John McManus Spiritual Direction

When I was a young boy, I would lie in bed with a sense that everything was connected to something beyond itself—what I'd now call contemplative awareness, though I had no language for it then.

At school in the 1970s I was taught about a God that felt punitive and distant, and a Church that, as Richard Rohr writes, had "developed an unworkable and toxic image of God that a healthy person would never trust." This God and Church were nothing like my childhood sense of the One Reality underlying everything. I spent my twenties searching through other traditions and finally stumbled into Hindu mysticism. I regularly traveled between Australia—where I was climbing corporate ladders—and Ramana Maharshi's ashram in South India, studying Self-realization and sitting in meditation.

Yet I was also an addict. Meditation with Ramana helped, but it wasn't enough to sustain me when I returned to Australia to a life dominated by Descartes' dictum "I think therefore I am." I felt trapped between the Western world's primacy of the mind and the East's devotion to the heart.

I attended my first 12-Step meeting in 1992 and have since been to over 3,000 meetings. I know what it's like to sit in a church basement being told to surrender to God and not have a clue what that really means. I know the resistance. And in a Western world driven by property, prestige and power, I genuinely didn't know how to surrender. Many people in 12-Step recovery are like this—they want something deeper, but they're done with religious baggage, done with a God who feels masculine,  vengeful and impossible to please.

My return to Christianity came through an offhand comment from my psychotherapist at the time. After one session where I was talking about Self-realization in the Eastern tradition, they said, "You know there are Christian mystics coming from the same place as Ramana." That stopped me cold. My therapist suggested I read the desert fathers of the early second century and the great mystics in the Catholic tradition. I discovered the 16th century Ignatius of Loyola and realized he understood something the 12-Step founders knew but couldn't quite articulate: that transformation happens through paying attention to what's actually going on inside you, that God speaks in the movements of your own heart rather than grand pronouncements.

I completed a Master's in Spiritual Direction because I needed to understand how change actually works. Now I work with addicts in 12-Step recovery, most of them sceptical of Christianity, uncomfortable with God-language, but hungry for something real. My work is helping them discover where the Divine is already moving in their lives—whether they call it Higher Power, God, or nothing at all. Grace is already there. The work is learning to notice it, test it honestly, and follow where it leads, without the religious wounds, without having to adopt beliefs that don't fit.