Jean Khoury
Summary: The role of spiritual direction extends far beyond the response to grievous sin. At its heart lies a hermeneutical task: the reading of a person’s history under grace. This article argues that the spiritual director must attend to the initial graces received – the “small lights” that illuminate a person’s path – not chiefly because they prevent despair in the face of serious falls, but because they form the very foundation of authentic accompaniment. When a person drifts through laziness, tepidity, or simple inconsistency, without necessarily committing mortal sin, the director’s primary duty is to retrieve and re-propose the continuity of God’s call. This practice rests on a robust theological principle: the permanence of God’s gifts and calling, grounded in Romans 11:29. The loss of grace through mortal sin is real and must never be minimised; yet the loss of a living correspondence to grace through tepidity is equally serious, and perhaps more common. The director who neglects to read the history of grace in a person’s life risks reducing spiritual accompaniment to generic moral exhortation. With this hermeneutic grounded in the tradition, however, direction becomes a participation in God’s own pedagogy.
Introduction
A common question arises in the practice of spiritual direction: when a person who has made real progress in the spiritual life subsequently falls into sin, what is the theological and pastoral reality? Does the person return to square one, or does something of the prior development remain? The response to this question, particularly as it concerns mortal sin, has traditionally emphasised rupture and restoration: mortal sin severs sanctifying grace, and reconciliation through the sacrament of Penance restores the state of grace. This much is clear Catholic doctrine.
Yet there exists another, more subtle case that demands attention from those who accompany souls in their journey towards God. This is not the case of grave sin, but the condition of tepidity, laziness, procrastination, and simple infidelity over a prolonged period. In such situations, no mortal sin need have been committed. There is no rupture of sanctifying grace in the strict theological sense. And yet the person has drifted, sometimes for years, from the path to which they have been called. In this context, the role of the spiritual director takes on particular importance.
The thesis of this article is straightforward, yet its implications are profound: the spiritual director must actively know and retrieve the history of grace in a person’s life, not primarily as a consolation after catastrophe, but as the essential hermeneutical foundation of all sound accompaniment. To neglect this history is to abandon one of the Church’s most important traditions regarding the reading of souls. To retrieve it, by contrast, is to help the person return not to some arbitrary starting point, but to the continuity of God’s own action in their life.
I. The Doctrine of Grace and Rupture: Mortal Sin and the Loss of Sanctifying Grace
Before addressing the subtler case of tepidity, it is necessary to establish the doctrine regarding mortal sin. The Church is unambiguous: mortal sin brings about a real and grave rupture. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states plainly: “Mortal sin… results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace”1. When sanctifying grace is lost, the person is severed from living communion with God. This is not a metaphor or merely a psychological state; it is a real deprivation of the principle that animates the spiritual life.
At the same time, classical theology has long maintained that not everything in the spiritual development of such a person is absolutely erased. St. Thomas Aquinas, discussing the nature of virtue and habit, teaches that “a habit is not destroyed by one act contrary to it”2. What is lost is the animating principle of supernatural growth – sanctifying grace and charity – not every trace of prior formation. The person does not become identical to someone who has never encountered grace.
The Council of Trent emphasised continuity alongside rupture. It teaches that those who fall from justification “may again be justified… when, moved by God, they seek the sacrament of Penance”3. The language of “again” suggests not a start de novo, but a restoration of a broken relationship. The journey remains the journey of the same person, now wounded but capable of healing.
Moreover, a distinction must be made between mortal sin and venial sin. Where mortal sin severs the state of grace, venial sin “weakens charity”4. The person does not “go back” in a radical sense; rather, growth is impeded and the soul becomes more vulnerable. This observation is important for understanding the broader category of unfaithfulness that does not rise to the level of mortal sin.
II. Tepidity and the Loss of Correspondence: When Grace is Present but Unfollowed
Yet it is necessary to turn attention now to what is, pastorally speaking, perhaps a more common and certainly more insidious condition: the person who drifts through laziness, procrastination, and simple indifference. This person may commit no mortal sin. They may indeed go to confession regularly and receive the sacraments. And yet, for months or years, they have abandoned the particular path to which they had previously been called. They are tepid.
The Catechism touches on this condition: “The Lord hates the lukewarm”5. Tepidity is not the explosive rupture of mortal sin; it is a slow withdrawal, a cooling of the ardour that once animated a soul, a gradual unfaithfulness that does not necessarily cross the boundary into grave matter. And yet it is grievous in a different sense: it represents an abandonment of what God has called a person to become.
