Listening for the Soul: Pastoral Care and Spiritual Direction

This is an amazing book and should be read by anyone who desires to develop their listening skills. This should be a mandatory reading for all who are in pastoral care.

bought as a gift

Listen to your Heart / SOu l `1

Got this for my nephew and he loved it,

I have been going through this book and each page and each chapter has new information about what it means to listen to the soul. It is more and deeper than I ever thought.

This book by Jean Stairs addresses a need in pastoral care and ministry - the attentiveness to the soul that so many people, ministers and laypersons alike, can find the love, support and care they seek in church and community. 'The world is crying out for the church to be more like the church,' Stairs states in her introduction, 'to represent the space and place where holiness, meaning, and God can be found, experienced, understood and reimagined.' This book is written largely for a Protestant audience, although there are insights to be gained by those who are Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox (and, to a lesser extent, some from outside the Christian realm, although the book is primarily written for an internal Christian audience).Stairs highlights the loss in Protestant circles of many of the spiritual aspects still honoured and available in the more liturgical churches - ideas of spiritual direction and other structures are still present there, but Protestant theology and practice views them with suspicion, for various reasons. One is the distrust of anything that moves away from a sense of sola scriptora or Christ-alone kinds of theologies. Another is a fascination with mainstream psychology and a misplaced trust in the idea of therapeutic cures being substitutes for spiritual care and direction. However, people still yearn for spiritual care and fulfillment.Part of this can be done in the actual practice of spirituality beyond the usual course of study - it isn't enough simply to read about spiritual practices, but rather one must incorporate these and do them. At my seminary, first-year students were expected to take a course that would cover in brief a successive selection of Christian spiritual practices; many students would come to seminary not only with having nothing outside of their own denomination as experience, but sometimes with nothing outside of their own congregation. There were always those students who found the course a waste of time - these were invariably the ones who read through the material, but never actually worked through the practices. However, for many if not most students, it was an awakening to the different ways of being authentically Christian in practice that can be incorporated into already existing theological and historical frameworks.Stairs' text shows many different ways of incorporating spiritual practices. I notice the word 'listen' a lot in her text, both in titles and the body of the essays - the word 'Listen' is the first word of the Benedictine rule, one of the time-honoured practices in Christian history. Stairs incorporates the idea of spirituality and spiritual practice into everyday life and work, into family and individual processes, into formal life events, and into church and worship experiences.The case study in the appendix is a wonderful postscript to Stairs' development of ideas. It recounts the experience of two women who founded a Sunday school programme, who shortly thereafter contracted cancer; one lived, and the other died. How does one deal with this kind of situation? Where is the attentiveness to the soul going to take place in the midst of this kind of happening? Stairs' gentle spirit covers it well.This is a wonderful book - it is a must read for ministers, clergy and lay, who provide pastoral care and spiritual care for people in their community, and for anyone who wants to heighten his or her sensitivity to the connections and the differences in pastoral care and spiritual direction, and how these can be applied to one's own life.

One of the best books I have read on the subject. Gets to the heart of pastoral care. Has a somewhat mystical bent.

This is an amazing, reflective, practical resource for pastors. A must have for those just beginning and those seeking refreshment. Stairs is realistic and challenging. Excellent!