Guenther uses the images of the spiritual director as host, teacher, and midwife to describe the ministry of spiritual direction today. She pays particular attention to spiritual direction for women, and addresses such down-to-earth questions as setting, time, and privacy. The stories of real people bring the practice of spiritual direction alive. "In the pages that follow, I will attempt to describe the shape that spiritual direction might take for people of our time, aware that the subject is an elusive one. I am speaking to the beginner, those persons lay or ordained, with or without...

The second half of life which we can enter at any age is that time when we begin the process essential to a mature faith: discovering who we are, exploring our relationship with God, and beginning to let go. This part of life has a depth and spirituality all its own a need for structure and rule, a tolerance of ambiguity, an exploration of limitation and mortality, and the deep work of discipline and detachment. Margaret Guenther brings her insights as a spiritual director to the gifts and opportunities of those of us who are on this journey to holy ground. In each chapter, Toward Holy Ground...

In this down-to-earth book on the essentials of prayer, Margaret Guenther answers many of the common questions of the spiritual life.

For God alone my soul in silence waits.... In these reflections on Psalm 62 Margaret Guenther provides the foundation for a time of reflection and retreat without ever leaving home. The book s first chapter introduces us to ways of making a retreat wherever we are, at a place apart or in the midst of our daily lives. Guenther then offers eight meditations on Psalm 62, with its themes of waiting on God s presence with patience, trust, and expectation. She explores the images the psalm evokes of longing, silence, waiting, safety, enemies, and God as a rock and refuge. As in all her books,...

From informal versions of the Rule of St. Benedict to Twelve-Step groups and Weight Watchers, the basic human need for guidance and structure in the quest for wholeness is palpable and real. Out of her long experience as a spiritual director, mentor, and teacher, Margaret Guenther offers a warm and sensible guide for "the rest of us" -- singles, couples, parents, extended families, members of churches -- to create a helpful and balanced rule of life to help us in our search for faith.

She explores ancient and contemporary meanings for the classic vows of poverty, chastity, and...

Sojourner is an Old French word with jour--day--at its heart. It reminds us of our transience and of the inexorable passage of time. It reminds us that we do not own this world but that we are merely passing through. It reminds us that God's time is not our time.

Fans of Margaret Guenther will welcome this salty and wise collection of reflections on her life journey her childhood in Kansas City, her college days, her career, her travels, and her slow awakening to transience of all things. This writer and spiritual director looks back over the nearly eight decades of her life,...