From the perspective of the spiritual director, this case presents a particular challenge and opportunity. The person may be living in a state of grace yet not living it. They may retain sanctifying grace whilst losing correspondence to the graces that would lead them forward. They are present to God sacramentally but absent in desire. They have not broken the relationship, but they have diminished it to a shadow of what it could be.
It is precisely in this situation that the reading of prior graces becomes not a luxury, but a necessity. The director cannot simply exhort the person to “do better” without understanding what that person is called to do. The generic call to holiness is real, but it is too broad. Each soul is called to a particular fullness of Christ, through particular means, indicated by particular graces. To neglect those graces in favour of general moral advice is to miss the very material through which God has been pedagogically forming that person.
Note: It is important to recall, within this perspective, the Church’s teaching on venial sin, which does not rupture communion with God but wounds it and therefore calls for a living response of conversion. The tradition affirms that sincere and fervent contrition already has a real purifying efficacy: “Venial sin can be forgiven by many means, but chiefly by acts of charity and contrition” (cf. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 87, a. 2). In the same line, the Catechism teaches that “venial sin… is forgiven by acts of charity, by prayer, by repentance” (CCC 1863). This means that a deep movement of the heart towards God, animated by love, truly “amends” venial faults by restoring the soul’s orientation. Moreover, the Eucharist itself has a proper healing power in this regard: “The Eucharist strengthens our charity… As living charity wipes away venial sins, the Eucharist also cleanses us from venial sins” (CCC 1394). Thus, far from being negligible, these ordinary means of grace continually purify and re-establish the soul in fidelity, allowing the person to remain within the dynamic of God’s action even amidst daily weaknesses.
III. Romans 11:29: The Permanence of God’s Gifts and Calling
The theological foundation for this practice of reading and retrieving past graces is found in scripture itself. St. Paul writes: “For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance”6. The Greek word ametamelēta conveys that these gifts are not revoked, not taken back. In Paul’s immediate context, this refers to God’s covenant fidelity towards Israel; yet the underlying theological principle extends universally.
God does not act capriciously or superficially. When He gives, He truly gives. When He calls, He does so definitively. St. Thomas Aquinas expresses the metaphysical principle underlying this: “God does not repent of what He has done, since His will is unchangeable”7. There is therefore a real permanence in what God accomplishes in a soul. Graces received, transformations begun, calls given – these are not illusions that vanish as if they had never existed. They remain inscribed in the person’s history with God.
Yet this principle does not mean “nothing is ever lost”; neither does it mean that the human person cannot refuse or interrupt participation in those gifts. Rather, it means that what God has truly given and willed is not revoked from His side, even if our participation in it can be broken and must be restored. As St. John of the Cross observes, drawing on the tradition: “God never withdraws Himself from the soul, but the soul withdraws itself from God”8. The asymmetry is decisive: the break, when it comes, is on the human side.
Applied to the case of tepidity, this means the following. When a person has received a clear call to a deeper spiritual life, when they have experienced graces that manifested this call, when God has demonstrably oriented them towards a particular kind of union with Himself, that call and that orientation do not evaporate because the person subsequently falls into laziness. The call abides as a divine intention, as a truth inscribed in the person’s history, not revoked by God. Yet its fruitfulness depends entirely on a renewed cooperation with grace on the part of the person.
God’s Faithfulness in the Old Testament
There is a structural principle in God’s Revelation: in the Old Testament, God forms His people by continually re-presenting His own past actions as the key to the present. Memory is not psychological recall; it is theological re-actualisation. It establishes identity, restores direction, and calls for renewed fidelity.
The decisive point is that God Himself initiates this remembrance. When Israel drifts, what He does first is not to invent something new, but to bring them back to what He has already done. This is explicit in the covenantal formula repeated across the Law and the Prophets: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). The commandment is grounded in a prior act of grace. Israel’s moral and spiritual life is meant to flow from a remembered intervention of God.
This becomes even clearer in moments of infidelity. When Israel sins, God does not deny the relationship; He recalls its foundation. In Leviticus, after warnings of punishment, He says: “Then will I remember my covenant with Jacob… and I will remember the land” (Leviticus 26:42). The initiative remains divine. The covenant is not cancelled at the first rupture; it is re-invoked.
