May Day! May Day! Around the world and across traditions, spiritual directors are responding to the distress call with heartfelt compassion, contemplative action, and peacemaking.

During the extraordinary educational events in San Francisco, keynoter Brian Swimme passionately put in plain words, “The task of spiritual direction is to deconstruct the maladaptive story that humans are living out of. The central task of spiritual direction is to create a culture that amplifies life’s hum … to learn that Earth is not a collection of resources but a community of life that the human is invited to join.”

 

 

Other keynoters, workshop presenters, and pilgrimage leaders, including Mary Ann Scofield, RSM; Jane Vennard; Alexander Shaia; Brother David Steindl Rast, OSB; Mary Ann Clifford, RSM; and Catherine Regan encouraged us to “amplify life’s hum” in a variety of ways: by listening to the plight of workers, of prisoners, of people needing hospice care, as well as listening to the birds and trees of Muir Woods.

Gratefulness and prayer were presented as an ancient-yet-new way of living, of being in the world, of “amplifying life’s hum.” According to Jane Vennard, “Our task here is to continually attend to the experience of Oneness, realizing again and again that nothing truly separates us from God, from each other, and from all creation. I am not only to love my neighbor, I am my neighbor. I am not only to care for this created world, I am the created world. All is one and All is holy.”

During the educational events, we honored elders in the spiritual direction community and welcomed newcomers.

We acknowledged in ritual and song that "the function of one generation is to make change possible for the next. The real function of each generation is to sow the seeds that will make a better world possible in the future" (Joan Chittester).

As a global learning community, we walk in solidarity with elders and newcomers, and with many in between who tend to the radical journey of our lifetime, a passage that Brian Swimme describes in this way: “The journey is from seeing Earth as Resources to Relatives.”

What a blessing to be related to YOU! As brothers and sisters, how might we “amplify life’s hum” together through the ministry and service of spiritual direction?