This used to be a popular practice in Europe some centuries ago, when the prevailing culture was still infused with godliness and holiness. Even kings and other prominent men and women of the time, serious with their life, sought spiritual direction.

Nowadays, this practice is hardly known. Even in those rare occasions when this term is invoked, something else is actually meant. More than spiritual direction, what is actually sought is guidance and counseling, or psychological therapy.

The distinction is crucial. Spiritual direction has as purpose to know God's will for the person concerned. It's not just giving tips and other pieces of advice for some practical or psychological problems a person may have.

Spiritual direction is engaged in learning to establish contact and a living relationship with God. It is pursued to develop and enrich that relationship, making it impact on one's daily life and duties.

It certainly helps in filling one's interior life with God, precisely keeping a person away from the strong trend to empty his spiritual life of God and filling it instead with merely earthly things. God should be one's home base or his default home page.

Its recourse is mainly a gratuitous effort, a completely voluntary task with nary a view for some purely human or temporal profit. It is simply to deepen one's relationship with God, irrespective of the consequences.

Sadly, this essence of spiritual direction is hardly known and appreciated these days.

Even among many priests today, supposed to be the primary givers and receivers of spiritual direction, this practice is seldom done.

If pursued, it is most likely on the part of the superiors to correct certain aberrant clerical behavior, or to achieve some degree of control over their priests. This is lamentable!

On the part of the priests themselves, it is resorted to just to fulfill an obligation or a requirement. So it's likely done in a formalistic and routine way, going through the motions without connecting with the practice's real purpose.

To recover the popularity of this practice is not easy. First, the prevailing culture is not conducive. In fact, it is hostile. Any effort in this direction will certainly be an uphill struggle, involving a kind of hand-to-hand combat.

A complex tangle of misconceptions and antithetical attitudes and habits has to be sorted out and overcome.

Like, is there really a God in the first place? The grip of atheism and agnosticism, usually not formally professed, is all over. Practical atheism and agnosticism are worse than the formal ones, since the former don't bother to argue and reason out. People just live them.

There are others who doubt the possibility of really being able to know God and to know his will, let alone, to follow that will. With all the exciting things the world now has to offer, shifting gears to have spiritual direction is next to impossible.

Then strong prejudices against it still dominate. Like, that it's only for the elite, or only for those who are intellectually or temperamentally attuned to it, etc.

Thing is there's always a grain of truth to these opinions, but they actually do not detract from the objective value of spiritual direction. We just have to find a way to show the ravishing beauty and permanent relevance of spiritual direction.

Another bias is that many people can actually handle their own spiritual direction. That is, they direct their own selves, trusting solely on their own lights, thus going against the conventional wisdom that no one is a good director of his own spiritual life. He tends to be myopic and lenient to himself.

We can go on and on. But the fact still remains that spiritual direction, properly done and with proper dispositions, is a tremendous help. Even more so these days when the pace of development and the increasing number of things that engage our attention can grip us in vise-like confusion.

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Fr. Roy Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE) in Talamban, Cebu City. You can email him at:Email: roycimagala@boholchronicle.com