The Prophets intensify this dynamic. In the midst of unfaithfulness, God speaks in a way that binds present correction to past grace. Through Isaiah: “Remember not the former things… Behold, I am doing a new thing” (Isaiah 43:18–19), but just before that: “Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea” (Isaiah 43:16). Even the “new” is intelligible only in continuity with the Exodus. And elsewhere: “I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth” (Ezekiel 16:60). The remembrance is God’s, before it becomes Israel’s.
At the heart of this stands the affirmation: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). This is not sentiment; it is a theological statement about God’s being. His fidelity is not reactive but constitutive. He does not “adjust” His behaviour to human inconsistency in the way we do. He “behaves as God”.
This has a direct methodological consequence for spiritual direction.
The director, if he is to act in a truly theological way, must imitate this divine pedagogy. That means he does not define the person primarily by their present inconsistency—laziness, distraction, or even periods of infidelity—but by the history of God’s action in them. He recalls, with the person, the decisive graces: the “Exodus moments”, the “Abrahamic promises” in their life. These are not nostalgic references; they are normative points of orientation.
In doing so, he is not ignoring failure. The prophets never ignore Israel’s sin. But they interpret it within a larger fidelity. The structure is always the same: remembrance of grace, unveiling of infidelity, renewed call to covenant. For example: “I remember the devotion of your youth… but my people have changed their glory” (Jeremiah 2:2, 11). The past grace gives the measure by which the present is judged—and also the basis for hope.
There is also a deeper layer. In the Old Testament, remembrance (zakar) is closely linked to covenantal action. When God “remembers”, He acts to restore. “God remembered his covenant with Abraham… and God knew” (Exodus 2:24–25). This is not passive memory; it is effective fidelity. In spiritual direction, recalling past graces should have the same orientation: not merely to analyse, but to re-engage the person in a living response.
The director does not simply catalogue past experiences; he discerns the line of God’s fidelity and re-proposes it as binding and living. He helps the person see that their life has already been claimed, already been shaped by God’s initiative, and that their present inconsistency does not annul that truth.
In that sense, the Old Testament is not just an illustration; it provides the very grammar of spiritual accompaniment. God forms His people by making them remember what He has done, so that they may walk again in fidelity. The director, if he is faithful to that model, does the same: he anchors the person not in fluctuating states, but in the enduring coherence of God’s action in their history.
IV. The Hermeneutic of History: Reading and Re-Proposing the Graces of God
It is against this theological background that the proper function of spiritual direction in cases of tepidity can be understood. The director’s task is hermeneutical: to read a history under grace. This history is not random; it has coherence because God acts with wisdom and constancy.
The graces received by a person over the course of their spiritual journey form what might be called “small lights” on the path. These are not necessarily dramatic experiences or extraordinary phenomena. They may consist of sudden clarity in prayer, a persistent interior attraction to a particular form of prayer or service, a word of Scripture that returns again and again with new force, a moment of genuine insight into God’s will for their life, a grace received in a pilgrimage or during a retreat, or even the repeated movements of the Spirit that point in a consistent direction. Graces can be given sometimes very early in life. These experiences, when they bear the marks of clarity, fruitfulness, and ecclesial discernment, have real interpretative value. They are data for discernment.
To ignore these graces would be to ignore the very material through which God has been pedagogically forming the person. St. Ignatius of Loyola insists on the importance of this practice: “It is very helpful to remember the consolations received”9, for in remembering them one grounds oneself in the real action of God over time. It is not accidental; it is a method of discernment rooted in the operation of grace.
The director, therefore, must actively gather these elements from the person’s story: initial calls, moments of strong attraction to prayer, decisive insights in Scripture, concrete invitations to a form of life, repeated interior movements that point in the same direction. To do this well requires patience and attentiveness. It requires the director to know the person not merely as they are at present, but as they have been formed by God’s grace.
Once these graces have been identified and held clearly, the director’s second task is to help the person recognise them anew and to re-enter into fidelity to them. This is not a return to illusion or a denial of human weakness. Rather, it is a return to reality: the reality of what God has actually done in this person’s life, the reality of a call that has not been withdrawn, the reality of a trajectory that still holds meaning.
St. Francis de Sales offers a principle that illuminates this work: “We must consider what God has already done for us, in order to know what He wills to do with us”10. This is not sentimental reminiscence; it is theological method. The past orients the future because God’s action is coherent.
