I cannot remember a time when I did not want to walk with people. The desire is old enough that I have stopped trying to locate its origin. What I do know is this: there is a particular moment I have witnessed in others — a shift, a softening, the look that crosses a person's face when something they have carried alone suddenly becomes visible to them in a new way — and that moment has never stopped arresting me. It is the moment I would call existential discovery. The instant when the abstract becomes tangible, when interior reality stops being a fog and becomes something a person can actually see and name.
It is the reason I do this work. And it is the reason I have had to reckon, repeatedly, with a question I would rather avoid: what does my own interior life have to do with my capacity to companion others toward theirs?
The uncomfortable answer is: everything. The director's most important instrument is not a method, a set of questions, or years of training — though none of those are unimportant. It is the degree to which the director has done their own work. Has sat with their own silence. Has allowed their own assumptions to be interrogated, their own blind spots to be named.
This matters because of something most of us discover eventually: we are remarkably poor examiners of our own lives. Not for lack of effort or intelligence, but because self-examination conducted alone is, by its nature, conducted from inside the very framework we most need to see. We ask ourselves the wrong questions, from a posture of presupposed certainty. We treat ourselves, often, with a harshness we would never extend to another person. Our self-interrogation — however sincere — tends to circle the same familiar territory without ever arriving anywhere new.
This is not a character flaw. It is the condition of being human. We are not designed to see ourselves clearly without help.
What an outside presence offers is not superior intelligence. It is angle. A different vantage point from which the same landscape looks entirely different. The questions a skilled director asks are not more sophisticated than the questions a thoughtful person asks themselves — they are simply unencumbered by the same assumptions, the same history, the same fear of certain answers. That freedom is what makes them catalytic.
But here is the thing about catalytic questions: they can only be asked well by someone who has been on the receiving end of them. Not in theory. In practice. In their own life, in their own direction, in their own willingness to be seen. The director who has never allowed another person to ask them a question they could not control will inevitably, even unconsciously, keep their directees at a similar distance. Stillness is caught before it is taught. Depth invites depth. You cannot reliably lead someone somewhere you have not been willing to go yourself.
Paul's letter to the Corinthians speaks of building one another up — not as a secondary calling but as an extension of the Spirit's own work in the world. I think of the catalytic question as a form of that. Not prophecy in the dramatic sense, but prophetic in the truest sense: speaking into the life of another in a way that opens what was closed, names what was unnamed, moves what was stuck. That work, done well, is not the director's work. It is the Spirit's work, moving through a person whose own interior has been made available enough to be used.
This is what formation of the director actually means. Not accumulating technique. Becoming available. And availability requires exactly what it sounds like: the ongoing, patient, sometimes painful work of attending to your own life — not so that you can have it resolved or explained, but so that you are not hiding from it. So that what you bring into the room with a directee is presence, not performance.
Life, as I understand it, is not meant to be experienced alone. Our trajectories are not solitary lines but interwoven threads — each one shaped by the others, each one mattering beyond what we can see. The cloud of witnesses the writer of Hebrews describes is not a metaphor I find difficult to believe. I have sat with enough people in their most liminal moments to know that something larger than the two of us is present in those rooms.
What I owe those people — what any director owes those in their care — is to keep their own house in order. To keep attending to the interior. To remain a person who is being formed, not merely one who facilitates the formation of others.
That is the work. It does not end.