Dr Ruth Fowler.
The Christian life is not simply about admiring or imitating Jesus from a distance, writes long-time spiritual director and meditator Dr Ruth Fowler*. It is about entering into the depths of one’s heart and living from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, she says, a transformation that is aided by a teacher who knows for themselves the gift of contemplative encounter. This means, she suggests, that we need to recover numbers of teachers who have been so graced with this Divine intimacy; and also, as pilgrims we need to re-learn how to relate to teachers in our own spiritual journey.
I wish to begin with a personal story which became the catalyst for my nearly fifty-year preoccupation with contemplation and spiritual authority.
When I went to India in 1979, I knew I was seeking a practice that could give me a deeper inner grounding. For several years I had been deeply involved in the alternative community-school movement and in union activism on behalf of women teachers. I had been burning the proverbial candle at both ends, professionally and personally, and was increasingly exhausted and adrift. I knew I needed a more stable inner ground from which to live.
The idea of meditation had first been stirred in me by a friend who had learned to meditate in Nepal and described it to me in terms of Shangri-La. In some still-inchoate way, I sensed that meditation might be a beginning—a way of becoming more grounded.
It never occurred to me that I could simply go to Chapel Street in Melbourne and learn to meditate. Instead, I travelled to Nepal and then India, where I remained for almost twelve months. There I learned a meditation practice that did, in fact, begin to stabilise and ground me. But what I received was not only a practice of meditation and the yogic asanas, I also received the grace of encountering an authentic teacher within the Raja Yoga tradition. Looking back, I realise that I was being led by the Holy Spirit the entire way.
I had not set out in search of a guru. Indeed, I was deeply suspicious of the Western fashion for seeking gurus at that time. Yet, at a level deeper than I could articulate at the time, I was searching for someone who could teach me a practice through which I might become more deeply whole. In effect, I was looking for a teacher, although I did not then have the language to name what I was seeking.
What I encountered in Maharaji (Paramhamsa Swami Yogeshwaranand Saraswati) was a spiritual power unlike anything I had previously known. During the months I spent at the ashrams in Pahalgam in Kashmir, and Rishikesh, I began to recognise in him something of the spiritual authority and power that I imagined the early Christians must have encountered in Jesus.
It was rare to have personal contact with Maharaji. On one occasion, however, as I was returning to my tent after a midday meditation session, he stopped me. Through an interpreter, he asked me several questions about my practice. The encounter lasted no more than four minutes. Yet when I walked away, I had the extraordinary sense that I was dripping with grace. It was as though my whole body and being had become saturated with a power and love that, in the language of my own faith, I understood as the presence of the Holy Spirit. Sceptics dismiss this telling as the fruit of desire mixed with an overactive imagination. But those who know such “experiences” recognise their validity even while exercising restraint in any re-telling.
Looking back, this encounter with Maharaji at the ashram became pivotal in my ongoing search for a deeply grounded and authentic encounter with the Reality we name as God. I had gone to India seeking a practice to become grounded but encountered a teacher who I recognised possessed spiritual authority. I had not known that I was seeking a teacher, yet the meeting revealed something important: the desire to become more deeply whole is inseparable from the need to learn from those who have themselves travelled the path. Maharaji was such a teacher because he embodied the depths of his practice in his person.
Jesus: The Exemplar of Spiritual Authority
You may ask, “what about Jesus?” Why do we need such teachers when we have Jesus who is both the goal and supreme teacher of the Christian life?
The Gospels tell us that those who heard Jesus recognised something fundamentally different in his teaching. His authority did not arise merely from learned interpretation, as with the scribes, but from an intimate knowledge of God. As Matthew records:
“When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes” (Mt 7:28–29).
Jesus exercised an authority that belonged uniquely to him. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis describes his words as “unique... inhabited by a mysterious authoritative power”—the Greek exousia.[1] His authority arose from both divine commission and participation in the life of God. Jesus embodied the Kingdom he proclaimed.
Yet Jesus also shared his authority with his disciples:
“See, I have given you authority (exousia) to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy” (Lk 10:19).
The Christian life, therefore, is not simply about admiring or imitating Jesus from a distance. It is about entering into his life and into the communion of Trinitarian love. We are called to experience its dynamis, its transforming power, and to live from that reality. The authority arising from this transforming power is not a fruit of ecclesial office but the gift of the Holy Spirit.
As Benedictine monk and meditation teacher John Main writes:
“If we are fully to respond to the call to leave the shallows and enter the deep, direct knowledge of a life lived in the mystery of God, then everything in life must be seen in the depth dimension of divine Presence.” [2]
But to enter this depth of Divine Presence, we need a living teacher—someone whose life embodies the path into the fullness of becoming in Christ and the mystery of Trinitarian love. Such teachers remind us that transformation is not merely an ideal but a genuine human possibility.
A teacher of the path of contemplation is not primarily someone who imparts information or possesses academic qualifications, but someone who has come to know God through lived experience.[3] They may be woman or man, ordained or lay, religious or married. What distinguishes them is wisdom born of prayer, love, fidelity and transformation.
Such a teacher knows the terrain because they have walked it. Mother Maria Gysi (d.1961),[4] a Russian Orthodox spiritual elder described the guide or staretz, (or teacher) as a mirror through which the disciples or seekers learn to see themselves:
For his disciple the staretz must be a clear mirror in which he can perceive his true face “the bearer of divine measures on which the disciple can depend until he learns to see.”[5]
It is in this lived participation in God that “a true staretz” becomes as a mirror, reflecting this Mystery through to the heart of the disciple or seeker, increasingly conforming them to the heart of Christ so that the disciple comes to know their own true face. As the guide is ever more deeply established in the Infinite heart, so too is the seeker carried into the slipstream of Love.
Similarly Elder Aimilianos (d. 2019), also a revered Orthodox spiritual elder, drew others into deeper relationship with Christ, through his own attainment. He writes that the spiritual elder “transmits to the disciples his own knowledge,” so that they too may become transfigured in Christ. This is a heart-to-heart transmission, communicated through “the fire that the spiritual elder kindles in their hearts” and through an awakened sensitivity to Christ’s living presence.
Aimilianos expresses this beautifully: the contemplative teacher, or spiritual father or mother, “brings Christ down, reunites heaven and earth, and transforms them into one unique and genuine dance.”[6]
At its fullest, the teacher who knows in their own experience the gift of contemplation, embodies the reconciliation of human and divine life, inviting others into their own participation in the mystery of God’s transforming love.
This need for a teacher on the spiritual journey is not unique to Christianity. The human desire to seek guidance from those who know in their own experience the mystery of the Spirit is universal.[7]
Recovering the Need for a Teacher
However, one of the striking differences between the early Christian tradition and much of modern Western Christianity is that the early Church simply assumed that anyone who sincerely sought God would learn the spiritual way under the guidance of an experienced teacher. Today that assumption has largely disappeared.
Modern Western culture prizes independence and personal autonomy. We are encouraged to believe that we should be able to find our own way.
Why has this tradition been neglected? In the view of John Main, Thomas Keating, Maggie Ross and others, it is because we have largely lost the place of silence within the Christian journey. Or, to put it another way, there are now so few teachers who have learned to become deeply silent before God—who know the contemplative path from the inside and whose lives have been deeply transformed by God—that they are able to accompany others from their own lived experience.
At the same time, Western Christianity has often placed greater emphasis on information than formation. We have unprecedented access to sermons, podcasts, books, commentaries and online resources. Yet sincere Christians continue to ask:
How do I become one with that which we name as God?
How do I come to know first-hand that a God of Love loves me?
Why do I remain spiritually stuck?
How do I discern God's action in my life?
How do I pray through dryness or suffering?
Questions such as these require more than instruction. They require the guidance and companionship of someone who has already travelled the path.
John Main recognised that Western Christianity had largely lost men and women capable of being deep teachers of prayer because they had not themselves journeyed into the fullness of contemplative experience. He wrote:
“Men and women of deep spiritual seriousness and hunger … were being denied the vital reference points of their growth to maturity and … lacked the personal communication of teaching authority and experience.”[8]
He was deeply troubled by the loss of experiential spiritual wisdom within the Church, society and monasticism. He spoke of monasticism's “widespread alienation from its own rich tradition and experience of prayer.”[9] The Western Christian church had become increasingly disconnected from its own lived contemplative tradition that had once formed its spiritual teachers.
Christianity as Apprenticeship
The Christian tradition was always understood as a form of apprenticeship. Jesus did not simply communicate ideas or doctrines; he formed disciples. He called people into relationship with himself so that, through living with him, listening to him and imitating him, they might be transformed. This is why St Paul could say: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” (1 Cor. 11:1)
From its earliest beginnings, those who sought to follow Christ ordinarily did so under the guidance of those whose lives had already been shaped by the Spirit. The early monks and nuns understood this. St John Cassian expressed it simply:
"whenever a person wishes to acquire skill in some art, he must give himself over with all his care and attentiveness to the study of the discipline that he wants to grasp and must observe the precepts and institutes of the most accomplished teachers in that area of work or knowledge; otherwise, he longs in vain and with idle desire to achieve a resemblance to those persons whose care and effort he fails to imitate.”[10]
For Cassian, prayer was not a technique to be acquired; it was a way of life communicated through encounter with those who embodied it.
John Main returned frequently to this insight. He reminded us that growth in prayer comes through learning from those who have been “tested, refined and purified” through the journey of faith.
He wrote:
“One of the major tragedies of our situation is that there are so few teachers of that goodness which Jesus enjoined upon us, so few who can speak of goodness out of their own experience.” [11]
For John Main, the teacher’s role was never to create dependence. The purpose of the teacher was to lead the disciple into freedom in Christ:
“If a teacher is there to lead, encourage and simplify, it is only so that the disciple may come as quickly as possible to that transcendence of self which enables them, in turn, to become a channel of the Lord’s love and power for others.”[12]
The teacher exists so that the disciple may become fully alive in God.
John Main also wrote:
“A visible teacher is needed to encourage, inspire and to help create an atmosphere of love and so enkindle a spirit of selflessness that is the only sane milieu for perseverance.”[13]
The teacher is not a substitute for the seeker’s relationship with God. Rather, the teacher through the Mystery of their own transparency to Christ, becomes the milieu in which the seekers own relationship with God can mature.
The Teacher as Carrier of the Spirit
In the early monastic tradition, teachers of prayer were at the heart of the community. They did not pray instead of others or assume responsibility for another person's spiritual journey. Through their fidelity, stability and perseverance, they awakened others to their own encounter with God.
John Main writes:
“In the early days of monasticism, these teachers of prayer were the heart of a monastery, the magnet that drew a community together and held it in the fraternal love of a life of prayer.”[14]
For John Main, this is why a monastery is fundamentally a place of personal transmission:
“A monastery is above all the place where the teaching is communicated by persons to persons in a fully human relationship.”[15]
The Christian mystery is not merely information to be transferred. It is life communicated through another’s life.
The Cistercian abbot and later hermit André Louf expressed the same understanding. Prayer, he said, is learned through apprenticeship: it is passed from one who is mature in the Spirit to one seeking maturity. The word of such a person becomes a “carrier or vehicle of the Spirit.”
Louf observed that prayer may be learned not only through words, but through presence:
“You may learn it from the look on another’s face or catch the sound of it in his heart—in a heart that lives, that radiates life and awakens others to life.”[16]
The teacher’s very person communicates something of the reality they have already encountered. This little-by-little leads “the disciple into deep water, to make him [or her] ‘descend progressively to the deepest part of himself, in order to liberate the vital forces that are hindered there.’”[17] In this way, the disciple, as Louf refers to the seeker, opens themselves to an inner transformation.
The Goal Is Transformation, Not Dependence
This ensures that the goal of spiritual apprenticeship is never dependence upon the teacher. The goal is transformation in Christ. The teacher accompanies the disciple towards increasing wisdom, discernment and freedom, until the disciple becomes increasingly attentive to the presence and action of God within themselves.
A genuine spiritual teacher possesses what the Christian tradition recognises as the charism of spiritual authority.[18] This authority is not derived from the institution of the church, from the laying on of hands. Rather its origin is charismatic—it is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
John Main was such a recipient of the gift of the Spirit. As was André Louf. Their authority came not from position or status, but from their lives transformed by God.
Such a teacher acts almost like a magnifying lens, concentrating the light of Christ so that those entrusted to their care gradually become simpler, freer and more attentive to God's presence within them.
Different Teachers
The word “authority” comes from the Latin auctoritas, meaning “to make grow.” This meaning is important. The authority of an authentic teacher of the Christ Mystery is not about control or power over another person. Rather, they nurture life in another, pointing them towards a deeper realisation of who they were/are created to be in Christ. Indeed it is a mutual enrichment but
Within the Christian spiritual ecosystem there are different layers of authority and teachers.
There is the teaching that begins us on the spiritual journey, from within the family. There is ecclesial authority—the authority of a bishop, priest or pastor through the office they hold within the Church. This authority is also a gift of the Spirit and carries an important responsibility.
Then there are those who have sufficient intimacy with God and wisdom to accompany us through further stages of the journey towards the Mystery of God.
But the ones of whom I am speaking today and to whom John Main refers, are those men and women whose lives and being reflect the Christ Light already present within them — people whose presence, love, wisdom and discernment are able to guide others into the depths of the Mystery of God, because they have gone there first. They are in a profound sense, living icons of Christ.
This was the authority recognised in the Desert Fathers and Mothers. People travelled great distances simply to ask an elder: “Give me a word.” The seeker wasn’t after information; they sought wisdom born of transformation. The authority of the Abbas and Ammas rested on their profound intimacy with God. It was recognised because they shone with the grace of Christ.
Authentic spiritual teachers do not seek or advertise this authority. Others draw it forth. We can see something of this in the example of the Russian hermit and staritsa, spiritual mother, Anastasia Logacheva. It was said of her:
“She shone with an inner radiance that attracted followers to her even in the depths of the forest and led many to sense in her the power of a deeper reality.”[19]
It is this same radiance and inner magnetism of John Main that drew people to him enabling them to deepen and grow in the love of God. His authority came not from position or status, but from a life shaped and transformed by the silence of stepping aside from self.
In our spiritual journey we may have several different teachers. But especially in Western Christianity, we need to recover teachers who are able to speak out of the fruits of their own deep transformation in Christ.
Boris Bobrinskoy and the Living Tradition
The Russian Orthodox theologian Boris Bobrinskoy expresses the enduring nature of spiritual teachers who are recognised as having the charism of spiritual authority. Though some of our teachers, who were living icons of Christ, are dead, yet they may continue to guide us.
“Revelation is always transmitted from heart to heart by the living, but also from heart to heart by those who are always living.”[20]
For Bobrinskoy, tradition is not simply the preservation of past teachings or the repetition of ancient words, it is a living transmission of divine life from one person to another.
He writes:
“I want to base myself with my whole being, without dissolving myself, on the experience of the saints... until I no longer know where to place quotation marks between the words of the saints and my own words.”[21]
He is not speaking of imitation in a superficial sense—copying the behaviour or language of another. He is speaking of participation in the Christ present in the saint, living or dead. Through the gradual interior assimilation of the Christic presence and wisdom that resides in the hearts of the saints or living icons, our hearts are permeated and transformed.
This is how the Christian tradition has always been transmitted—through transformed lives.
Recovering the Need for a Teacher Today
However, we live in a culture where this kind of apprenticeship has become unfamiliar.
The modern emphasis on autonomy and self-direction can make the very idea of needing a teacher uncomfortable. Even the word obedience is often misunderstood as submission or loss of freedom.
Yet in the Christian tradition, obedience—ob-audire, to listen deeply—is not about surrendering our freedom. It is about learning to hear the voice of God through those who have become attentive to the Spirit.
The recovery of the teacher is therefore not a return to dependence. It is a recovery of a deeply Christian understanding: that transformation happens through relationship, through communion, and through the gracious gift of those in whom Christ’s life has become visible.
The Danger and the Gift
Of course, our own age has witnessed painful and deeply troubling examples in both Christian and non-Christian contexts, of people claiming spiritual authority but who have abused the trust placed in them. This makes one thing absolutely essential: discernment.
The recovery of spiritual teachers cannot mean a return to unquestioning submission or authoritarian models of leadership.
Having the humility to learn from another’s intimacy with God has very different characteristics.
It does not dominate; it serves.
It does not compel; it invites.
It does not diminish freedom; it nurtures freedom.
It does not create dependence; it encourages maturity.
Above all, it points beyond itself to Christ.
Conclusion
Recovering the need for a teacher who has entered into the Mystery of God, in their own experience, is not about surrendering our freedom or creating dependence upon another person. It is about rediscovering an ancient Christian conviction: that deep transformation is ordinarily learned through relationship, led by the Holy Spirit.
Throughout Christian history, the Spirit has worked through women and men whose own lives have been transformed by grace—people who become instruments through whom others are invited into deeper communion with God. Such teachers do not replace Christ. In their profound alignment with and in Christ they lead others to Christ.
Their greatest gift is not that they draw attention to themselves, but that through their lives we come to recognise more clearly the presence of Christ already present within us.
I invite you to think about your own spiritual journey. I have been writing about the need for a teacher, but this is not simply an idea. Each of us has our own experience of being taught, guided or awakened by another.
Who have been your teachers?
What was it about them that opened something in you and deepened your relationship with God?
And what have you received from another person that could not have been learned simply from a book?
In the second part of this reflection, I shall reflect on why John Main OSB is such a teacher for me and I hope, awaken those of us who practise Christian Meditation more deeply to the extraordinary grace we have received in having such a teacher in John Main. Both articles are based on talks that were presented on 22 August 2026 in Melbourne, Australia, to the Victorian community of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM).