Note: It is important to recall that the first one or two sessions of spiritual direction are ordinarily given over to allowing the directee to recount, in a truthful and unhurried manner, the history of his or her journey with God, especially the significant graces, lights, and calls that have marked that path. This initial work is not merely introductory; it is foundational, because it provides the material through which discernment becomes possible. As Scripture reminds us, “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10), and it is under this same Spirit that the director listens, discerns, and gradually perceives the coherence of God’s action. Over time, what emerges is not a collection of isolated experiences but a certain unity, a “golden thread” that reveals how the Holy Spirit has been leading this particular person with consistency and purpose. The role of the spiritual director is therefore not to impose an external framework, but to recognise and serve this interior logic of grace, the work of the Holy Spirit and invite the directee to see it and correspond to it. It is also a great sign of encouragement and true hope. Consequently, when there is an interruption—through negligence, distraction, or a weakening of fidelity—it becomes essential for the director to recall, with the directee, the decisive moments of grace and the direction they indicated. This act of remembrance is not a return to the past for its own sake, but a way of re-situating the present within the enduring faithfulness of God, who “remains faithful” (2 Timothy 2:13). In this way, the director can gently and concretely invite the person to re-enter that line of grace, not by constructing a new path, but by recovering the one already given. The image of a “golden thread” can even be deepened: it is not only a thread to be followed, but a living current, a river of grace that continues to flow, even if the person has momentarily stepped aside from it. The task of direction is thus to help the person recognise again this movement of God, and to encourage a renewed, conscious, and faithful participation in it.
V. Discernment and Purification: The Reinterpretation of Past Graces
Yet a necessary precision must be observed. The retrieval of past graces in spiritual direction does not mean a naive or undiscerning repetition of every past experience or interpretation. The tradition insists on discernment. St. Paul gives the criterion: “Test everything; hold fast what is good”11.
Sometimes what a person took to be a clear call was in fact mixed with illusion, ambition, or insufficient grounding. Tepidity itself can distort memory, either by idealising the past or by dulling its clarity. Thus the director does not simply “reaffirm” the past; he discerns it anew in the light of truth. The role is hermeneutical in the fullest sense: to read the history in such a way that the false is separated from the true, and the genuine movement of God is distinguished from the movements of self-interest.
This discernment is not merely critical; it is constructive. Through it, past graces may become more intelligible, sometimes purified of mixed motivations, sometimes deepened through the lens of later experience. A call that seemed to concern a particular external form of life may be revealed to concern a deeper interior orientation. A grace that appeared to be about doing may be recognised as primarily about being.
In this way, the hermeneutic of spiritual history becomes not a retreat into the past, but a deepening of it. The person is not asked to restore the past, but to understand it more truly and to re-enter into fidelity to what is essential in it.
VI. Implications for Practice: The Foundation of Sound Spiritual Direction
These principles have direct and significant implications for the practice of spiritual direction. First, they establish that the work of spiritual direction cannot be reduced to the management of the present moment. It must be inherently historical. The director who knows only where a person is now, and not where God has been leading them, works without the necessary data for true discernment.
Second, these principles establish that the common case of tepidity and simple infidelity is not a matter to be resolved by generic moral exhortation. When a person is called to deeper prayer and allows laziness to steal years from them, when they abandon practices that were once central to their life with God, when they become absorbed in lesser goods and lose sight of the greater good to which they have been summoned, the director cannot simply say: “You must be more faithful. You must pray more. You must try harder.” These exhortations may be true, but they lack specificity and power. They do not engage the real history of God’s action in that person’s life.
Instead, the director must say something far more forceful, because it is rooted in reality: “Remember what God called you to. Remember the clarity you once had. Recognise that this call has not been withdrawn from God’s side; it remains true. Your unfaithfulness has not cancelled it. Your laziness has not made it less real. What you are called to become remains what you were called to become. Return, therefore. Not to an imagined perfection, but to the truth of your own history with God.”
This is the work of the director: to be, in essence, a reader and keeper of the person’s history. To know not only their struggles, but their graces. To connect the dots, to see the trajectory, to help the person recognise the coherence that God has given to their life. To hold before them the reality of what God has done and willed, against the temptation to despair or resignation.
Without this hermeneutic of history, spiritual direction risks becoming abstracted from the concrete particularity of God’s action in a person. It becomes merely moralistic. With it, direction becomes a participation in God’s own pedagogy, a witness to His fidelity, and an instrument of His call.
