From the Pragmatic to the Poetic

Jonathan Went came to the Ignatian Spirituality Center for Seek and Find spiritual direction services last spring, looking for guidance while in the middle of a big decision. The Dartmoor School teacher was considering undertaking a PhD program in English and wanted to know whether God was truly calling him to it. According to Jonathan, ISC’s Carla Orlando provided him with a perfect match for spiritual direction.

“I started crying during our first initial interview,” Jonathan recalled. “What started as a discernment process about his schooling, soon went to a very different place. It became apparent that I was really set on finding the holiness of God and my own relationship to his presence. There was this deepening movement within my soul.”

Raised Catholic, Jonathan experienced stages of atheism and rebellion,explored Protestantism, and had more recently been drawn back to his Catholic heritage. He described it as coming full circle.

As a result of the spiritual direction, Jonathan found his practice of writing poetry had become something more.Instead of pursuing the PhD, Jonathan started writing a daily haiku, a chance to practice “presence” in nature,finding glimpses of the divine. “It shifted from me just using art as a practice to this deeper knowing and longing that I had in my soul. That was surprising, because here I was being very pragmatic—should I go for a doctoral program—and then there’s this deeper undercurrent of being struck by the holiness of God and who I’m called to be.