How can Spiritual Direction hold safe space for covenantal partnerships to acknowledge and initiate a path toward mutuality with each other and G-d together through love mysticism? By offering a non-dualistic perspective, along with a spiritually and sexually integrated appreciation for the work of the Holy Spirit through covenantal partnerships, spiritual companions may help couples understand that “romantic attachments (within their covenant relationship) are frequently the opaque manifestations of divine-human intimacy wanting to happen.”(1) As Janet Ruffing suggests, spiritual companionship, even for couples, needs to be a non-judgmental relationship where “sexual expression, sexual orientation, or romantic attachments”(2) may be explored by covenant partners without embarrassment or shame in the presence of G-d as the possible “progressive, deepening encounter into the mystery of God as the divine beloved, until lover and beloved are experienced as one body and soul.”(3)
Magnetic desire within the covenant relationship for each other and G-d indicates a potential path of love mysticism, often expressed in embodied “aspects of the unity of love of God and love of (partner), showing that our loving ultimately leads to God.”(4) Through a spiritual direction relationship, couples may begin to recognize how the “very Mystery itself solicits us, moves toward us in love and in mercy.”(5) Understood individually as made in the image of G-d, covenant couples may further comprehend that their covenantal relationship is also made in the image of the Triune G-d, as a sacramental expression of G-d’s communal identity. Through spiritual companionship, couples can remember how “the mystical tradition encourages believers to enter fully into intimacy with the Divine Beloved. We are to become love, too. God awakens us to this divine-human love affair and initiatives in us the search for the Divine Beloved.”(6)
As covenantal partners, cleaved together as one beloved with the Holy One, “God continues to solicit and elicit our love.”(7) Spiritual Direction with couples offers covenant partners an invitation into deeper intimacy and mutuality with G-d and each other, encouraging couples to respond to G-d, and each other, by soliciting and eliciting desire within the covenant relationship. Participation together in this progressive back and forth of desiring beckons covenantal beloved partners into spiritual and sexual union with the Divine Lover as a covenantal three-some.
1. Ruffing, Janet K., RSM, Spiritual Direction: Beyond the Beginnings (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 99.
3. Ruffing, Spiritual Direction, 99.
4. Ruffing, Spiritual Direction, 105.
5. Ruffing, Spiritual Direction, 106.
6. Ruffing, Spiritual Direction, 106.
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