Learning to Listen to God in the Directee
Jean Khoury
Summary: This article proposes and develops a single thesis: Spiritual Direction is, from the director’s point of view, a discernment of God’s action in the life of another person, and Lectio Divina is the privileged school in which the director’s capacity for such discernment is formed. The two practices are not merely juxtaposed; they share the same interior structure of purification and listening, the same law of progressive depth, and the same pedagogy of smallness. The article traces this parallel through the director’s task of “connecting the dots” in a directee’s life, corrects and deepens the analogy by insisting on the incomparable dignity of the person for whom Christ died, and draws out the practical consequence that a director who does not practise Lectio Divina faithfully is exposed to a specific and serious danger: giving good advice one step too early. The article closes with concrete consequences for the formation of spiritual directors and a Marian reading of the director’s fundamental posture of listening.
Introduction
Spiritual Direction and Lectio Divina are commonly treated as two distinct items in a formation programme: one a personal practice of prayer with Scripture, the other a ministry of accompaniment. This separation, however useful for the purposes of a syllabus, conceals a much deeper unity. Considered from the point of view of the director, and not merely of the directee, the two practices turn out to be two exercises of one and the same spiritual capacity. Both are, at root, a discipline of listening. Both require the same interior renunciation before that listening can begin. Both obey the same law of gradual depth, so that an initial, general perception of the truth is never yet the whole of what God is asking. And both are ordered towards the same end: the free and active correspondence of a human person to the grace that God is already at work accomplishing within him.
This article sets out that thesis and unfolds its principal consequences. It does not claim to exhaust the theology of either Lectio Divina or Spiritual Direction. It claims something more modest and, for the formation of directors, considerably more useful: that daily, faithful, genuinely supernatural Lectio Divina is not an optional devotional accessory for a spiritual director, but the very instrument by which his capacity to direct is formed, corrected, and continually deepened.
A Necessary Clarification: What Do We Mean by Lectio Divina?
Before entering into this reflection, it is important to clarify what is meant here by Lectio Divina. This article is based entirely—and I would dare to say, exclusively—on an experience of supernatural/contemplative Lectio Divina, as it is taught and practised at the School of Mary. Without some familiarity with this way of practising Lectio, the argument that follows may easily be misunderstood.
There is Lectio Divina and Lectio Divina, just as there is Spiritual Direction and Spiritual Direction. Lectio can very easily become a good and fruitful form of spiritual meditation: we read the day’s readings, reflect upon them, draw out spiritual insights, apply them to our lives and perhaps make some resolutions. All of this can be genuinely good prayer. But it is not yet necessarily the Lectio Divina that is presupposed in this article.
The Lectio Divina spoken of here is much more demanding. It is not primarily an exercise in reflecting upon the text, but a daily encounter in which we seek to listen to God Himself through His Word. It requires an act of purity, a radical placing of God above ourselves, and then a persevering act of listening. We have to learn to distinguish God’s Word from our own thoughts, desires, emotions and expectations. We have to allow the Word to descend progressively into us, until it reaches the soil of our concrete life and touches our will. The goal is not simply to understand something from Scripture, but to receive what God is saying and doing in us and to discover the concrete response to which He is calling us.
Practised faithfully, this form of Lectio becomes a demanding daily school of listening. It gradually brings us into a real and living transformative conversation with God and, through the action of the Holy Spirit, into genuine spiritual growth. It teaches us through experience how God works in a person: how He leads, purifies, waits, repeats, strengthens, corrects, invites and gradually brings us further. It teaches us to recognise the difference between what we ourselves think and what the Holy Spirit is doing.
This is essential for understanding the argument of this article. I am not proposing simply that a spiritual director should read Scripture regularly because Scripture is spiritually beneficial. I am proposing something much more precise: the director’s daily experience of supernatural Lectio Divina forms his capacity to listen to God and therefore profoundly prepares him to listen to God in the directee.
The Spiritual Director needs to learn to “read” what God is doing in the soul of the person entrusted to him. This cannot be acquired simply through techniques, psychological knowledge or theoretical study. It requires a long acquaintance with the ways of the Holy Spirit. The director must himself have become familiar with the daily work of the Spirit: how grace moves, how God leads a person progressively, how He works through small things, how He purifies, how He waits, how He brings a person from a general light to a concrete response, and how easily our own thoughts and desires can be mistaken for God’s action.
