Spiritual direction is a voluntary relationship between a person who seeks to grow in the Christian life and a director. The latter is not, notice, a counselor or therapist. Rather, he or she is a mature Christian who helps the directee to discern what the Holy Spirit is doing and saying, and act on that discernment, drawing nearer to God in Christ.

The focus is on intimacy with God, not on the solving of clinically identified psychological problems. The whole sinful orientation of the self, not any particular dysfunction, is the "problem" to be addressed. The director helps directees identify ways they have sought satisfaction and fulfillment from sources other than God, in the process pushing God aside. Directees are led to hear the Holy Spirit (the real spiritual director) calling them back onto the right path. The director's role is one of coming alongside, rather than dictating a program. The relationship thus shares some features with the Celtic ideal of a "soul friend" or anamchara. However, its nurture usually flows only one way.

Being a good spiritual director requires not a doctorate, but mature theological knowledge, a degree of holiness, and a knack for discernment.

Spiritual direction has a long and honored place in Christian history. In the New Testament this sort of discerning, directing relationship can be seen with Jesus and his disciples, for example, or with Paul and Timothy. And spiritual mentoring continued in the early church through a spiritual lineage from apostles to bishops (tradition has it that the second-century bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, was personally discipled by the apostle John). In fact, spiritual direction was particularly critical before the formation of the canon, when the oral word passed down through bishops complemented the letters circulating in the church that eventually composed the New Testament.

John Cassian (ca. 350–435) provided some of the earliest recorded guidance on the process of spiritual direction. Influenced by the Egyptian desert ascetics, Cassian introduced an intentional process of mentoring into the monasteries. He put every novice under the care of an older monk and warned that great care should be taken in choosing spiritual directors. St. Benedict worked Cassian's concerns into his influential Rule, and by the end of the seventh century, spiritual direction was firmly associated with monasticism throughout the West.

Spiritual direction was limited to the monasteries for the next 400 years, until the emergence of the Dominican order of itinerant friars in 1216. Dominicans emphasized teaching and preaching Christian doctrine, and these activities soon expanded into a regular program of caring for and counseling souls—particularly in spiritual discernment and perfection. Since many of those who received the ministry of the Dominicans were laymen in the emerging medieval cities, the practice of spiritual direction spread rapidly beyond monastery walls.

Spiritual direction as practiced today—especially in the Roman Catholic Church—owes its greatest debt to the founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits): Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). Loyola encouraged the practice of individual and group retreats. Participants worked through his famous "spiritual exercises" in a program spanning four "weeks" (these have subsequently been stretched or compressed to fit various timeframes).

The first week draws participants into a frank consideration of their own sin and its consequences. The second focuses on Christ's life on earth. The third focuses on his Passion, and the fourth on his Resurrection. Loyola also drew up rules to accompany the weeks. For example, the second week comes with guidelines for identifying and rejecting the workings of Satan in their lives. All of this Loyola intended to be directed by a

mentor who is "prudent, discreet, reserved, and gentle." Since Loyola's time, Catholics have continued the practice, shaped further by such writings as the 17th century's St. Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life.

Protestants, on the other hand, have emphasized the direct, unmediated nature of the individual's relationship with God in Christ, and they have thus tended to be suspicious of the function of spiritual directors. This, however, seems to be changing today, at least among Protestants unsatisfied with what Crabb calls the "standard evangelical means of spiritual growth": moral vigilance, church attendance, and busyness in a variety of programs, conferences, methods, and ministries.