*Dr Fowler was the co-founder of WCCM Australia in Victoria in 1985, (known then as the Australian Christian Meditation Community) and led the Community in its formative early years. Since that time, she has given workshops and retreats both here in Australia and overseas, assisting adults to deepen their practice and understanding of the path of Christian meditation, as well as working with teachers on ways of introducing Christian meditation into schools and parishes. Ruth is profoundly grateful for the spiritual home that this Community has been for her and in particular the inspiration of its spiritual Father, John Main OSB. She continues to lead a weekly Christian meditation group online.
Ruth has lived in both Christian (with the Benedictines, now at Jamberoo Abbey) and non-Christian (India) monastic settings, which she regards as foundational in her spiritual path. She has been a spiritual director for many years, regarding this as a profound grace and privilege. Ruth recently completed a PhD at the University of Divinity entitled, The Charism of Spiritual Authority: A Call to Recover the Heart of Spiritual Guidance in Western Christianity, reflecting her concerns for the recovery of contemplative prayer, the importance of a teacher in the contemplative path and the relationship of these to spiritual guidance. Prior to her retirement in 2007 from the paid workforce Ruth was a Public Servant in the Victorian Government and a secondary school teacher in State and Catholic schools and active in the alternative school movement and teacher union politics.
References:
[1] Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, Vol. 1 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1996), 318.
[2] John Main, The Present Christ, (London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), Newsletter, Dec 1982, 111.
[3] Throughout these talks, by “experience” I do not mean occasional spiritual experiences or extraordinary mystical events, but a life shaped by sustained encounter with God—whether named Christ, Divine Mystery or indwelling Presence. It is a life transformed through the dying and rising woven into ordinary existence and through faithful practice of contemplative silence, until one is, in a profound sense, hollowed out by love.
[4] In 1966 Mother Maria Gysi became the founder of the first women’s Orthodox Monastery in the UK at Filgrave in Kent, after spending more than seven years as an Orthodox nun under the guidance of Fr. Anthony Bloom (later Metropolitan Anthony Sourozh) living in an Anglican Benedictine women’s Monastery at West Malling, UK. Sister Thekla, ed. Mother Maria: Her Life in Letters, (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), XIII–XLVIII.
[5] Mother Maria Gysi, The Fool and Other Writings, (Normanby: The Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Assumption, 1980), 18. Cited in Ivana and Tim Noble, “The Starets-Disciple Relationship According to Mother Maria Gysi,” Baptistic Theologies, Vol 7, no. 2, 2015: 93.
[6] Archimandrite Aimilianos, “The Role of the Spiritual Father in an Orthodox Monastery,” in The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain, ed. and trans. Hieromonk Alexander Golitzin (South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1994). Cited in Maximos Constas and The St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, “Transfigured in the Night: Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra,” The Orthodox Word, Vol 50, no. 3, May—June 2014: 150, https://www.sainthermanmonastery.com/product-p/ow296e.htm.
[7] Greg Bogart, In The Company of Sages: The Journey of the Spiritual Seeker. Kindle ed., (Rochester, VT and Toronto: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, 2015), 11.
[8] John Main, Letters from the Heart, (New York, Crossroad, 1982) Newsletter, April 1978, 13.
[9] John Main, Monastic Prayer Today in Community of Love, (Singapore, Medio Media, 2010), 91-2.
[10] John Cassian, Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey, (Paulist Press, New York, NY; Mahwah, NJ. 1997) 636, Conf. 18, II. 1.
[11] John Main, The Hunger for Prayer in Community of Love, (Singapore, Medio Media, 2010), 20.
[12] John Main, Letters from the Heart, Newsletter, April 1978, 53.
[13] John Main, The Hunger for Prayer, 22.
[14] John Main, Monastic Prayer Today in Community of Love, (Singapore, Medio Media, 2010), 98.
[15] John Main, Monastic Prayer Today, 97.
[16] André Louf, Teach Us to Pray: Learning a Little About God, trans. Hubert Hoskins, 1991 ed. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 40.
[17] Wright, Charles. The Way of the Heart: The Spiritual Experience of André Louf (Monastic Wisdom Series Book 72). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.146.
[18] Drawing on Kallistos Ware (The Inner Kingdom, [St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY, 2001] 127-151), I suggest that the charism of spiritual authority has five key characteristics – profound intimacy with God, the gift of discernment, capacity for loving relationship, recognition by others as having spiritual authority and through their own transparency to Christ sanctify others through their presence. These characteristics shall become apparent in the next article where I speak of John Main as a teacher.
[19] Brenda Meehan, Holy Women of Russia: The Lives of Five Orthodox Women Offer Spiritual Guidance for Today, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 58.
[20] Boris Bobrinskoy, The Compassion of the Father, [La Compassion du Pere, 2000] (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 129.
[21] Boris Bobrinskoy, The Compassion of the Father, 129.