CARNEYS POINT – The middle-aged man, focused on the crisis of a recent divorce and the challenges of a new job, expected a bit of Dr. Phil homespun advice and some pleasant psychobabble cheerleading when he visited Deacon Kevin Laughlin at St. Gabriel’s Church here.
Instead, he found himself reflecting upon the harsh words in the prophet Jeremiah’s lamentation:
You duped me, Lord, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.
The short session offered a sliver into the meaning of spiritual direction.
“People come to me to see the place of God in their lives,” says Deacon Laughlin, director of religious education at St. Gabriel’s. Ordained just last year, the retired high school English teacher felt a need for more schooling and enrolled in the Faith Formation program sponsored by the Diocese of Camden.
He wanted to do spiritual direction, akin to personal counseling, but with a focus on how God is working in a person’s struggles and joys. It is a long Catholic tradition, with different approaches, including Jesuit, Salesian, Franciscan and Redemptorist ways of gently assisting believers to see how God is working through the struggles and joys of everyday life.
Deacon Laughlin reflected with the client upon the passage in Jeremiah, explaining the context of the book, which is about a people who have been banished from their home. Other times, he may reflect upon the story of Jonah, a metaphor about saying no to God, or the woman at the well in John’s Gospel, a story about Jesus calling back not only a single woman to faith but the people of Samaria as well.
A session may include a reflection on a Scriptural passage important in a person’s life. Deacon Laughlin is as apt to ask about how a client relates to his parish as how he relates to a spouse or children.
Deacon Laughlin will soon graduate from a program in pastoral counseling at Neumann University in Aston, Pa. The cost of the program is subsidized by the diocese and the parish as part of the Faith Formation program. He pays only a third of the cost, as do the more than 300 participants in the program. They are trained through various online and in-person programs through Neumann, the College of St. Elizabeth, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary and the University of Dayton.
Deacon Laughlin emphasizes that the process of spiritual direction is not supposed to place him as a detached guru. He is, rather, an attentive listener, seeing those who come to him as fellow pilgrims along a spiritual path.
While Deacon Laughlin says he appreciated his diaconate training, which focused on much of the nuts and bolts of ministry, he wanted more and is using his faith formation training not only in counseling but in other forms of ministry.
For example, the parish will hold a religious education faith festival, bringing together all ages. It’s a way, he says, of nudging the parish away from a strict child-centered approach to religious education, bringing together all who seek spiritual support, emphasizing that faith formation is more than a phase of childhood.
He’s also using what he’s learned in ministry to those in recovery from alcohol addiction, particularly in retreats and evenings of recollection.
One way to grasp spiritual direction is to point out what it is not. While it is similar to other forms of counseling, the focus remains God-centered, and at the same time it doesn’t seek to impose God on someone’s life, instead preferring to point out those areas where God may be working. In that sense, says Deacon Laughlin, while a deep Catholic tradition, it also can include Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others.
The appeal is eclectic. His Neumann University class includes a woman living in a senior home, who reflects frequently upon God’s presence in her life as a wife and mother. The class involves Protestants as well as Catholics.
It’s an indication, he says, that from all walks of life, “people are hungry for God in their lives, meaning and purpose. There is a spiritual thirst.”
Peter Feuerherd is communications director for the Diocese of Camden and associate publisher of the Star Herald. This is the first in an occasional series of articles on how Faith Formation is making an impact in the diocese. For more information about the diocesan Faith Formation program, call Linda Robinson at 856-583-6116.
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