MY SPIRITUAL BEGINNING AND CALLING

Due to my simple farmland lifestyle, I naturally gravitate to disciplines geared to form the soul. In particular, I am drawn to prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care. Undoubtedly these are my passions.

The unconditional love of my forebears was evident. In addition to thanking God for my maternal parents, I have a tremendous amount of gratitude toward my paternal parents. I thank God for my father, Arie Lewis, and for his father, Atlas Lewis, and my mother’s father, Richard Peacock. Both my grandfather on my daddy’s side and my great-grandfather on my mama’s side were among the founders of schools and churches in their respective communities. This legacy continues in the noted communities of Bladen and Columbus counties in North Carolina. I am eternally grateful that their legacy continues through the spiritual lines of thousands of men and women of God, myself included. Because of their God-inspired tenacity, I am able to press forward to impart what God has given me in my garden of life. Thus, in the spirit of my foreparents, we continue our sacred journey together.

Our home church, Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, was where I received Christ as my Lord and personal Savior. During the fall revival of 1967 I asked him to come into my life and save me. To this day I can hear the church mothers saying, “He loves you. Just ask him into your heart. He loves you.” Over and over, they kept telling me how much Jesus loved me. And I believed them with everything in me! On this foundation, my faith journey of love began. And truly love is the foundation of my Christian experience. Most importantly it is the foundation of the Christian faith.

As Thomas Merton said, many Christians have “practically no idea of the immense love of God for them, and the power of that Love to do them good, to bring them happiness.”1 Many of us do not fully experience the joy of life, simply because we do not know the immense love that God has for us (as stated simply in John 3:16). One of the great markers of spiritual maturity is growing in awareness of the depth of God’s love.

I thank God for his faithfulness toward my siblings and me in that he blessed us with an environment of a loving, caring, and nurturing community, including our parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins. Such a foundation in my Christian journey allows me to seek ways to love unconditionally. Consequently I emphatically embrace the theology of love. I believe that love covers all kinds of sin. I believe what the world needs more is love. And is love not the greatest commandment? This is the greatest call: to love.

An individual’s spiritual development is a powerful process that results in greater depth of character. This process is traditionally called spiritual formation, which writers Richard Foster and Emilie Griffin called “a series of concrete actions that will gently move us to transformation in Christ.”2 But they were careful to alert us to the fact that the disciplines themselves are not transformative; our transformation is God’s work, a work of grace. Such grace is what equips an individual in the kingdom of God to grow spiritually. The disciplines of the Christian faith are conduits of spiritual development that catapult men and women of God to new places in their faith journey.

Spiritual formation comprises a number of spiritual disciplines that assist us in communing with Yahweh. A list of practices can incorporate numerous disciplines, but the desired outcome is the same: spiritual growth.

In this book we will focus on three disciplines: prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care. Throughout we will see that oftentimes one spiritual discipline is enhanced by and even strengthened by another. It takes a plethora of spiritual disciplines for a disciple of Christ to reach higher heights and deeper dimensions of God’s glorious, loving grace. Though prayer is often an independent discipline, it is interdependent with spiritual direction and soul care.

Before we move further, it is important to note that in some contexts, spiritual direction and soul care are used interchangeably while in others they are used distinctively. Spiritual direction is the practice of discerning the activity of God in the life of another. The term spiritual director is applied to the person who seeks God’s directives for the life of another while attentively nurturing and caring for that individual’s very soul. That is soul care.

The call of the spiritual director is to be a conduit of God who assists directees in recognizing the activity of God’s holy presence. The spiritual director must be mindful that the ultimate director is the Holy Spirit; God sees fit to use human directors in connecting his omnipresence to their directees. Without a doubt, a key element undergirding spiritual direction and soul care is prayer.

In its simplest form, prayer is communication with God. This book highlights how prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care provide resurrection power in the lives of people of African American descent.

These disciplines have been intertwined for centuries in the African American community. Truly we are people that identify with the language of the soul. Our ancestors—and even today’s spiritualists—may not identify the attentiveness we possess as spiritual direction and soul care, but the Holy Spirit of the past and the present, the keeper of our souls, is the source that we engage in each other. We speak soul to soul and spirit to spirit as we seek God and the hearts of our sisters and brothers. This is spiritual direction and this is soul care. We are the people of spirit and soul!

However, the term spiritual direction is not frequently used in the African American community (though it may be more prominent in some communities than others). For the sake of clarity, I will use the two words together as one discipline and will extract definitions where necessary. In particular, I will discuss the meaning of spiritual direction. One goal of this book is to reflect on spiritual direction in mainstream European American Christianity and to see such disciplines lived out in the African American faith community.

Before I go on, note that many contemplative patriarchs of the early church had a genealogy rooted in Africa. In her book Joy Unspeakable, Barbara Holmes, president of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, makes this clear when she identifies the spiritual leadership of several figures of African descent—Tertullian, Augustine, Cyprian, and others—who were “instrumental in the expansion and theological grounding of the early church.”3 In addition to identifying these African spiritual giants, Holmes noted that “although initially the spread of Islam limited the expansion of North African Christian practices to sub-Saharan Africa, the trajectories of today’s Christian contemplative practices can be traced to the early communities in the Middle East and Africa.”4 Thus we see spiritual leaders of the Christian faith with African roots.

Persons of African descent have a rich heritage of Christian spirituality that can be identified as far back as the first century, long before they reached the colonized shores of North America. Such a legacy is embedded in the spiritual bloodline of African Americans and can be found in numerous heroes and “sheroes” who are recognizable in African American history.

THE SHAPE OF THIS BOOK

I am excited to share with you ten men and women of God who exemplify prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care in the faith...