Holy Listening
The Art of Spiritual Direction
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Narrated by:
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Suzie Althens
About this listen
Margaret 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 [this book], 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 formal theological training, who find themselves drawn to this ministry. Perhaps they feel the stirring of their own unacknowledged gifts. Or perhaps they wonder about receiving direction, whether it is a ministry available to 'ordinary people' or reserved for the especially holy. I hope some dark corners will be illuminated and some questions answered".
©1992 Margaret Guenther (P)2020 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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By: J. Alasdair Groves, and others
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Strong Women, Soft Hearts
- A Woman’s Guide to Cultivating a Wise Heart and a Passionate Life
- By: Paula Rinehart
- Narrated by: Jennifer Jill Araya
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Through inspiring real-life testimonies, Paula Rinehart writes as both a kindred spirit and a compassionate counselor to women feeling robbed of their passions and trapped by life's disappointing realities. Women who long to be released from the burden of hard choices and perpetually empty souls will be empowered to rediscover dreams long lost and refocus energy misguided. Strong Women, Soft Hearts cries out for women to embrace passion and approach life as something to be lived, not merely survived.
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Important
- By Alixandra Hice on 12-04-22
By: Paula Rinehart
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To Be Told
- God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future
- By: Dan B. Allender PhD
- Narrated by: William Sarris
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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God wants to reveal himself through your story. Discover how he has written your life so far and how he is leading you into the rest of your story. Everyone wants clearer guidance from God on what to do with their future. In this insightful book, therapist and Professor Dan Allender shows you how to listen to the stories of your life and identify the themes that God has written there.
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Thought Provoking and Inspiring
- By michelle deuz on 04-10-21
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Prayer
- Finding the Heart's True Home
- By: Richard J. Foster
- Narrated by: Terence Aselford
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 1992, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home has become a classic on its eponymous subject. Awarded Christianity Today's Book of the Year award and the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association's Gold Medallion award, Prayer continues to receive widespread acclaim as one of the most thorough and insightful treatments of this central spiritual practice.
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Great Introduction to Prayer
- By Adam on 09-16-07
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Life of the Beloved
- Spiritual Living in a Secular World
- By: Henri J. M. Nouwen
- Narrated by: Henri J. M. Nouwen
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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How does one live a spiritual life in a secular world? Henri Nouwen responds from the depths of his heart to this dilemna posed by his friend Fred Bratman. Nouwen's own interpretive reading of the text lends a sense of immediacy to the audiobook.
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Listening Is Life Changing
- By Rich S. on 12-27-13
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Everything Belongs
- The Gift of Contemplative Prayer
- By: Richard Rohr
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 4 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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This popular and best-selling book from a renowned Franciscan challenges people to move beyond the comfort of a settled life toward an understanding of themselves that is rooted in their connection to God. Only when they rest in God can they find the certainty and the freedom to become all that they can be.
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I love Richard Rohr, but
- By Kothel on 02-02-21
By: Richard Rohr
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Preparing for Heaven
- What Dallas Willard Taught Me About Living, Dying, and Eternal Life
- By: Gary Black Jr., Richard J. Foster - foreword
- Narrated by: Jim Denison
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In his acclaimed books, renowned writer, speaker, and philosophy professor Dallas Willard explored the nature of Christian life in God's Kingdom. Yet one topic remained undisclosed: Willard's understanding of heaven and eternal life. In the months before his death, Willard engaged in moving and insightful conversations about the meaning of life and the life to come with close friend and theologian Gary Black, Jr. These inspiring dialogues were steeped in biblical theology as well as practical wisdom grounded in the here-and-now.
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preparing fir heaven
- By Colin C. on 09-21-21
By: Gary Black Jr., and others
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Stop Calling Me Beautiful
- Finding Soul-Deep Strength in a Skin-Deep World
- By: Phylicia Masonheimer
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 5 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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If you're tired of hearing the watered-down Christian teaching and hungry for a deeper spiritual life - one that gives real answers to your hardest questions - Stop Calling Me Beautiful teaches you how. Jesus doesn't offer a powerless salvation. He makes your brokenness part of his whole redemption story - if you allow him to. Don't settle for a feel-good faith. If you want victory over insecurity, fear, shame, and the circumstances you are facing, it's time to embrace Jesus. All of him.
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not what I expected, in a good way!!
