II. Five Scenarios

A. Powerful Encounter with God in a Park (male, painful/troubling)

Note: This is one of five hypothetical direction scenarios. All actual direction sessions are confidential.

I have been seeing Tom monthly for direction for six months. Although I know he is an avid outdoorsman, he has never brought an experience in nature for use in direction. So, at the end of our sixth session, I invited him to consider a prayer in nature: “Tom, your Centering Prayer practice is deepening, and it continues to shape you in important ways. But I want to invite you to experiment with another prayer practice in the next few weeks. You mentioned that you are going camping next weekend at a state park. While you’re there, I invite you to take a slow, leisurely walk for about an hour. Be open to whatever God has to show you. Be attentive to whatever sticks out to you on your walk.”

At the next session, Tom shared: “I tried the prayer in nature that you suggested last time. This is a little strange, but, as I reflected on my experience, the part that stood out most strongly to me was seeing a dead squirrel that had been run over near the entrance of the park. It was really disturbing – and not at all what I expected my prayer in nature to be.”
As a director, one of the challenges of this scenario would be the element of surprise. My expectation was to invite Tom explicitly into the Nature arena, but suddenly there are issues of death and how God is present in the grotesque, the painful, and the troubling – not just in the beautiful and comforting. It also invokes my own feelings of discomfort at seeing dead animals – and my own anger when I see animals run over and thoughtlessly left on the roadside. I would likely need to bracket my own experience and reflections in order to be fully present to Tom’s experience. I would hope to keep in mind that this experience is an opportunity to invite Tom into the affective, non-thematic, and Mystery dimensions – not just remain in the theoretical realm of the interpretive dimension.