The science of spirituality continues to evolve! It's possible that we have a "God Spot" in the temporal lobe of our brain, and "God Chemical" in our brain stem. What does this mean to you?

A new article, "Is This Your Brain on God?" maps through research and images these areas in the brain:

Brain Stem: The God Chemical
Temporal Lobe: The God Spot
Parietal Lobe: Spiritual Virtuosos
Overall Brain: The Biology Of Belief
Frontal Lobe, Parietal Lobe and Hippocampus: Near-Death Experiences

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual — from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

Click "Is This Your Brain on God?" to read the full article.

"Quietly, compassionately, spirit directors take the soul by the hand, helping a seeker tap deeper dimensions," writes Anndee Hochman for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. Here are some quotes from the article. To read the entire article, follow this link.

Spiritual directors typically meet monthly with their directees, who may or may not share the same religious background; the relationship can continue for years. Unlike psychotherapy, which is problem-based and designed to alleviate distress, spiritual direction doesn't aim to "fix" anything. Instead, it offers people a place to talk about their spiritual lives without fear of judgment. For some, that means discussing God or prayer in the context of their faith; others use language such as "the yearning of the soul."

"In this culture, it's easier for us to talk about sex than about spirituality," says Cole, whose experience with spiritual direction was so positive that she enrolled in the training program at Chestnut Hill College and, five years ago, left her parish ministry for a full-time independent practice. "I've had people come who've had a religious experience that made them feel 'odd,' and they'd never told anybody."

Liz Ellmann, executive director of Spiritual Directors International, which publishes a journal and creates ethical guidelines for practitioners, says trauma often unleashes spiritual questions: "How do I be present to pain and joy? Why do I have to be so busy that I can't enjoy my life? And who do you talk about that stuff with?"

On a Thursday evening at Mishkan Shalom, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Roxborough, a small group of women and men gather near the wooden ark that holds the Torah ...

The growth in spiritual direction - here, in the seminary-rich Philadelphia area, and around the world - doesn't surprise Ervin. "We are at a crisis in our culture - not only for how to live, but how to live with the whole world. . . . People come down with breast cancer, they lose their job, the company downsizes, everything's falling down around them. Spiritual direction is a way of grounding themselves in the midst of that and seeking meaning."

To read the entire article, follow this link. 

Add your comments about the article in the reply section below.

September 16, 2009, "Rome Reports Video News"

Pope Benedict XVI recommends that people seek council from a spiritual guide, especially young people.

During the general audience dedicated to Saint Symeon, the pope said that in order to follow God, people need another person to help in getting to know oneself and who can help foster a deeper relationship with God.

Benedict XVI explains, "Symeon teaches us that Christian life is an intimate and personal communion with God."

The pope affirmed that even though its okay to worry about physical, intellectual and human growth, its just as important to address internal growth. This internal development, that cannot be obtained through books alone, is what allows people to know God.

This understanding also allows people to open up to God. Only by living this love can people be sensitive to the needs of others.

Follow this link to read more about what spiritual direction is, and is not!

SDI Coordinating Council member, Jinks Hoffmann created this prayer for peace. We invite you to join us in praying for peace today, United Nations International Day of Peace. 

Peace.

There is a peace
that passes understanding,    Philippians 4:7
a peace
that needs not
control.
Though life is
uncertain and random
and chaos is ever present,
there is a peace.

There is a peace
an intuitive knowing
that fits
like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle
into a coherent whole,
a peace that seeks and finds
Peace.

There is Peace
longing to be present
in all the world,
 Peace that desires
nothing more
than quiet
forgiveness, acceptance
and recognition
of the samenesses and differences
that makes us human.

When peace and Peace
connect, as if God’s hand
on the Sistine Chapel finally
reaches Adam’s,
the world will breathe
a sigh of relief,
and the thank you will reverberate
through
eternity.

©Jennifer (Jinks) Hoffmann.    September   18th  2009

Rosh Hashanah blessings!

To celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Spiritual Directors International announces the newest SDI You Tube video in the "Spiritual Directors International Learns From ..." series!

Rabbi Ted Falcon offers guidance to everyone in this new YouTube video about Jewish Spiritual Direction.

Rabbi Falcon talks about Torah as a paradigm for spiritual awakening, and spiritual direction as a place for doubts and questions to be explored. "The real challenge is to become peace."

Rabbi Ted Falcon has been a teacher and student of Jewish meditation for over thirty years.

To be the first to view new educational videos, add your name to the YouTube subscription service for sdiworld videos.

