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SPIRITUAL DIRECTION

attachments and their attentiveness to them (Vaughan-Lee 2009).
According to Teresa of Avila, spiritual guidance at this stage focuses
on the person’s tendency towards having second thoughts, delays,
grief, fear, and repugnance, but also on their experience of a happy
mysterious anticipation (Burrows, 26). They are helped to reassess
their lives and their internal values and to face and own their shadow
side and experience of darkness (McLean, 6). Spiritual directors can
help spiritual directees overcome false images of a fearful God and
The Shaykh gain a sense of a loving God by helping them become aware of their

encourages own experiences of God’s loving presence (Michael, 105). This change
of God-image can bring about confusion, which the spiritual director
spiritual invites the spiritual directee to explore. They also help spiritual direct-
ees in this struggle to surrender to God and trust that God will treat
directees to them well (Ruffing, 41).

acknowledge Stage 3
Zuhd’ (asceticism, renunciation, or detachment), the Valley of
their longing Insight (Attar, 180), is the third station of the heart in Sufism. As
part of their ongoing battle with the ego, seekers attempt to detach
for a direct themselves from love of their possessions and begin to downsize the
number of things they own. They move their focus from earthly
communication things to spiritual things. It is taking a step further from the absten-
tion of stage two. They begin to move from fear of a punishing God
with God, and to cherishing their relationship with a loving and merciful God. Fear
turns to hope. Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), a philosopher and Sufi mystic
to face both (who also described the spiritual journey in seven stages), taught that

hope motivates people at this stage to worship God as they become
the difficulty conscious of God’s mercy and their intense longings for God’s bless-
ings (Al Azhari).
of feeling For Teresa, the third stage is the mansion of sincerity where the

experience of God is still indirect. In her opinion, it is the stage of
vulnerable and most good people who “are very desirous not to offend His Majesty
even by venial sins, they love penance and spend hours in meditation,
the tendency to they employ their time well, exercise themselves in works of charity

to their neighbours, are well-ordered in their conversation and dress”
avoid this pain. (Teresa [b], 3.II: 8, 73). She sees a danger here as this new way of
living and being leads people to thinking they are wiser and more
spiritual than they actually are. This becomes a block to the inbreak-
ing of God into their mansion and tests the sincerity of their desire
for a continued surrender to God. In this third mansion, the spiritual
sweetness of the first two mansions begins to dry up, and spiritual
travellers experience times of aridity. However, this is not a sign of
regression but of progression because, as Giles says, “God relates to
the soul in ways that are too delicate to be discerned by the senses and
emotions” (4). The Sufi zuhd’ and Teresa’s third mansion describe the

20 Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction