To Go to the Deepest Place with God: Canon Susie's Story & The Gift of Spiritual Direction
The Anglican Diocese in New England continues to grow each year, adding to our family new believers and those from other denominations. As Anglicans, we strongly encourage devotional practices that help Christians grow in their faith such as personal prayer and Bible reading. However, there are other practices that are perhaps lesser-known but of great importance to Christian formation nonetheless. Today we want to introduce you to one of those practices called spiritual direction and to the story of Rev. Cn. Dr. Susan “Susie” Skillen, our Canon for Spiritual Formation.
Canon Susie defines spiritual direction in her materials as a three-way conversation between the “directee,” the “director” and the Holy Spirit. The director seeks to provide a safe and prayerful space in which director and directee can look together for the presence of God in the events of the directee’s daily life. The director encourages and supports the directee in order that he or she may respond meaningfully to God’s invitations. Spiritual direction differs from therapy, discipling, counseling or mentoring.
If that sounds unfamiliar to you, you can take heart that it was just as unfamiliar to Canon Susie when she first encountered the idea around 30 years ago. At that time, she was being trained in healing prayer ministry with a group of people at All Saints Church (at the time All Saints West Newbury.) The woman who was leading the training began to describe spiritual direction and Canon Susie immediately thought, “I really want that.”
Interest turned to action and she began meeting with a spiritual director who was a lay woman in Ipswich. She describes how nervous she was in the very beginning: “I had gone to Gordon College and I grew up in a Christian home, so I knew the Bible. I thought, well I can go to her and talk about the Bible, but the woman didn’t want to talk about the Bible; she wanted to talk about me, about who I was and then where God was in my life and what he was doing.” It was a surprising and exciting journey: “I didn’t know who I was. I was in my thirties and I found there was a lot to discover about myself.” A good spiritual director, she says, can ask a question that opens up a new way of thinking about God or oneself that one might never have considered before. After 30 years, she says this still happens. “I can bring any subject to my spiritual director, even an interaction I had with a neighbor and how that made me feel, and she’ll move it to a deeper place, asking: ‘where is God speaking to you in that?’”
Often spiritual direction goes to the place of asking what are the deeper longings of our hearts? because when we go to the deeper longings, that is the place where God is drawing us to himself. We experience it as longing, but it is really God’s longing to pull us into deeper relationship with him. It’s not just the mystics who say this – Cn Susie mentions that John Calvin opens his Institutes of the Christian Religion with the claim: without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God and without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self. She says this knowledge is so tied together that when we neglect to take that deeper journey into ourselves, we are not experiencing the fullness of who God is. When we do begin to know ourselves, we find a wonderful pathway of knowing the deep love of God for us and that is life-changing.
She is quick to point out that this journey is for everyone. “I think some people have the idea that spiritual direction is only for ‘super spiritual people’ – people who have regular prayer lives, people considered very deep Christians, or however one might define a ‘super spiritual person.’ That’s not the case. This is for anyone who wants to go deeper with God.” There are other ways to learn about yourself, to find your personality type and so forth, but there is only one way to go to the deep places and that is by taking the journey of asking: who am I in the loving heart of God?
It wasn’t too long after meeting with a spiritual director that Cn. Susie wanted to get training in spiritual direction from the Shalem Institute (at the time it was thoroughly Christian), and her parish priest, Rev. Bill Murdoch (now Bishop Bill Murdoch) became her sponsor for the program. Soon she started providing spiritual direction, but she sensed an invitation to more. A friend said, what about becoming a priest? That was the last thing in her mind. How can I be like Fr. Bill, she wondered? But as she started looking, she met a woman who was doing spiritual direction and was also a priest, and realized, “I really do identify with the kind of ministry she is doing and I think that might be my call,” so she began a discernment process.
During this season, she and her husband, Dr. John Skillen, had moved their family to Italy where he was starting the Orvieto Program for Gordon College. Canon Susie became connected with St. Pauls Within the Walls [Episcopal Church] and was ordained a priest in Rome in 2005, going on to start a little parish in Orvieto, Italy. When the Skillens decided it was time to come home stateside, Bishop Bill invited her to be part of the new diocese he was forming in New England, eventually commissioning her to start a spiritual director training program that was orthodox, Scripture-based, and had an Anglican ethos. So in 2010, that’s what she did.
After 12 years, she says it’s just been wonderful. “I love doing the training and it has continued to expand.” She originally just led training for local people, mostly those in the ADNE, but with the rise of virtual gatherings and now that it is listed on the website, people from much further away are participating. “I’m getting people from Kenya, Switzerland, California, Washington, Minnesota, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, as well as people from New England. So it’s getting to be really exciting. They fly in for the 3-day retreats but we have monthly zoom meetings for group spiritual direction and peer supervision. It’s been interesting to see it evolve…I’m amazed at what God has done.”
Canon Susie sees value in the training, even for people who aren’t 100% sure if they are called, in that it also serves as a valuable time of discernment. She says a lot of people - probably most - are not sure if they are called when they join the program, but for those who discern they aren’t, it becomes a great spiritual formation opportunity as they learn about and implement new prayer practices, reflect on readings and their own spiritual life, and participate in group spiritual direction, discerning where God is leading them next.
The Anglican Diocese in New England is so grateful to God for Canon Susie’s ministry among us - not only in the realm of spiritual direction but also in her leadership in the area of clergy care and priestly ministry; in every way she answers God’s call to her - in her own words, “to help people come to know how much God loves them. That’s the deepest thing, that’s what changes us deep inside, that’s what sets us free.”
To find a spiritual director that will meet in person or virtually, Canon Susie says there are a number of directories online, but people can reach out to her for resources and recommendations.
To learn more about her Spiritual Direction Training Program, Holy Conversations visit: adne.org/formation. Applications to the 2022-2024 cohort are due May 1, 2022.