View additional YouTube videos in the SDI learns from ... series.

September 16, 2009:
Spiritual Directors International is featured in The New York Times magazine article, "The Right Way to Pray?" by Zev Chafets!

Read Chafets' experience of spiritual direction, four ways to pray- "Gimme!" "Thanks!" "Oops!" and "Wow!", along with insightful interviews and reflections.

Article quotes to tickle your interest:

• Quoting Joy Carol, an Anglican spiritual director, Chafets writes: “I would hope that you would find yourself moving to a deeper level of questions, insights, spiritual growth, and with that a yearning for the Presence of the Divine. Prayer would naturally be a part of the process — and we would work out a way for you to pray that would fit your style of life and your unique spiritual journey."

• “People once learned to pray from priests and ministers and rabbis,” Liz Ellmann, executive director of Spiritual Directors International, told me.

• "After 90 minutes of spiritual discussion, the sun was sinking over Broadway, a sure sign that my time was almost up. “What do I do now?” I asked. “Just ask yourself: ‘What is really meaningful to me in my life? Is there something I’m longing for?’ Let it roll around in your brain. If you would like to come back, you’re very welcome to.”

• “I’m saying that techniques can make a difference,” Rabbi Gellman said. “Like wrapping yourself in a prayer shawl if you want to shut out the world. But really, when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”

• “What about adults who want to learn to pray?”

• “Prayer is like other activities,” the Rev. Daniel Henderson told me when we met at the tabernacle the week before Easter. He was visiting Brooklyn with a group of seminary students from Virginia. “You learn from people who are already good at it,” he went on."

• "Catholic prayer has not only become more accessible to the laity, it seems; it has also become more private and personal. Janet Ruffing, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, is the director of Fordham’s program on spirituality and spiritual direction. “In America, among Roman Catholics, roughly 80 percent of those doing pastoral ministry in Catholic parishes are women,” she says. “Women religious have been very active in promoting deeper contemplative, mystical prayer. Until Vatican II, that was reserved for the very few. Now it is becoming the ordinary expectation for people with a regular prayer life.”"

• "There are some 300,000 churches in America, and I could have picked any one to attend on Easter morning, but I liked being in this one. Especially the kids. They didn’t need Reverend Henderson’s prayer techniques, or the high-tech mantras of the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Their prayers weren’t Rabbi Gellman’s suburban Jewish prayers of Thanks! offered to whom it may concern. They didn’t pray to de-center their egos or find transcendence or to set off on a lifelong therapeutic spiritual journey. They prayed to a God with whom they were on a first-name basis, and they believed their prayers gave them power, which they used on behalf of their asthmatic sisters and infirm grandparents and a kid they knew with burns on his body."

Click here to read The New York Times magazine article, "The Right Way to Pray?" by Zev Chafets.

Please share your comments in the SDI blog.

The Shack
by Wm. Paul Young in collaboration with Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings
Windblown Media, 2007 252 pages

When I read The Shack this summer I felt affectionately connected to God—in myself, in creation, in other people, and on high. Not new feelings but renewed feelings. I’d resisted reading it in part because it was all the rage and I’m cynical about the tastes of the masses, and in part because I’d heard it was evangelical propaganda full of biblical literalism and not for sophisticated progressives who take the bible seriously but not literally, like my image of myself. And in part because a one of my favorite parishioners, an African American who grew up in Sierra Leone wasn't sure about it and asked me to read it. The lovely irony of this will become clear when you read the book.

The Shack is a parable, a wisdom tale designed to startle and reveal something new. The story is about a father’s spiritual trip, and I say trip, because it is not a steadfast faith journey that evolves and matures over time with trust and prayer. It’s a crisis trip, an internal psychological and spiritual conversion of soul and mood: from a life of grim plodding, possessed by grief, laden with a habit of gloom larger than Eeyore’s to a life full of joy grounded in wisdom not rapture. Isn't that what everyone who prays desires? The plot isn’t complicated. It’s a reiteration of the story of the biblical Job, the good guy who is struck by more personal tragedy than anyone should have to bear and asks, Why? Job is far more dramatic in his impatient refusal to let go of the besetting question about why bad things happen to good people than is Mackenzie Alan Phillips in The Shack who has sunken into a faith of empty duty and spiritual deadness—until he gets an odd invitation in the mail.

Isn't this essentially the plot of everyone who seeks divine consolation in prayer and come for guidance into spiritual direction?