For this reason, if the reader is not familiar with the supernatural Lectio Divina taught and practised at the School of Mary, I would strongly recommend becoming acquainted with it before reading this article. Otherwise, some of the points made here may appear exaggerated or even strange, because they presuppose an experience of Lectio that goes considerably beyond what is commonly understood by the term “spiritual meditation”.
The whole argument that follows comes from this experience. Lectio Divina is the school in which the director first learns, in his own life, to listen to God. Spiritual Direction then asks him to exercise this same listening in the presence of another person: to listen to God at work in the directee and to discern what God is asking of that person now.
I. The Director’s Task: Discerning God’s Action in Another
The primary task of Spiritual Direction, seen from the director’s side, is not to give advice, to solve problems, nor even, in the first instance, to help the directee in a psychological sense. It is to discern what God is doing in the directee, and to help the directee recognise this action and correspond to it freely. Everything in the direction must serve this single goal: not stagnation but steady growth, the removal of obstacles where possible, and, where an obstacle cannot yet be removed, its transformation into an occasion of grace.
The director therefore asks, at every encounter, a set of questions that are ultimately one question addressed to God rather than to the directee: What is the Holy Spirit doing in this person? What is God inviting him to now? What is assisting this work of grace, and what is resisting it? What needs to be purified, accepted, strengthened, or undertaken, so that God’s work may continue?
This requires of the director a trained ear: a capacity to listen beneath the surface of what is said — prayer, work, relationships, temptations, desires, failures, consolations, decisions — for the deeper movement of grace running through it. An isolated event, taken on its own, may mean very little. It is only by listening over time, and connecting the dots, that a pattern begins to emerge: a recurring difficulty, a persistent attraction, a repeated resistance, a new desire for God, an unexpected consolation. The director’s task is to help that pattern, that single work of God, become visible — first to himself, and then, above all, to the directee.
II. The Analogy Refined: Two Kinds of Text
It is here that the analogy with Lectio Divina becomes fruitful. In Lectio Divina, one stands before Scripture and asks, in substance: Lord, what are You saying to me? What are You doing in me through this Word? What are You asking of me? In Spiritual Direction, the director stands before another person’s life and asks something structurally identical: Lord, what are You doing in this person? What are You saying through what is happening in his life? What are You asking of him now?
The texts differ. In Lectio Divina the text is Sacred Scripture. In Spiritual Direction the director listens to the person himself: his history, his present circumstances, his prayer, his struggles, his desires, his decisions, his failures and his graces. Yet in both cases the fundamental posture is the same: the director is not, in the first instance, seeking his own answer. He is seeking God’s action and God’s will.
There follows from this a precise and demanding parallel. In Lectio Divina, one must learn to distinguish the Word of God from what one’s own mind, imagination, emotions, preferences and desires are saying about the text. In Spiritual Direction, the director must make exactly the same distinction: he must distinguish what God is doing in the directee from what he himself would like God to be doing, from what he believes ought to happen, from his own preferences, and even from what the directee himself would like to happen.
I think this deserves its own section because it introduces an important safeguard against premature discernment. The analogy is not merely that both LD and SD require “listening”; it is that both begin with a disciplined attention to what is actually before us. We do not rush from the text to our spiritual interpretation, and we should not rush from the directee’s words to our spiritual interpretation of his or her life.
Attentiveness: First Listen to What Is There
There is another important analogy between Lectio Divina and Spiritual Direction: the necessity of attentive listening to what is actually before us. In Lectio Divina, we do not begin by asking immediately: “What do you want from me Lord today?” Before we move towards what Jesus may be saying personally, we first give ourselves to the text. We read it carefully. We pay attention to the words, the structure, the context, the persons involved, what happens, what is said and what is not said. We allow the text to speak for itself. We do not immediately jump from the text to our own thoughts, associations or spiritual applications. This first attentiveness is essential. We must first receive what is there before attempting to discern what God is doing through it. The same is true in Spiritual Direction.
