Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601

Steve Spilde: Welcome. I am excited today because my guest is Linda Kerrigan, one of the very wise mentors in my life. She is a friend. She was a long-term teammate. We worked together in the Spiritual Direction and Preparation Program. If there is anything I know about spiritual direction, chances are it came to me through Linda. It’s my sincere pleasure to be joined by her today. Welcome, Linda.

Linda Kerrigan: Thank you, Steve. I am happy and honored to be invited for this opportunity. It means a lot to me.

Steve: Since I’ve given you credit for teaching me about spiritual direction, I’d like to hear from you. Describe your understanding of what spiritual direction is, and what it is that you do when you’re sitting with someone.

Linda: I think over the years we’ve often been asked in our Ministry of Spiritual Direction that question; basically, what the heck am I doing? And what is this that we call ‘spiritual direction?’ I think a very simple and basic description I read – and I like it very much – [is], spiritual direction is walking home together. Walking home together. That brings to mind the _____ story where the disciples were walking and Jesus showed up along the way. That is what happens in spiritual direction. It’s not just walking together, but it’s joining heart-to-heart, being open to your own vulnerability and that of the other person. It’s about sharing compassion. As a spiritual director, it’s about inviting the person to be in touch with their inner wisdom. I think more often than not, people do not credit themselves with having a deep well of wisdom. Sometimes, just putting words and language around that [and] get a person[’s] lightbulb to go off. [It’s like], ‘oh, really? You think I have something inside me? Of course you do, because God has placed it there for you to access. It’s a profound experience. It’s meeting a person on sacred ground, honoring that sacred ground, and inviting them to share their story in a way that, I’m their spiritual director to receive that story, hold that story, honor it, and assure my directee that yours is a sacred story.

Steve: Spiritual direction – can you break that down for me, just the words. Or Spiritual Director – what’s your understanding of what we’re talking about when we use the word ‘spiritual?’ And what’s your understanding of the word ‘director?’

Linda: ‘Spiritual’ goes way beyond the confines of religion. Spiritual, to me, is in the everyday sacred. Spiritual has to do with the notion or the belief that all are connected. When I was on retreat once, it was a very profound peace that my Spiritual Director offered me, and that is God is everywhere. And not only everywhere, but equally everywhere. And also beyond that, that God is within us. When I think about spiritual versus religion, to me, religion is limiting and confining. Spiritual embraces all and wholeness and possibility and wonder and awe and concepts that we haven’t even imagined. It’s very embracing. It’s inclusive. It’s for everyone to make some kind of connection. Again, I think religion is more confining and associated with church buildings and dogma and rules and so on. That’s what spiritual means for me, and the other is as I sat and thought about spiritual and spirituality, I don’t think I had that word in my vocabulary until I was in my 50s. And I think what helped me have a greater understanding of spiritual, spirituality was the programming, the relationships through the Franciscan Spirituality Center. That was a wonderful invitation and an opportunity for immersion for myself to expand my understanding of what spiritual means.

Steve: As your understanding of spirituality started to evolve, in what ways did your life change? Or in what ways did you start to practice your spirituality in new ways?

Linda: I think one experience that kind of drew me in [was] having an opportunity for a pilgrimage to Assisi, there was such a fond presence of spirit. I was very, very overcome by a sense of … The word I had for it then was humility. I was just overcome with humility. I felt so very small as I moved about the streets of Assisi and followed in the footsteps of Francis and Claire. But my smallness wasn’t like I felt minimal or minimized, but it was just because I was overcome with feeling humbled. The spirit was so alive in the various places that we visited where Claire and Francis lived out their life, and where they played and lived and so on. You could just sense that there was something happening in these places. You just sensed it your body. The experience that changed me; it was a conversion kind of thing. I came back home, and from there I then began to pursue becoming a Franciscan affiliate with the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. That led to signing up for the Spiritual Direction and Preparation Program. I felt really drawn to live out this feeling and connection with a greater spirituality in my life versus in limited religious practice.

Steve: For people who don’t know what we’re talking about, the pilgrimage to Assisi, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse have a program where some of their long-term employees, they think it’s important for them to walk in the footsteps of their tradition’s founder, Saint Francis, to walk in his personal footsteps. Francis lived a long time ago, back in the 1200s in Assisi, Italy. My understanding is your husband worked for the Sisters, so that’s how you had the opportunity to go to Assisi, correct?

Linda: Yes, spouses were invited to go along.

Steve: Explain to people why the Sisters would make that investment. Why was it so important, because it was a significant investment, to send people to the other side of the world to spend a week or 10 days walking in the footsteps of someone who lived 800 years ago?

Linda: The Sisters are very wise. They are always looking forward. Given their sponsored institutions at the time – Pat worked at Viterbo University, which was a sponsored institution – they felt very strongly that key people in leadership in particular really needed to have a fuller understanding of mission and ministry. The Sisters are well aware of their declining numbers and their need to let go of sponsored institutions, at least in a financial way. They felt a profound responsibility to immerse their key people in Franciscan values, understanding history to have an immersion experience so that they could have a profound connection and bring that back to their institutions and to their workplace and to they people they served – in this case, the university students and those who were at Mayo – to maybe refigure or at least deepen the way that they were already providing servant leadership to assure that Franciscan values were at the basis of their work in mission and ministry. At this point there’s probably been several hundred people – at least maybe 200 to 300, for sure – who have had this wonderful opportunity because of the Sisters’ investment.

Steve: What I’m hearing you say is that that pilgrimage, that trip to Assisi, really reshaped your understanding of what we mean by spirituality or faith or God or spirit, correct?

Linda: Right. And it also got me to be thinking about, where am I going in life? What is it about? How can I live out mission and ministry? Coming back from that experience changed from being in the counseling field to being drawn to spiritual direction as a work career opportunity.

Steve: This experience helped you make your spirituality, would be fair to say embodied? It became a body experience [and] not just simply an experience of your mind – a thinking experience?

Linda: Definitely. I probably never had been so much of a head level person anyway. I think I’m more connected with gut level and intuition and the ____ space. It just kind of made that more expansive and stronger.

Steve: Being able to walk in the footsteps of Francis was much more powerful than just simply reading about him or hearing about him.

Linda: Absolutely. I don’t mean to say that everybody has to make a pilgrimage to Assisi to make that happen for them. I’m just saying that that is how it happened for me. It was life-changing and impacting my outlook and my way of being in the world.

Steve: That fits with my understanding of you and who you are as a Spiritual Director because my sense is that many times people come to you, perhaps as a Spiritual Director, and their understanding of God or their understanding of what it means to live a life of faith really is a lot in their head. It’s come to them through a book. It’s come to them through preaching. But yet, they’re struggling to connect that with their own life experience. So you as a Spiritual Director are really helping them to find that story within their own life.

Linda: Indeed. Again, I think the beauty of spiritual direction is to have that position, that environment, the atmosphere of openness, accepting that people become who they are, where they are. It’s not my job to move them along or teach a certain way of understanding, but again, just honoring who that person is, where they are coming from, trusting that God is present in them, God is working in them. It’s not my work; it is God’s work. But God has called me to be a part of whatever transformation, openness that might happen for that individual. I find the other challenge – and I really do appreciate the challenge – of people who come who have fallen away from their faith practice or maybe have had no faith practice whatsoever. And yet, what I see in them is a deep, deep longing and hunger for connection. They often can’t explain; they don’t understand it. To be present to that person, to journey in a deeper understanding or a new way of seeing things, I am so honored to be able to be with those people.