The ideas in this book aren’t new: God in three persons, God who meets us and loves us at the center of our pain, Jesus in living color. It’s evangelical Christian propaganda as I’d feared. What is new is that the theological ideas are wrapped, often not too tightly, in personal narrative, someone’s experience filled with characters you can fall in love with, identify with, care about. You keep reading even though you think you can guess what might happen. To Christian's the story is the one we hear in Church every Sunday and then some—with a twist. One of the novel’s central characters is God-relating-to-God. Hey, don’t you have inner dialogues? But are yours all filled with mutual respect and love—and good boundaries? The gift of his book is that it gives readers a new image of God, not an abstraction or doctrine but as characters in a novel, drawn with sympathy and color, characters that sustain the narrative, characters you want to know. That’s new and it is charming. Here is a God-image easy to see and to trust in prayer. What makes The Shack not really a good novel is that its plot is weak, the writing not very creative, the dramatic action not suspenseful but forced into the service of an agenda, the solutions contrived, the wisdom un-nuanced. The plot quickly takes second place to the agenda of the author and collaborators with just enough change of scene to keep you going. What starts as a story turns into a sermon, embarrassingly preachy in spots, especially near the end when a clear Christian refrain shows up uninvited. I cringed.

My Jewish blood also curdled in a couple of places that were unnecessarily anti-semitic and insulting to the Hebrew scriptures. The story doesn’t carry its own weight throughout. As I’d feared it is also biblical literalism thinly disguised. Why am I not in a rant? Disgusted? I don’t know. I just got into the scene, the relationships, corny but alluring, often followed up with a tidbit of irresistible wisdom like the Eden myth question: “Rumors of glory are often hidden inside what many consider myths and tales.” Or the human soul as a living fractal—wild, messy always in process, patterns emerging, alive, growing and needing constant tending. Jesus takes Mack on a walk across the water. I giggled with them as they stepped off the dock, carrying their socks and shoes and rolling up their pants just in case. This and other biblical scenarios are simply portrayed without fanfare. They’re just acted out in character. Who cares if they actually happened? It is not fact that inspires faith but warmth. Do we spiritual directors at our best not risk walking on the water with our directees?

The Shack is vulnerable, open to all kinds of scholarly nitpicking, literary scorn, religious defensiveness, much of it justified. But does it work anyway? I think it does for one reason only: the characters are loveable, charming, their voices convincing. You want more. You fall in love. You want this kind of love, this kind of God. I wonder if that is why this book is so popular. It allows us to fall in love, to be as a child, to let go of proofs, to enjoy a story that touches our humanity at its most vulnerable and presents an ancient Christian insight in new garb.

The Shack is also fragile because it is a bridge, a string bridge to be sure, but a bridge nevertheless between wherever evangelical Christianity on the "right" and wherever liberal or progressive Christianity is on the "left". To cross this bridge will take more than reading one book. But The Shack invites us to start. Coming together will take courage and trust in the long slow work of God as we traverse with care, holding hands and watching where we place our feet.

Is this not the ministry of spiritual direction? Is this not the vulnerability that happens in prayer? If this book does nothing else it give us fresh dynamic language and imagery for divinity and goes a long way to balance transcendent and immanent, love and freedom, revelation and psychology. This is evangelical Christianity in its loveliest form.

Reviewer: Lyn G. Brakeman is an Episcopal priest and the author of two books Spiritual Lemons and The God Between Us, and a blog.

The day after tragedy strikes, we awaken to a new world and begin to deal with the aftermath. Last weekend, I visited friends in New York City. I worked with one of them on Wall Street during my twenties, and she still works in the financial markets. I was moved by the resiliency in my friends and in the city.

We all have the capacity to respond with peace. Meeting regularly with a spiritual director helps us learn how to respond with a grateful, peaceful heart, even when tragedy strikes. We learn to appreciate the opportunity to practice becoming a peacemaker every day. No matter what happens, we can develop the capacity to pray for peace, and to respond with peace. The greater act is peace.
 
May these prayers of peace help us become people of peace, one step at a time.

AFRICAN NATIVE PRAYER FOR PEACE
Almighty God, the Great Thumb we cannot evade to tie any knot; the Roaring Thunder that splits mighty trees; the all-seeing Lord up on high who sees even the footprints of an antelope on a rock mass here on Earth. You are the one who does not hesitate to respond to our call. You are the cornerstone of peace.
 
BAHAI' PRAYER FOR PEACE
Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be fair in they judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be a lamp unto those who walk in darkness, and a home to the stranger. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be a breath of life to the body of humankind, a dew to the soil of the human heart, and a fruit upon the tree of humility.
 