When the directee begins to speak, the director should first listen attentively to what the person is actually saying. He should allow the directee to tell the story, to describe what has happened, to express what he or she is experiencing, to speak about prayer, relationships, difficulties, desires, fears, struggles and events. The director needs to build as complete a picture as possible before beginning to interpret spiritually what is happening. This first phase should not be underestimated or hurried. The director should resist the temptation to jump immediately to the “spiritual” meaning of what he hears. A sentence, an event or a difficulty can easily appear to have an obvious spiritual explanation. But just as in Lectio we need first to understand the text in its context, in Spiritual Direction we need first to understand the person and the context of his or her life.
There is a danger here which is particularly subtle for a director who already has experience. Because he has heard many people and recognises familiar patterns, he may be tempted to interpret too quickly: “I know what this is.” But the directee is not a case. The person is unique, and what appears familiar may be the manifestation of something quite different. The director therefore needs the patience to listen again, even when he thinks he already understands. In Lectio Divina, the first reading is an exercise in attention. We allow the text to establish the ground upon which the rest of the prayer will take place. Likewise, in Spiritual Direction, attentive listening establishes the ground upon which discernment can take place. Only after this initial listening can the director intensify his interior attention to what God may be doing. Having received the person’s account, he can then begin to listen more deeply—not merely to the words themselves, but to the movements beneath them. He can begin to notice what is emerging, what is repeated, what seems to carry particular weight, where there is peace or disturbance, attraction or resistance, growth or stagnation. His contemplative attention becomes more acute.
The movement is therefore similar to that of Lectio Divina: first attend; then listen more deeply; then discern; then respond. This is important because the director’s prayer and contemplative discernment should not become an excuse for failing to listen to the person. The director cannot “go to God” while bypassing the directee. God is giving Himself to be discerned precisely within this concrete person and this concrete story. The director must therefore attend carefully to what is actually being presented to him.
In this sense, attentiveness itself is already an act of charity: God takes full care of the entire life of the Directee. To listen carefully to another person is to acknowledge that this person matters, that his or her experience deserves to be heard, and that God’s work in this particular person cannot simply be reduced to a category or a preconceived spiritual interpretation. This is another reason why Lectio Divina forms the director so well. The daily discipline of remaining before the text, resisting the impulse to move too quickly towards one’s own interpretation, gradually forms an interior habit of attention. The director learns to stay with what is there. He learns not to fill the silence too quickly. He learns not to impose his own thoughts. He learns to allow reality to disclose itself.
And this is precisely what he needs when sitting before a directee. The director must first listen to the person before listening more deeply for God’s action in the person. The first listening does not compete with the second; it prepares for it. Just as the careful reading of Scripture prepares us to hear the Word more deeply, attentive listening to the directee prepares the director to discern more accurately what the Holy Spirit is doing. Only then can the director move beyond what is immediately apparent and exercise the contemplative and discerning listening proper to Spiritual Direction. He begins to ask inwardly: What is God doing here? What is He bringing to light? What is He purifying? Where is He leading? What is He asking now?
The director therefore needs two attentions, or perhaps two depths of the same attention: attention to the person and attention to God at work in the person. The first must not be skipped in the name of the second. Rather, careful attention to the person becomes the human ground upon which contemplative discernment can take place. In this respect, the wisdom learned in Lectio Divina is very practical: do not rush. Listen to what is there. Let it speak. Only then ask what God is doing through it.
III. Purity before Listening: The Common Asceticism of Lectio Divina and Spiritual Direction
Both practices require, before any act of listening, an act of purification. Purity here means placing God above everything else. Before Lectio Divina can properly begin, one must become free, so far as possible, from the desire to make Scripture say what one wants it to say. One comes before God rather than before oneself; one relinquishes control; one allows the Word to interrogate the reader rather than being immediately pressed into confirming him.
The same disposition is demanded of the spiritual director. He must become inwardly free of the desire to fix the person, to make him progress according to the director’s own conception of spiritual growth, to impose a particular spirituality upon him, or even to secure for himself the private satisfaction of having helped. The director’s proper prayer, before and during direction, is: not my will, but Yours. Only after this renunciation can genuine listening begin.
