 Image: Freepik.com Most people who come to spiritual direction are waiting—not for the session to begin, but for themselves to be ready.
They are waiting to feel like they believe what they say they believe. They are waiting for the fog to lift, the doubt to quiet, or the sense of God’s presence to return—or arrive for the first time—before they feel they can really begin. There is a version of the spiritual life that quietly trains people to clean themselves up before they speak. It treats prayer as something you earn access to by getting your interior house in order first. It suggests you must feel sufficiently sincere or resolve the outstanding business between you and God before you presume to show up at the door. I want to explore where that version comes from, and why it misses the radical nature of grace. The Breath in the Locked Room On the evening of the first Easter Sunday, Jesus walked through a locked door into a room full of people who had spent the weekend in hiding. He said peace—before they had explained themselves, before they had demonstrated remorse, and before they had shown any sign of having learned a single thing from the previous three days. And then he did something that John describes with a word that appears only one other time in Scripture. He breathed on them. The Greek word is emphysaō. The only other place it appears in the biblical text is Genesis 2:7, when God formed the first human being from dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. What Jesus did in that room was a new creation act. The same breath that animated a human being from dust was exhaled again into people who had not earned it or prepared for it. The Spirit is not the reward for readiness; the Spirit is what makes readiness possible. The Grace That Goes Before This is what the tradition calls prevenient grace—the grace that goes before. That same breath is not just a moment in a locked room; it is the pattern of how God deals with us. It is the grace that exists before your first conscious prayer, before your decision to take the spiritual life seriously, and before you sat across from a spiritual director for the first time. The breath had already been exhaled. In the waters of your baptism, the same Risen Jesus who stood in that upper room breathed the life of new creation into you—not because you were prepared or understood what was happening, but because that is what God does with dust. What this means for the interior life is more practical than it sounds: You do not begin to pray in order to establish contact with a God who is waiting at a distance. You begin to pray because the Spirit who was breathed into you is already praying. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The prayer is already happening. You are not initiating it—you are joining it. Grace First, Comprehension Following This changes the posture of the whole interior life. You are not reaching for what has not yet arrived; you are learning to live from what was already given. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the fourth century, understood this deeply. He put candidates for baptism through the rites of initiation first—in the dark—before they fully understood what was being done to them. They went into the water before they could explain it. The body received the oil. Only afterward were they told what had happened. His point was not that understanding is unimportant, but that the Spirit was not waiting for understanding to arrive before showing up. The grace came first. The comprehension followed. It still works that way. The Honest Starting Place Spiritual direction, at its best, is simply the practice of helping someone notice what the Spirit has already been doing in them—often in the places they were least expecting it, and frequently in the experiences they most wanted to leave behind. If you have been waiting to feel ready—ready to pray, ready to trust, ready to believe that the forgiveness is actually for you—I want to suggest that the waiting itself, with its doubt, hesitation, and quiet fatigue, may be the very thing to bring to prayer. Not as evidence that something is wrong, but as the honest starting place it already is. You are not behind. You are not disqualified. You are dust that has already been breathed into—and the breath has not left you. That is where the interior life begins. Not with your readiness. With his. If you find yourself waiting like this, spiritual direction can be a place to begin—not once you are ready, but exactly where you are. You can learn more about how I work here. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack.
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 Image: Freepik.com There is a diagnosis at the center of Lutheran theology that is either the most liberating thing you have ever heard or the most uncomfortable, depending on where you are when you encounter it.
Martin Luther called this incurvatus in se — a life “curved in on itself,” bent inward, unable to receive life from outside itself. The heart that has folded its doors inward on itself. The soul that keeps recycling its own air, trying to find life within its own limited resources. The person who believes that if they just try harder, think more clearly, breathe more deeply of their own oxygen, they can save themselves. You cannot resuscitate yourself. That is the diagnosis. And it is not primarily a moral judgment — it is a structural one. The problem is not that you are bad at trying. The problem is that you are trying to do something that is, by definition, impossible. You cannot pump your own lungs back to life. You cannot be both the patient and the physician. I see this in spiritual direction more than almost anything else. People come in having worked very hard on themselves. They’ve done the therapy and the reading, built the routines, cultivated a solid interior life. And then something happens — a loss, a failure, a season of dryness that will not lift, a sin they keep returning to despite every intention otherwise — and suddenly the air grows thin. Stale. Familiar in the worst way. They sit across from me and say some version of: I do not understand why this is not working. I have been doing everything right. The problem is not that they have been doing it wrong. The problem is that they have been doing it alone. The disciples in John’s twentieth chapter are doing the same thing. Locked in a room. Breathing the same stale air of Friday — the air of the tomb, the air of endings, the air of what cannot be undone. They are not bad people. They are simply sealed inside the limits of what they can produce on their own. Fear circulates. Grief circulates. Anxiety circulates. Everything becomes recycled air. And then Jesus walks through the wall. Not through the door — through the wall. Without a key, without permission, without waiting for them to get their act together first. He simply occupies the space where their fear has been circulating. And his first word is not a rebuke. It is not a correction. It is not a to-do list. It is Shalom — peace — spoken as a creative act. Not describing a reality that already exists, but calling one into being. Then he does something even stranger. He breathes life into bodies sealed by fear. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically in a distant sense. Breath into lungs that have been locked against hope. If you were a first-century listener, your mind would go immediately to Genesis — to the moment God leaned over dust and breathed the breath of life into nostrils that had never drawn air. John is telling us this is a new creation moment — the Spirit’s breath renewing what fear has sealed shut. The Upper Room has become a new garden. The Risen One stands in the middle of a room full of people surviving on recycled air, and he gives them what they cannot generate. You cannot breathe in a vacuum. You cannot manufacture the breath. You are the recipient of a gift. This is what spiritual direction is, at its best — not a technique for generating spiritual experience, not a system for optimizing your interior life, but a space in which you stop trying to be your own air supply long enough to notice that Someone else is already breathing into the room. The director’s role is not to supply the air. It is to help you notice that the room is already being filled, and to help you stop holding your breath against it. Sometimes that involves naming what is true. Sometimes it involves silence. Sometimes it involves learning to discern the difference between the noise of your own fear and the quieter, steadier breath of grace that is already present but often ignored. The practices matter — lectio divina, centering prayer, the examen, confession. They matter the way open windows matter. They do not create the air. They simply stop you from sealing the room shut. They make space for what is already being given. If you have been working very hard on your interior life and finding that the air still feels thin, that is not a sign that you are failing. It may be a sign that you have been trying to do alone what was never meant to be done alone. Life is already in the room. The only question is whether you will stop trying to be your own air supply long enough to receive it. If you want a companion for that kind of work, spiritual direction is where I do it. The contact page is the place to start. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] |