BUDDHIST PRAYER FOR PEACE
May all beings everywhere plagued with sufferings of body and mind quickly be free from their illnesses. May those frightened cease to be afraid, and may those bound be free. May the powerless find power, and may people think of befriending one another. May those who find themselves in trackless, fearful wildernesses--the children, the aged, the unprotected--be guarded by beneficent celestials, and may they swiftly attain Buddhahood.

CHRISTIAN PRAYER FOR PEACE
Blessed are the PEACEMAKERS, for they shall be known as the Children of God. But I say to you that hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To those who strike you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from those who take away your cloak, do not withhold your coat as well. Give to everyone who begs from you, and of those who take away your goods, do not ask them again. And as you wish that others would do to you do, do so to them."

FIRST NATIONS NATIVE AMERICAN PRAYER FOR PEACE
Oh Great Spirit of our Ancestors, I raise my pipe to you. To your messengers the four winds, and to Mother Earth who provides for your children. Give us the wisdom to teach our children to love, to respect, and to be kind to each other so that they may grow with peace in mind. Let us learn to share all the good things that you provide for us on this Earth.

HINDU PRAYER FOR PEACE
Oh God, lead us from the unreal to the Real. Oh God, lead us from darkness to light. Oh God, lead us from death to immortality. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti unto all. Oh Lord God almighty, may there be peace in celestial regions. May there be peace on earth. May the waters be appeasing, May herbs be wholesome, and may trees and plants bring peace to all. May all beneficent beings bring peace to us. May thy Vedic Law propagate peace all through the world. May all things be a source of peace to us. And may thy peace itself bestow peace on all, and may that peace come to me also.

JAINIST PRAYER FOR PEACE
Peace and Universal Love is the essence of the Gospel preached by all the Enlightened Ones. The Lord has preached that equanimity is the Dharma. Forgive do I creatures all, and let all creatures forgive me. Unto all have I amity, and unto none enmity. Know that violence is the root cause of all miseries in the world. Violence, in fact, is the knot of bondage. "Do not injure any living being." This is the eternal, perennial, and unalterable way of spiritual life. A weapon howsoever powerful it may be, can always be superseded by a superior one; but no weapon can, however, be superior to non-violence and love.

JEWISH PRAYER FOR PEACE
Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, that we may walk the paths of the Most High. And we shall beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation--neither shall they learn war any more. And none shall be afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of Hosts has spoken.

MUSLIM PRAYER FOR PEACE
In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. Praise be to the Lord of the Universe who has created us and made us into tribes and nations, that we may know each other, not that we may despise each other. If the enemy incline toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace, and trust in God, for the Lord is the one that heareth and knoweth all things. And the servants of God, Most Gracious are those who walk on the Earth in humility, and when we address, them, we say "PEACE."
 
SHINTO PRAYER FOR PEACE
"Although the people living across the ocean surrounding us, I believe, are all our brothers and sisters, why are there constant troubles in this world? Why do winds and waves rise in the ocean surrounding us? I only earnestly wish that the wind will soon puff away all the clouds which are hanging over the tops of the mountains."

SIKH PRAYER FOR PEACE
"God adjudges us according to our deeds, not the coat that we wear: that Truth is above everything, but higher still is truthful living." Know that we attaineth God when we loveth, and only that victory endures in consequence of which no one is defeated.
 
ZOROASTRIAN PRAYER FOR PEACE
We pray to God to eradicate all the misery in the world: that understanding triumph over ignorance, that generosity triumph over indifference, that trust triumph over contempt, and that truth triumph over falsehood.

To learn more:
PEACE SEEDS
Peace Seeds represent the 12 prayers for peace prayed in Assisi, Italy, on the Day of Prayer for World Peace during the United Nations International Year of Peace, 1986. Distribution of the prayers is encouraged.

If you have a favorite prayer for peace or hope for peace, please add it to the Reply section below.

Many thanks to the hard work and deep prayer that was offered by the volunteer servant leaders of Spiritual Directors International, known as the Coordinating Council.

To learn more about the people in the picture, Jinks Hoffmann, David Liedl, TOR; Miriam Frey; Christopher McCauley; Sally Taylor; and Terry Moran, CSSR; visit the servant leadership pages of Spiritual Directors International.

Please pray in gratitude for the members of the Coordinating Council. If you would like to offer your gratefulness for their service by writing a note, you are welcome to add a comment.