This is why the daily practice of Lectio Divina carries such weight for the formation of a director. It is a daily school of listening. It confronts the director, again and again, with the difficulty — indeed, by his own strength, the impossibility — of truly listening to God. It teaches him to fall silent, to resist the impulse to manufacture an answer, to distinguish God’s voice from the many other voices within and around him, and to wait.
IV. A Solidarity Born of Struggle
Because the director undergoes this struggle personally, in his own daily prayer, he becomes more capable of understanding the same struggle in the directee. He knows from within what it costs to encounter silence, distraction, resistance, fear, desire, self-deception, impatience, and the constant temptation to substitute one’s own thoughts for the Word of God. This experience produces a profound solidarity: the director comes to perceive that the directee is engaged in exactly the same fundamental combat — the passage from listening to oneself towards listening to God.
This is also why Lectio Divina sharpens discernment as such. It continually asks the one who prays: what is coming from God, and what is coming from me? This question, repeated daily, gradually becomes an interior habit that is not confined to the time of formal prayer but accompanies the whole of the spiritual life — and, in the director, accompanies every act of accompaniment.
V. A Necessary Correction: The Primacy of the Person over the Text
The analogy just drawn must now be corrected and deepened, or it risks a serious theological distortion. Are the Scriptures more sacred than the human being, than the directee himself? The answer is no. God did not die for a book. He died for the directee. Jesus loved the directee and gave His life for him; He did not give His life for the Scriptures.
The Scriptures are, without any qualification, the inspired Word of God. But they do not have their goal in themselves. They are given by God to serve the person, for the person’s salvation. Saint Paul states this precisely: whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, and all Scripture, being inspired by God, is useful for teaching, for refuting error, for guiding people’s lives and for training them in holiness. Scripture is ordered towards the person; the person is not ordered towards Scripture as though it were his final end.
The Eternal Word of God incarnate came for the directee. Saint Paul can therefore say of himself, and of every believer: the Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me. Christ Himself points beyond the sacred text towards this same end when He tells those who search the Scriptures that it is the Scriptures themselves which testify to Him — they lead to Christ, and Christ leads to the Father. The directee, and his conscience, are therefore sacred: not because everything that arises within a conscience is automatically from God — the conscience can err, and requires formation and purification — but because this is the sanctuary in which God is at work, and to which He has directed the whole of Scripture as its instrument.
This correction gives to Spiritual Direction a beautiful and exacting dignity. The director does not enter a text; he enters, with permission and with great humility, a place where God is already and directly at work. He is not an oracle. He is a servant of discernment before a mystery greater than himself.
VI. The Progressive Word: Saint Gregory the Great and the Growth of Discernment
Lectio Divina teaches, day by day, that Jesus’ word to us follows our own growth. Scripture grows with the one who reads it, as Saint Gregory the Great observes in his Homilies on Ezekiel: the Word itself does not change, but our capacity to receive it changes, so that a single passage can open new depths five years on that it did not yield before. The Holy Spirit is continually leading the one who prays towards new depths.
The same law governs Spiritual Direction. A director may be tempted to suggest a particular direction to the person he accompanies, while God, in fact, is already going deeper and asking for something more subtle, less immediately visible, less flattering to look at, yet closer to His actual will. Only a director accustomed to the daily discipline of Lectio Divina will reliably perceive this further, quieter step.
Scriptures Grow With us, The Experience of the Fathers of the Church
“Reading Scripture According to Saint Gregory the Great”, Parick Catry O.S.B.
VII. Good Advice Given Too Early: The Peril of the First Light
This yields one of the most important practical distinctions in the whole of Spiritual Direction: the danger is not only that of giving bad advice. It is the danger of giving good advice one step too early.
The director may see something genuinely true in the directee’s situation — that he needs greater discipline, that he must overcome a particular attachment, that he should exercise greater generosity. All of this may be true. But the fact that something is true does not mean that it is what God is asking of the person now. The Holy Spirit may be leading him somewhere else first: not simply detachment from a given thing, but the purification of his very image of God; not immediately greater generosity, but first the humble reception of God’s love. The director sees something that needs to be done; God may, at this precise moment, be doing something that needs first to be received.
The director who has been formed by daily Lectio Divina has a genuine advantage here, because he has learned, in his own prayer, not to seize upon the first thing that appears.
VIII. Finished and Unfinished Lectio: From the General Light to the Soil of the Soul
This distinction can be sharpened further by recalling the difference between an unfinished and a finished Lectio Divina. During Lectio, an initial light is often received: something becomes clear, a general understanding forms, a direction even seems obvious. But this first light frequently remains high up in the mind. It has not yet descended to reach the will, the soil, the concrete reality of the soul. If one stops there — if one says, in effect, now that I understand this, what shall I do with it? — one has moved too quickly, converting a general grace into a private project.
The same discernment is demanded of the director. He may perceive something true and important in the directee, yet that general light is not automatically the same as God’s concrete word for this moment. He must not interfere prematurely by asking, in effect, what shall we now do with this direction God is giving you? He must continue, together with the directee, to beg for the Word to descend until it touches the will and suggests one concrete, particular act. Only then does one have real spiritual progress, real growth, rather than the mere elaboration of an insight.
Finished and Unfinished Lectio Divina. How The General Light Becomes Clear
IX. The Pedagogy of Smallness: One Step at a Time
Lectio Divina, by repeatedly bringing the one who prays to something small — a single word, a single phrase, a single concrete invitation — teaches a great lesson of the spiritual life: what matters is God’s will, and even the greatest of projects can only be achieved one step at a time. We do not climb the whole mountain today; we ask only for our daily bread.
The direction God gives may therefore be to begin with something small, and to persevere in it, and to let it be strengthened before anything more is asked. Lectio teaches, with disarming clarity, the weakness of the human being and the ordinary way God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit deal with it: something small, something repeated, something reinforced, something less shiny than other possibilities and considerably less flattering to the ego. This is the very school of Lectio Divina, and it is directly transferable to Spiritual Direction. A directee may present ten problems, and the director may perceive ten things requiring attention; but God may be asking for one thing only, and perhaps not even the most obvious of the ten. Part of the director’s wisdom lies precisely in discovering, patiently, which single thing the Holy Spirit is bringing forward now.
“Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.” (Mt 25:21)
X. He Who Has Ears: Growth in the Capacity to Hear
He who has will receive more. He who has ears to hear will be led to deeper levels of the spiritual life, to greater humility, greater charity, and the more fiery action of the Holy Spirit. The spiritual director is, in this sense, almost spontaneously taught by God to become continually a better director, because every day he opens his ears anew. If he desires to grow, God will give him more; if he has the humility to listen and to put into practice what he hears, God will give him a still greater capacity to listen and to discern.
This is not merely an accumulation of information about the spiritual life; it is a genuine growth in capacity. The one who listens becomes capable of a deeper listening; the one who obeys becomes capable of a deeper obedience; the one who receives grace becomes capable of receiving a further grace. And because the director experiences this growth personally in his own Lectio, he becomes able to recognise and to serve the same growth in the one he accompanies.
XI. Accompanying the Directee’s Own Lectio Divina
It follows naturally that the director will invite the directee to practise Lectio Divina — but the invitation cannot stop at recommendation. Because genuine Lectio Divina is demanding, and can very easily be mistaken for something else, the director must also be prepared to discern, together with the directee, whether he or she is actually practising it in a supernatural way.
Lectio Divina is very easily reduced to good spiritual meditation: taking a passage of Scripture, reflecting on it intelligently, drawing out spiritual thoughts, applying them to one’s life, and finishing with the satisfaction of having prayed well. None of this is wrong in itself, and it may be genuinely fruitful. But good spiritual meditation is not, for all that, Lectio Divina. The centre of Lectio Divina is not what I can extract from the text, but what God is saying and doing through it — an act of purity, an act of listening, a willingness to receive rather than to construct, an openness to being questioned and searched by the Word rather than using it to confirm oneself.