- By Kristin on 09-03-20
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Befriend
- Create Belonging in an Age of Judgment, Isolation, and Fear
- By: Scott Sauls
- Narrated by: Dean Gallagher
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Is real friendship too risky? We live in a world where real friendship is hard to find. Suspicious of others and insecure about ourselves, we retreat into the safety of our small, self-made digital worlds. Tragically, even the church can become a place that reinforces this isolation. Jesus models a much richer vision of friendship. Scott Sauls, pastor and teacher, invites you to see the breadth of Christ's love in this audiobook, Befriend.
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Great post election therapy.
- By Manoli on 12-20-16
By: Scott Sauls
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Making All Things New
- An Invitation to the Spiritual Life
- By: Henri Nouwen
- Narrated by: Dan Cashman
- Length: 1 hr and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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"During the past few years, various friends have asked me, 'What do you mean when you speak about the spiritual life?' Every time this question has come up, I have wished I had a small and simple book which could offer the beginning of a response. I have felt that there was a place for a text that could be read within a few hours and could not only explain what the spiritual life is but also create a desire to live it. This feeling caused me to write Making All Things New..."
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Simple & powerful!
- By N J. on 11-11-24
By: Henri Nouwen
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Stay Salt
- The World Has Changed: Our Message Must Not
- By: Rebecca Manley Pippert
- Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The world has changed in so many ways, and many of us no longer feel confident when it comes to evangelism, especially with the rise of hostility toward Christian points of view. Keeping quiet is becoming our default position. Yet the world has not changed in one way: It still needs Jesus. Renowned evangelist Becky Pippert draws on decades of conversations about Christianity around the world to call and equip ordinary Christians to share Jesus through their ordinary day-to-day conversations.
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Best book on relational evangelism I’ve read
- By Mike on 07-08-20
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If you're longing to become more attentive to God - to listen to him, know his voice and experience his love, spiritual direction can point the way. In Seeking God Together, experienced spiritual director Alice Fryling offers a unique introduction specifically for group spiritual direction: a place where individuals can experience what it means to be listened to and loved by others, so that they can learn to listen more attentively to God in their daily lives and be used by God.
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The Dark Night of the Soul
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Answered many questions I had
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Many of us do not trust our own thoughts, feelings, and desires when it comes to discerning God's will. Instead we look outside ourselves to determine what God wants from and for us. In God's Voice Within, spiritual director Mark E. Thibodeaux, SJ, shows us how to use Ignatian discernment to access our own spiritual intuition and understand that the most trustworthy wisdom of all comes not from outside sources, but from God working through us.
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In this noisy, distracting world, it is difficult to truly hear. People talk past each other, eager to be heard but somehow deaf to what is being said. Listening is an essential skill for healthy relationships, both with God and with other people. But it is more than that: listening is a way of life. Adam McHugh places listening at the heart of our spirituality, our relationships and our mission in the world. God himself is the God who hears, and we, too, can learn to hear what God may be saying through creation, through Scripture, through people.
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A refreshing and compelling approach to listening
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How Great The Father's Love For Us
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In this landmark work, Foster examines the foundations of Christian experience, growth, and renewal found in six historical movements: contemplative, holiness, charismatic, social justice, evangelical, and incarnational. Using profiles of biblical and modern characters who exemplify these traditions, he offers suggestions on how to integrate them into your daily life and challenges you to lead a more authentic Christian experience.
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Spiritual Conversations with Children
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When children have a listening companion who hears, acknowledges, and encourages their early experiences with God, it creates a spiritual footprint that shapes their lives. How can we increase our capacity to engage children in spiritual conversations? In this audiobook, Lacy Finn Borgo draws on her own experience of practicing spiritual direction with children. She offers an overview of childhood spiritual formation and introduces key skills for engaging conversation-posture, power, and patterns - from a Christ-centered perspective.
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Practical, story filled guide
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What listeners say about Holy Listening
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- aahlers
- 03-01-21
Illuminating, real, candid, nuggets of gold layered in the chapters.
Well worth the time spent. Truly a book I'll be coming back to again and again. Great narration, easy listening voice.
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- Cecilia B.
- 01-31-23
Best Spiritual Direction Guide
I've read many of the big names in spiritual direction, but Guenther is by far the best. A little dated in its references to women theologians and thinkers, but the ideas themselves never go out of style. Compassionate and wise. Highly recommended.
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- John W Huxtable
- 02-21-24
Great listen
I love the openness and the ability to challenge the listener to be receptive and comfortable in culturally uncomfortable situations.
