Lynn Darke

 Lynn Darke

At the heart of any spiritual tradition sits a need to tend to the holy, and for spiritual guides with listening hearts. For anyone drawn to ‘tend to the holy’, learning how to recognise and respond to the nuanced moods and movements within is like learning to read a compass; and by leaning into the grace offered, we can make choices that lead to the increased freedoms that God longs for each of us to know.

As I stop to look back at my own wanderings (and wonderings) I discover that I was always being met exactly where I was by a God who even now remains both elusive yet intimately knowable, and keen to be found in the midst and mess of my ‘spiritual’ and ‘everything else’ life.

This requires, as the Jesuit writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin reminds me, patience and trust in the slow work of God, for we are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, and struggle to believe that God is trustworthy. My training to become a spiritual director came about in response to my own deepening trust and a desire to walk with others also on the way; a desire that grew naturally alongside my work as a specialist nurse in palliative care. I do both from a faith grounded in contemplative Christianity and am open to seeing God in all things, whatever your beliefs and wherever you are on your journey.