There is a little story Metropolitan Anthony tells of a young women put into prison during the Russian Revolution. It explores the issue of justice in how we see others. We usually see justice in terms of attribution or retribution, of allotting a person's due, but here justice goes deeper and further to recognising the right of another to be irreducibly different from ourselves, accepting the fact that the other has no reason to be a replica of myself. That they are called t

The Celtic tradition offers us the wonderful notion of anam cara. In Gaelic the word anam means soul and cara is a word for friend. So anam cara means soul friend. This is not a simple or superficial friendship, but a special and deep one in which one person really supports and guides another. They are the person to whom you can reveal the hidden intimacies of your life - your innermost self, heart and mind, without mask or pretension. In early Celtic history, the anam cara w

I have been involved in a UK project developing an ethical framework for spiritual direction work, which also relates to spiritual accompaniment, spiritual mentoring and spiritual guidance. It was put together in consultation with many other publications of guidelines of good practice and ethics from across the world, and across spiritual disciplines, as you can see detailed in the appendix. The project has paused for a while. So, I post here the work I have done on ethics an