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- Adam Shields
- 10-11-23
Modern classic
It would not be surprising to anyone who regularly reads my book reviews that I generally have a book in three broad areas going at almost all times: Spiritual direction/spiritual formation, history, and biography/memoir. I try not to have more than one of each category going at a time, but those three categories are about shaping the way I am in the world. I want to pay attention to my spiritual formation. I want to equip myself as a spiritual director. I want to understand how the world was shaped to be as it is now so I can think more clearly about the way forward. And I want to see how others have lived as a means to see how I can live well.
Holy Listening is a book I have had on my shelf for a while, but I have not read it. It is a modern classic on spiritual direction. First published in the early 1990s, when spiritual direction was starting to have a broader resurgence, Guenther wrote particularly as a female pastor and spiritual director in a way that was probably more radical than it feels now. There are many metaphors for spiritual direction that authors have used over time, but Guenther embraces the metaphor of spiritual directors as midwives. That is a particularly feminine metaphor. I think both men and women spiritual directors need various metaphors because any one metaphor breaks down when pressed too far. Guenther is aware that she is oriented toward a feminine metaphor and does defend it a bit, but essentially allows it to stand on its own.
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop wrote a well-known essay in 1990 about exposing children to diverse books because books can be "windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors." (The link is to a 2-minute video of Bishop describing her language.) Students can see themselves (mirror), they can see how others live in ways that they do not (windows), and they can immerse themselves in the experience of others (sliding glass doors). An important part of the essay is that Bishop argues that diverse books are important to white students who (even 30 years after the essay) mostly see themselves (mirrors) in the books that surround them. And that can create a distorting effect on those students, impacting the way that they see the world as normative for them.
The book ends with a more explicit discussion about women as spiritual directors and the need for the church to embrace women as spiritual directors and directees in part because women have been marginalized in church leadership, even as they often are the backbone of the church. I do not know if there are statistics about women and spiritual direction, but my anecdotal experience is that women are both more likely to seek spiritual formation experiences, they buy and read more books, they are more likely to attend church, they are more likely to serve, they are more likely to make up the larger percentage of spiritual direction programs. But most books are written by men with the assumption that men are the primary readers.
It is reasonably well known that men tend not to read women. Kaitlyn Schess, in her latest Getting Schooled video, speaks about the publishing reality that women authors tend to sell more books if they are marketed just to women. Women tend to read more, but when men read, they overwhelmingly read male authors (90% by one study). Women authors have overwhelmingly female audiences (about 80%). However, male authors still have a roughly even gender divide among their readers. Publishing has some responsibility here, but it seems that while women often read men, men do not read women at the same rates, even if both genders tend to read books by their same gender at higher rates.
This has mostly not been about the book itself. Still, as I read the book, I kept thinking about how the book seems to be consciously trying to speak to the reader to encourage both men and women to think differently about spiritual direction to expand what spiritual direction can be. The focus is to encourage people's spiritual lives. If we alienate women from spiritual formation or bias their understanding of spiritual formation in only gendered ways, we end up harming both men and women.
I have said it before, but we need to talk much more about becoming mature Christians and much less about becoming mature men or women. The point should be about maturity, and when we gender maturity, we harm not only the ideas of what maturity is but those that do not conform to stereotypical norms. I believe that part of why we currently embrace misogynistic Christian ideas among a too large group of Christians is because there has been a mistaken understanding of the pragmatic means of reaching men. (This is a gender impact of the Homogeneous Unit Principle.) Instead of addressing the problems of men only listening to men, many have doubled down and made it a theological requirement to become a toxic male to be a mature Christian man. And that, I think, is part of why women are leaving the church at more significant rates than men.
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- Sean
- 11-15-23
A beautiful guide for one longing to listen
Holy Listening uses wonderful analogies and language which has encouraged me in the practice of Spiritual direction. I loved her idea of being a midwife in the spiritual process. I highly recommend Holy Listening.
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- Ryan Smit
- 10-08-22
Refreshing perspective
Excellent!!! As a shepherd of souls myself, this book was welcomingly refreshing and encouraging. Well done.
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- Todd G. Rodarmel
- 02-01-23
Very helpful!
I found this book on spiritual direction very insightful and applicable. As a man, I love hearing from a woman’s perspective.
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- Roger Hornbeck
- 09-05-24
Holy Listening presents a grace filled way of being with each other on the spiritual journey.
It clearly defines spiritual direction, providing practical insights into the direction relationship. This is a must read book for all spiritual directors.
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