Introduction

      Newman as Spiritual Guide on the Path to Holiness

      Life is fleeting! The biblical authors warn us as much. The Letter of James, for example, summarizes the human condition in particularly stark terms: “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (4:14). The psalmist drives this same point home, comparing mortals to the flowers of the field: they flourish for a time, but then the wind passes over them, and they are gone, never to be known again (see Ps 103:15–16). Time marches steadily onward, and if we are not careful, we can reach the end of our days only to find that we have wasted our time pursuing meaningless things.

      We all want our lives to matter — to have some sort of lasting significance. But this can prove elusive, even for those who have the best of intentions. Think back, for instance, on the past ten to fifteen years of your life. If you are anything like me, there are many things that, with the wisdom you have now, you would have done differently. Yet, here you are today — your past frozen, as it were — living with the consequences of the decisions that have brought you to this point. I’ve heard more than one older acquaintance remark that “youth is wasted on the young.” For whatever reason, as human beings, we don’t seem to realize how precious time is until it’s gone. But once time has slipped through our hands, there is no recovering it. Life can be lived only forward; there are no mulligans.

      This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to find a trusted spiritual director — someone who is able to see shortcomings in our character that we are prone to overlook and who can help us to avoid pitfalls that might hamper our spiritual progress. And it’s not only young people who suffer from shortsightedness and willfulness. The human heart is incredibly prone to self-deception, such that good intentions, on their own, are rarely enough to keep us on the right path. Even the saints testify to the need for a good spiritual director. Saint Faustina, for example, once admitted, “If only I had had a spiritual director from the beginning, then I would not have wasted so many of God’s graces.”¹ A good director, Faustina added, “knows how to avoid the rocks against which the soul could be shattered.”² Saint John Henry Newman had a similar outlook, noting that “we should all of us be saved a great deal of suffering of various kinds, if we could but persuade ourselves that we are not the best judges, whether of our own condition, or of God’s will towards us. What sensible person undertakes to be his own physician? Yet are the diseases of the mind less numerous, less intricate, less subtle than those of the body?”³ Long story short, we can spare ourselves a lot of potential heartache by turning to a trustworthy spiritual adviser.

      As a supplement to (not