The Need for Advice in the Spiritual Life

In our daily life we often realize the need to consult someone when we feel we are not equipped or capable of solving a certain problem or situation.

For example,

• When we are sick, we seek a good physician or a specialist in the medical field to help us heal and we follow his/her advice.
• When our car breaks down, we seek the help of an auto mechanic and we follow his advice on how to take care of the car.
• When a court case is looming large ahead of us, we seek the advice of a lawyer and follow it meticulously.

These are a few examples of when we seek the advice of others. In cases like these, we readily accept that we are not experts in the field and are even willing to pay large amounts of money to an expert that can assist us.

Yet when it comes to spirituality and our spiritual life & growth, which is the main reason why we are born & baptized, we more often than not think that we know what is spiritually best for us. We often fail to seek out expert advice on specific spiritual matters, especially in the arena of spiritual practices.

So why do we so often resist taking guidance on our spiritual practice?

Some of the reasons may include:

• We feel that Spirituality is deeply personal and others will not be able to guide us.
• We do not know for sure who we should listen to.
• We simply think that only we know what is best for us.

In order to overcome these obstacles in developing our spiritual lives we should probably keep the following points in mind.

• Just like any other field where we require an expert, in our spiritual journey too we need guidance else we can waste a lifetime walking down a wrong spiritual path. As a result we can stagnate or even deteriorate in our spiritual practice.
• Spirituality is deeply personal and each of us needs to find our individual way to God. However we still need an understanding of spiritual principles and frameworks in guiding our decision-making choices in spiritual practice. To learn this we need to listen to others who have already walked a spiritual path that knowingly or unknowingly conforms to the basic principles of spiritual practice.

If our desire to progress spiritually is strong, genuine and unbiased, this itself will attract the appropriate person in our life who will be able to help us progress spiritually irrespective of where we are in the world. This is according to the old adage that ‘one should not look for a teacher; the teacher will appear when the student is ready’. In the meantime, one easy avenue for guidance can be private confession, a confidential, non-judgmental time when God's grace is available to all who seek it.