The more the spiritual director learns about Lectio Divina and practises it faithfully himself, the more clearly he will see this difference, and the more capable he will become of helping the directee move from mere pious reflection to authentic listening. This is not a matter of turning Lectio into another technique to be supervised, but of accompanying the directee towards a genuine capacity to receive the Word of God — the very capacity the director is himself labouring, daily, to deepen.
XII. The Marian Dimension
There is, finally, a Marian depth to this whole relationship, particularly fitting for a School bearing the name of Mary. Mary is not first the one who explains the Word of God; she is the one who receives it, keeps it and allows it to unfold within her, treasuring all these things and pondering them in her heart. The director needs something of this same Marian disposition: receiving, keeping, pondering, waiting, discerning and responding, both before the Word of Scripture and before the mystery of the person entrusted to him.
Practical Consequences
The thesis developed above is not merely speculative; it carries direct and concrete consequences for the practice of Spiritual Direction and for the formation of directors.
First, daily, genuine Lectio Divina must be treated as a non-negotiable foundation of a director’s own life, not as an optional devotional preference. A director’s principal instrument is not a technique, a questionnaire, a psychological framework, or even a body of theological knowledge; it is a person capable of listening to God and of discerning His action in another. That instrument is formed, sharpened and continually corrected by nothing other than the daily discipline of listening to the Word.
Second, in every session of direction, the director may habitually ask himself the two questions that structure this whole reflection: what is true here, and, distinctly, what is God actually asking of this person now? The two questions are not the same, and the second must never be assumed simply because the first has been answered.
Third, the director may cultivate a settled suspicion of his own first insight, precisely because it is usually correct as far as it goes and precisely because correctness is not yet the whole of discernment. Before proposing a course of action, he should ask whether the light he has received has already descended to the soil of the person’s will, or whether it remains, as yet, high up in the mind — a true but still general perception awaiting its concrete form.
Fourth, the director may habitually prefer the small, concrete, repeatable step over the ambitious spiritual programme, resisting any temptation — his own or the directee’s — to make Spiritual Direction impressive. He should ask, session after session: among everything that could be addressed, what is the one thing the Holy Spirit appears to be bringing forward now?
Fifth, when the director introduces a directee to Lectio Divina, he may not consider his task complete upon recommending the practice. He should periodically and gently discern with the directee whether the Word is genuinely being received — whether it is questioning and searching the directee, or whether the exercise has quietly settled into good, but merely human, spiritual meditation.
Sixth, formation programmes for spiritual directors should place Lectio Divina, and specifically the distinction between an unfinished and a finished Lectio, at the very centre of the curriculum — not as one module among others, but as the underlying discipline that forms the ear on which every other competency depends.
Conclusion
Lectio Divina teaches the one who prays to listen to God in His Word; Spiritual Direction asks the director to listen to God in the life of another. In both, the director must become poor before God, placing the divine will above his own thoughts, desires and judgements. In Lectio he learns that the Word continually opens new depths as he himself grows; in Spiritual Direction he learns to recognise that God’s work in the directee likewise unfolds progressively, often through movements that are subtle, quiet, and easily missed. He therefore needs, day after day, continually renewed ears: he who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Yet the deepest correction of the analogy must be kept firmly in view to the very end. The directee is not the Word of God, and his life is not a second Scripture. But God is genuinely and directly at work within him, and it was for him — not for a text — that the Word was made flesh and gave His life. The director’s task is to become sufficiently free, sufficiently attentive and sufficiently purified to recognise that work, to help bring it to light, and to accompany the directee, one small and faithful step at a time, in his free correspondence to it.
The ultimate fruit of Lectio Divina in the spiritual director is not, therefore, that he becomes better at directing others. It is that he becomes a better disciple — and it is precisely because he never ceases to be a disciple, one who each day says again, Speak, Lord, Your servant is listening, that he is able to stand before another disciple, whom God has entrusted to him, and help him hear that same voice.
Bibliography
Sacred Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:4; 1 Samuel 3:9; Matthew 6:11; Matthew 25:29; Mark 4:9; Mark 4:24; Luke 2:19; John 5:39; Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:16; Galatians 2:20.
Jean Khoury, Lectio Divina at the School of Mary.
Jean Khoury, Finished and Unfinished Lectio Divina.