Spiritual direction has been described in a myriad of ways, but in the end what it is primarily is a personal encounter with God.

These are the stories of three women religious who have sought spiritual direction in their own lives and now guide others in a mutual conversation with God.

Sister Clare Graham
Sister Claire Graham has been connecting people with God since she became a Sister of Social Service 33 years ago.

She became a spiritual director much more recently.

Sister Graham’s personal conversations with God really began in earnest when she was given her first assignment as director of a Sisters of Social Service retreat house in 1975.

“I remember sitting in the retreat house and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just do nothing all day but talk about God,’” she recalled.

Sister Graham began meeting with her own spiritual director not long after entering religious life.

“I can’t live without a spiritual director,” she said. “I think we have this funny notion that nuns and priests always have it all together but we don’t.”

From 1979 to 1986 Sister Graham worked at Stanford Home for Children and then was involved in several ministries of the Sisters of Social Service in Los Angeles. She was also on her way to shaping a personal definition of spirituality.

“I believe spirituality is who we are in God’s image and the institution or church is how we are called to live that out that knowledge of God in our lives,” she said.

Sister Graham found herself involved informally in spiritual direction when she and Sister of Social Service Catherine Connell founded Wellspring Women’s Center in 1987, a Sacramento drop-in center serving women and children.

At Wellspring she began her work with women alone, many broken and deprived of material possessions, women whom she empowered with a single message.

“Mainly I was trying to show those women they had self-worth, that God loved them just the way they were,” she said.

In 1996 she left Wellspring to serve in pastoral counseling and outreach ministry programs such as the Step Ministry program for the homeless at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Sacramento.

It was at this time she was encouraged by a friend to enroll in a spiritual direction class at the Bread of Life Center in Davis. Being a spiritual director, she found, was a vocation that fit like a glove.

In 2000 she left her work at St. Francis of Assisi and opened the Spiritus Center in Sacramento, which provides individual spiritual direction as well as weekend retreats and days of recollection.

Within weeks people came from all walks of life, people considering religious life, women religious, a deacon and a few priests, but primarily members of the laity.

“I’m fairly well known,” said Sister Graham, a gross understatement considering the fact that the native Sacramentan has an extensive network of friends within and beyond the Catholic community.

“I believe in the world today people are dying for spirituality,” she said. “There are very few places they’re safe to talk about their journey to God. This little Spiritus Center provides a place people can come without any fear.”

As is typically the case in spiritual direction, Sister Graham meets with “directees” on a regular basis, at least monthly. What happens during those meetings, she said, is “a connection of two people searching for God.”

“You don’t have the answers and I don’t have the answers,” Sister Graham said. “God has the answers and in our conversations we learn what the answers can be for us.”

Sister Marcella Fabing
From Sister Marcella Fabing’s point of view, spiritual direction has roots planted firmly in family.

A Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Sister Marcella grew up in San Francisco. She believes her chosen vocation as a woman religious was nurtured by “the very real faith” of her parents.

“God was a part of their lives, their lived faith life, the things they did for family and other people,” she said. “It’s always been there.”

Sister Fabing is associate director of Christ the King Passionist Retreat Center in Citrus Heights, where she works in spiritual direction with people making retreats on an almost daily basis.

Her brother, Jesuit Father Robert Fabing, is founder and director of the Jesuit Institute for Family Life Association, a series of 44 marriage counseling and family therapy centers in California and Oregon.

Sister Fabing believes that while not everyone is called to be a spiritual director, parents, grandparents, aunts and cousins are engaged in spiritual direction in a more informal way.

“We need to give credit to the wisdom, faith, and lived experience of family members and parish leaders, wise people who live their faith and are there to listen and respond to questions…who are finding God in their life experiences,” she said.

A self-described “life learner,” Sister Fabing said her own decision to make her first profession as a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet was influenced by the fact that her community’s charism is “contemplation in action.”

“Prayer is the source of all we do,” she said. “In spirituality we come to know not with the head but with the heart…the experience of God through the good times, the hard times, the joyful times and the dry times.”