Note: It is essential to recall that Lectio Divina places the person in immediate contact with the true and primary spiritual director, who is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Risen Christ speaking through the Word. As Scripture affirms, “you have no need that anyone should teach you… his anointing teaches you about everything” (1 John 2:27), and again, “when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Lectio Divina is therefore not simply a method of prayer, but a privileged locus of guidance, where the Word becomes living and operative, allowing the person to hear, receive, and follow the concrete indications of Christ. In this perspective, the role of the human spiritual director must be understood with theological precision. He does not substitute himself for the Holy Spirit, nor does he become the principal guide of the soul; rather, his vocation is to ensure that the directee is effectively rooted in this living relationship with Christ in the Spirit. His task is to “reconnect” the person, whenever necessary, to this source, verifying that the Word is truly being heard, welcomed, and put into practice. St Paul expresses this dynamic when he says, “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work” (Philippians 2:13): the director discerns and supports this divine action but does not replace it. In this sense, his role is profoundly theological, he connects the directee directly to God, he leads him to God like the theological virtues do. He helps the person enter into an immediate obedience to God, to his will, to his Word under the motion of the Spirit. Consequently, his presence becomes, as it were, confirmatory rather than substitutive: he recognises, tests, and, when necessary, rectifies the authenticity of what is being lived, according to the apostolic injunction, “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). When this order is respected, spiritual direction reaches its true form: not a dependence on the human guide, but a verified and growing docility to the Holy Spirit, who alone is the interior master and guide of the soul.
Conclusion
The central claim of this article may be stated simply: the practice of spiritual direction, particularly in cases of tepidity and infidelity that do not necessarily involve mortal sin, demands that the director actively know and retrieve the history of grace in a person’s life. This is not optional refinement; it is foundational.
The theological warrant for this practice is robust. God’s gifts and calling are without repentance (Romans 11:29) – we see it in the history of Israel in the Old Testament. His will is unchangeable. He does not withdraw from the soul; it is the soul that withdraws from God. When a person has received genuine graces, when they have been oriented by God towards a deeper spiritual life, that call and orientation remain inscribed in their history before God, regardless of their subsequent infidelity. The permanence of God’s action is the foundation upon which the entire practice of reading history rests.
Yet this reading must be done with discernment. Not every past experience is a pure sign of God’s will; some may be mixed with illusion or self-interest. The director’s task is not to uncritically affirm everything that has come before, but to interpret it carefully, to separate the true from the false, and to help the person recover the authentic thread of God’s pedagogy in their life.
In conclusion, the case of mortal sin, whilst it involves a real rupture of grace that must never be minimised, is not the primary focus of this reflection. Rather, it is the far more common case of the tepid soul, the soul grown lazy, the soul that drifts through procrastination and indifference, that demands the full engagement of the director’s hermeneutical and pastoral gifts. Here, the director’s knowledge of past graces is not a consolation offered after catastrophe; it is the very foundation of sound accompaniment. It is the means by which God’s own consistent and unchanging action in the person’s life is made manifest. And it is the ground on which the director invites the soul to return, not to square one, but to the truth of its history with God.
More on Spiritual Direction, see here.
Bibliography
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated and edited by the Leonine Commission. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1888-present.
Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd edn. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1992.
Francis de Sales, St. Introduction to the Devout Life. Translated by Michael Day. Baronius Press, 2003.
Francis de Sales, St. Treatise on the Love of God. Translated by Henry Benedict Mackey. Sophia Institute Press, 1997.
Ignatius of Loyola, St. Spiritual Exercises. Translated by David L. Fleming, S.J. Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992.
John of the Cross, St. The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Spiritual Canticle. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1979.
Trent, Council of. “Decree on Justification.” Session VI. 1547.
Malachi 3:6; Romans 11:29; 1 Thessalonians 5:21. The Holy Bible, Douay-Rheims Version. Baronius Press, 2003.
Notes
1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Sec. 1861.
2. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 63, a. 2.
3. Council of Trent, Session VI, Chapter 14.
4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Sec. 1863.
5. Derived from Revelation 3:16.
6. Romans 11:29 (Douay-Rheims).
7. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, a. 7.
8. A synthesis of St. John of the Cross’s doctrine found throughout the Spiritual Canticle and Ascent of Mount Carmel.
9. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Rule 5 for the discernment of spirits. “Consolation” here, in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s jargon mean the graces received that were felt.
10. Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, Book II.
11. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (Douay-Rheims).