As the academic/program year begins I step back into the deeply satisfying work I’ve been called to as a spiritual director/spiritual Companion. Trying to explain the gift of this work to people, I recently shared this quote from the 20th century Anglican spiritual writer, retreat leader and mystic Evelyn Underhill. 
She writes: For a spiritual life is simply a life in which all that we do comes from the centre, where we are anchored in God: a life soaked through and through by a sense of [God’s] reality and claim, and self-given to the great movement of [God’s] will . (The Spiritual Life, pp. 31-32)
I love this quote because she names what I believe we all most deeply desire: a life lived from the center, anchored, or, as she says elsewhere, “at home” in the holy mystery that is at the heart of everything, that interior place where we can be open to transformation, healing, and ever-deepening roots in love.
Over the summer I began sharing some of these insights as a leader in the Adelynrood School for Spiritual Direction, which meets for a week in June and a week in August each summer, a 4-week certificate program. Being with others who feel called to accompany people on the spiritual journey was richly energizing, and being at Adelynrood, the retreat center that is a ministry of my intentional community, the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross
I always take the summer as sabbatical time, but now I am looking forward to resuming this work of accompanying people on the interior journey, attending to what connects us to that center, and what gets in the way, and always trusting in the grace and love that holds us in life.