Through the years she has worked as an elementary school teacher, in diocesan catechetical ministry in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and in adult faith formation in the Diocese of San Jose. She was involved with spiritual direction during her tenure at Vallombrosa Retreat Center in Menlo Park from 1988 to 1992 and a year later began working on women’s weekend retreats at Christ the King Retreat Center.

“Spiritual direction is God’s plan for me,” she said. “It just evolved.”

Sister Fabing said it is important for spiritual directors to have an understanding of their own spiritual journey “to be sensitive to the journey of others.”

“Even as I have grown in religious life I still work on deepening that relationship (with God),” said Sister Fabing, who has her own spiritual director.

One key component of the spiritual direction process is “helping the directee do the articulation of what God is doing in their lives, in their hearts, and in their prayers.”

“You do a lot of listening,” she said.

Sister Fabing has noticed growing numbers of women, both nuns and laywomen, are finding vocations in spiritual direction and seeking it to grow their own faith lives.

“It has taken spiritual direction and infused it with the feminine dimension, the intuitive sense, the listening sense of women and an understanding of how growth happens,” she said.

The growing hunger for spiritual direction is a positive sign for more vocations to religious life, she said.

“The spirit of God is alive and well in this church and people are hungering for a deepening relationship,” she said. “It was part of my own vocation, being called and saying, ‘OK Lord, here I come, ready or not.’”

Sister Katherine Doyle
To become engaged in conversation with Mercy Sister Katherine Doyle is to appreciate not only the spiritual richness of the words she speaks but a peace-filled silence after the conversation ends.

Her personal conversations with God began in earnest when she made her first profession to the Sisters of Mercy of the Auburn regional community in 1965. Even before Sister Doyle entered religious life at the age of 17, she remembers talking to her parish priest about her desire to deepen her life of prayer.

The path she took as a Mercy Sister led her to positions as a teacher and educator in Sacramento-area Catholic high schools in the late 1960s until 1983. Then she became a consultant for youth catechesis in the diocese’s youth and young adult ministry and as director of the Department of Catholic Faith Formation.

Sister Doyle was elected to the Mercy regional keadership team in 1994 and served as director of Mercy Center in Auburn. She has also served as Mercy’s director of communications and archivist, and currently works at Mercy Center in spiritual ministries outreach, a combination of retreat work, adult formation and spiritual direction.

She sees her calling to spiritual direction as “a gift given for the sake of others.”

“You don’t just decide you’re going to be a spiritual director, you have to be called to it,” Sister Doyle said. “I slipped into the ministry as a result of people seeking me out and asking me to journey with them.”

The defining elements of spiritual direction, she believes, focus on “the directee’s search to know God’s deepest desire for them and the openness of both director and directee to honor the movement of the spirit” within their lives.

“For that reason, the whole of one’s life is the context for the conversation,” Sister Doyle said.

The perception that spiritual direction is problem solving, counseling or being told what God wants from you, Sister Doyle said, misses the point.

“I prefer (to think of myself) as a spiritual companion because it is God who is the director,” she said. “My task is to facilitate the encounter between the person and God and keep myself out of the way.”

Sister Doyle serves as a spiritual director for laity, religious, deacons, and people discerning a call to religious life. The majority of people are Catholic but people from other faith traditions also seek her spiritual direction.

Her view is that a certain maturity is needed to benefit from spiritual direction.

“Young people frequently need help with vocation discernment but the majority are in the second half of life,” Sister Doyle said. “They are seeking a deeper meaning in life, a deeper relationship with God. That is the task of the second half of life.”

There is a distinct difference between the role of a spiritual director and a person who is a vocation minister working with a person exploring a call to religious life.

“A spiritual director helps the person focus on their relationship with God and response in life,” she said. “Making the choice is not the primary focus.”

Looking back over her 40 years as a religious, Sister Doyle said that listening to people’s experience of God has been filled with grace.

“I am reminded of the movement of God within me,” she said. “People’s desire, vulnerability, longing for God and dedication to do God’s will constantly challenge my fidelity and fill me with awe.”

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