Before Action: Spiritual Direction and the Art of Being

I'm re-reading Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. I often find myself drawn to books about creativity—not just because I'm a writer, but because I perceive a deep and intimate connection between creativity and spirituality. Both are concerned with opening ourselves to a source that seems to move through us rather than originating from us. Both ask for receptivity, attentiveness, and devotion to something bigger than us.

Dorothea Brande wrote Becoming a Writer in 1934, long before the creative writing boom of the postwar years. She wasn’t a novelist or a teacher of literary technique but a journalist and editor fascinated by the creative process itself. Her little book became a quiet classic precisely because it does not teach how to write—it teaches how to become a writer.

For Brande, writing doesn't begin with craft, but with character. It cannot originate in methods, only with an inner orientation.

I think there’s something here for how we understand Spiritual Direction.

Spiritual Direction is a preliminary discipline. It comes before coaching, before therapy, before any program of improvement or transformation. It doesn’t ultimately teach you how to do anything. It’s not about developing spiritual techniques or perfecting practices. Instead, it’s about remembering who you are, locating the source of your life and inspiration, and exploring that deep wellspring.

Unlike coaching or therapy—which often aim at improvement, advancement, or growth—Spiritual Direction succeeds not in the furthering of action, but in the deepening of identity.

What identity? Well, that depends on the directee—everyone is different. Just as there are many genres of writing, there are many flavors of Spirit. Spiritual Direction is about feeling for that deeper identity within you—a Self that is not defined by action or worldly success, but is itself the metric by which all your true success will be measured.

Brande said that the aspiring writer must find the inner conditions in which writing becomes inevitable. In the same way, Spiritual Direction helps you find the inner conditions in which your soul can speak, pray, love, and act freely. It is the art of cultivating beingness before doingness—of discovering the sacred orientation from which authentic action naturally arises.

This is one of Spiritual Direction's secret arts: It doesn’t give you something new to do; it helps you recover a way of being that already belongs to you.

And from that place—where your deepest Self and the creative current that moves through all things are once again in conversation—everything else flows.