390 - Soul Friend

Soul Friend
By Kenneth Leech
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1980. 250 pp. $8.95.

Forget the title. All well and good that it's from an ancient Celtic saying, "Anyone without a soul friend is a body without a head." But the American edition of this book (already a best-seller in England) is meant for people who rarely banter in ancient Celtic sayings. How could Harper & Row have put out a truly fine essay-doctrinally rich and historically infortned-on the Christian interior life and spiritual guidance only to give it a title that sounds like the diary of a greening hermit whose best friend was a clever racoon?

But the author is no hermit. An Anglican priest, Leech has been engaged in teaching, youth ministry, and parish life in his native England and more recently has lectured in the United States. His book grew from lectures to priests in training at Canterbury and-it would seem very clear-from colloquium spirituale with them and with many others.

The subtitle, "The Practice of Christian Spirituality," suggests more. Leech wisely contextualizes Christian spirituality at the very start within today's searches for interiority: LSD, TM, the Jesus movement, liberation theories, and the charismatic experience. By the end of his careful and compassionate survey, the keen need for spiritual direction today is palpable. This is one of Leech's conclusions.

392 - Soul Friend

But Christian spirituality has always demanded direction, so there are purposes not peculiar to our times. Working to clarify them, Leech writes a very fine préecis of the history of Christian spiritualities and of the traditions of spiritual direction. He is also thorough, including desert fathers, orthodoxy and monasticism, pre-and post-Reformation guides, and modern trends among Anglicans, Protestants, and Catholics (particularly American).

From this summary emerges the validation of another of the author's conclusions-the spiritual director is a professional. Yet here's something else odd about that title. Anyone can be a true "soul friend" for the glory of God. But the Christian living an interior life will want to search out and pray for a skilled director, whom Leech (arguing "from the tradition") assigns five marks: a director is possessed by the Spirit, a person of experience ("with the realities of prayer and life"), of learning, of discernment, and one who gives way to the Holy Spirit.

It is obvious, however, that during the twentieth century the profession of pastoral counseling and spiritual direction has been closely tied up with and in some measure subverted by psychological counseling. By reflecting at some length on the histories of and connections between spiritual direction, counseling, and therapy, Leech cautions against confusing them. The cure of souls and the cure of neuroses may overlap, but they are not the same. For no Christian's interior life proceeds apart from the life of the Kingdom and of humankind as a whole.

The bridge between interior and Kingdom is discernment of spirits and the signs of the times. Leech writes some fine pages about discernment, but he misplaces them in his chapter on counseling and therapy. He thereby tends to privatize the process as belonging to "Casting out the Demons" (the section's title). This is a rather serious and surprising lapse which has consequences in his important final chapter. Before coming to that chapter and its thesis, the author gives a rather brief but quite clear and inviting treatment of prayer-its practice, obstacles, and function in the Christian life.

He finally states the thesis he has bad in mind all along: pastoral counseling and spiritual direction cannot authentically operate under "an excessive preoccupation with self-development at the expense of social justice." The proper theological context of spiritual direction is not merely the personal relationship of the individual and the Savior; it is rather "the sphere of the Kingdom of God, the liberated zone of God's movement."

Leech is not prepared-who among us could be? to urge definitive ways in which personal spiritual development and the social growth of the Kingdom can be achieved. His brief chapter is titled, "Toward a Prophetic Understanding of Spiritual Direction." His argument is rather that "Diakrisis [which be has translated as "discernment"], that fundamental characteristic of the spiritual director, is a function of krisis, judgement; and the central krisis of the gospel is the coming of the Kingdom."

394 - Soul Friend

The desert into which today's spiritual guides go is not an Egyptian wadi. It is the wasteland of human life. They return from there ready to suggest to other pilgrims which spirit leads to self-preoccupation and which to, what Ignatius of Loyola called discreta charitas, discerning love like Jesus' love.

This is all very serious matter for a book called Soul Friend. The fear must be that those who ought to read and use it will not. Spiritual directors who foment "self-realization" might expect it to be too sentimental. Social activists might misprize it as a bouquet of religiosity. Pastors might think it's about a nice thing for which they have not time. Teachers of clinical-pastoral theology (or spiritual or ascetical) might take it as that diary with the racoon.

They will all be misinformed. This is a rich and very useful book, a compendium with a thesis in one of Christianity's areas of greatest growth. Forget the title; remember the book.

Joseph A. Tetlow, S.J.
America House
New York, New York