, and what neither could see is left, with reverence, to the One who alone sees it. In the course of years the Open pane widens, not because either person has become cleverer but because trust has grown and grace has done its quiet work. And neither person leaves the room unchanged. The director is enlarged by what he has been trusted with, and the directee by what he has been shown, and both of them by the presence of the Third, whom neither of them could see.

That is what the Church is asking of her priests, and of the lay men and women and religious who will work beside them, when she asks them to take up the cure of souls. It is a modest picture of a very large thing, and it can be taught. A seminarian who has been given the four panes understands, in an afternoon, what he has been called to do. A directee who has been given them understands, in an afternoon, what he has agreed to. It would be a pity if the Church, with a generation at her doors who are asking for exactly this, were to go on leaving the matter to improvisation.

The two disciples on the road to Emmaus did not know, until the bread was broken, that the stranger with whom they had been walking was the Lord. Only afterwards did they understand what had been happening in their hearts. Every faithful director will have the same experience. He will walk beside a soul for years, asking, listening, offering a mirror, receiving what is brought out of hiding, and he will not know until much later, and perhaps not until heaven, what was being done by the One who was walking between them. That is the director’s reward, and it is sufficient. In heaven, we are promised, we shall know fully as we have been fully known, and the four panes will be one.

The last word belongs to the psalmist, who prayed the prayer on which every direction rests: search me, O God, and know my heart. A director who can pray it for himself and for those he directs has understood what the Window is for. And that, in the end, brings us back to the seminary, where this book began, and to the question of how such men are to be formed.

Notes

[1] See Chapter One, nn. 15–16, and the section on the rise of the therapeutic; Congregation for Catholic Education, Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood (29 June 2008); Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

[2] See Chapter One, nn. 7–9, and Chapter Seven, nn. 1–2, for the French survey of catechumens (25 March 2026) and its cautions. The figures are counts of baptisms and say nothing about perseverance.

[3] Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, “The Johari Window, a Graphic Model of Interpersonal Awareness,” Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development (Los Angeles: University of California, 1955). The model arose in the setting of group-dynamics training and was applied to personal and therapeutic relationships more widely afterwards.

[4] Joseph Luft, Of Human Interaction (Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books, 1969), where the principles governing change in the four panes are set out; see also his Group Processes: An Introduction to Group Dynamics (Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books, 1963). The principles are paraphrased here, and page references should be supplied from the edition used.

[5] Carl R. Rogers, “The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 21, no. 2 (1957): 95–103; On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961). Cf. Chapter Four, §2.5, on congruence.

[6] Exodus 3:5; Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, Apostolic Exhortation (24 November 2013), n. 169, on the “art of accompaniment”.

[7] Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (18 November 1965), n. 2; John 15:15; cf. Exodus 33:11.

[8] See Chapter One, the section on the Sacrament of Penance and spiritual direction (forum and confidentiality), and nn. 15 and 32; Code of Canon Law (1983), can. 240 §2.

[9] Sidney M. Jourard, The Transparent Self (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1964).

[10] James 1:23–25.

[11] 2 Samuel 12:1–14.

[12] Revelation 3:17–18. For the director’s own blindness, see Matthew 7:3–5.

[13] Proverbs 27:6; Ephesians 4:15; Galatians 6:1; John 21:15–17.

[14] Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (7 December 1965), n. 16; Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1776–1778.

[15] John of the Cross, Llama de amor viva, stanza 3, nn. 30–62 (see Chapter One, n. 31), and Teresa of Ávila, Libro de la Vida, chs 5 and 13 (see Chapter Six, n. 6).

[16] Genesis 3:8–10.

[17] Psalm 32:3–5; Proverbs 28:13; 1 John 1:7–9.

[18] John Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum IV, 9, and Collationes II, 10–11 (Abba Moses on discretion, including the account of Serapion); Regula Benedicti 4.50 and 7.44.

[19] Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (First Week), n. 326.

[20] Matthew 6:1–6.

[21] See Chapter One, the section on why the two belong together in a priest; Code of Canon Law, can. 240 §2.

[22] John 3:19–21; Ephesians 5:11–13. On safeguarding and supervision, see Chapter One, n. 14, and the measures proposed there for bishops and dioceses.

[23] Augustine, Confessiones X, 2, 2, and XI, 1, 1.

[24] On the unconscious in psychological thought, see Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), and C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), cited in Chapter One, n. 17; on the Church’s guidance for the use of psychology, see Chapter One, n. 15.

[25] Psalm 139:1–4, 23–24; Psalm 19:12; Jeremiah 17:9–10; 1 Corinthians 4:3–5; Hebrews 4:12–13.

[26] Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2563.

[27] Teresa of Ávila, Castillo interior, First Mansions, ch. 1, n. 2.

[28] John of the Cross, Noche oscura, Book I, ch. 12, on the benefits of the night, the first of which is knowledge of oneself.

[29] Jeremiah 1:5; Ephesians 1:4; 1 Corinthians 2:9; Revelation 2:17.

[30] John 21:17.

[31] Genesis 2:25; 1 Corinthians 13:12.

[32] Second Vatican Council, Presbyterorum Ordinis, Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests (7 December 1965), nn. 12–14.

[33] Aelred of Rievaulx, De spiritali amicitia I, 1 and I, 69.

[34] Luke 24:13–35. The image of Emmaus also illustrates Chapter One; see Chapter Seven, n. 27.

[35] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2; see Chapter Five, n. 23.

[36] Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic; see Chapter One, n. 16.

[37] Code of Canon Law, can. 240 §1 and can. 246 §4.

[38] Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, Part I, ch. 4.

Bibliography