What can this book do for you? I have written this book to help women become friends with God. I say "help" because all one person can ever do for another spiritually is to walk alongside. St. Ignatius of Loyola said it well more than four centuries ago when he reminded spiritual directors to get out of the way and allow the Creator to deal with the created one. He meant that God is already working in people''s lives and that their task is to learn how to pay attention to what God is doing. A good spiritual director--or simply a good friend--learns to help a person see more clearly, understand more specifically, and participate more intentionally with God''s action in her life. I say "women" because I have observed for many years how women bring certain qualities to the spiritual life, and how they also face certain challenges. In the Catholic world--and the Christian arena in general--most materials on the spiritual life are still written by men, and their vocabulary and sensibility do not always take into account how women actually experience the world.

I am still learning, at age fifty, how my experience as a female has influenced the way I imagine God and relate to God. This book is not an attempt to re-create the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, but because Ignatian spirituality makes such effective use of the physical senses, the imagination, and our reflection upon real experience, I have rooted much of this book''s material in the Ignatian understanding of spiritual movement. Here is a brief summary of some of the concepts important to the chapters ahead. We find God in all things. God is ever-present and at work in human experience. We grow by learning to recognize God and respond to God where God already is. Reflection is a powerful spiritual practice that moves us forward.

Reflection involves self-awareness and discernment, combining the ability to understand our interior life with the wisdom to choose our path wisely. We can practice reflection in a number of ways and build into our behavior healthy self-awareness and clarity, leading to good choices. We are able to know the Divine through a developing friendship with Jesus of Nazareth. As someone "fully human and fully divine," Jesus is able to meet us intimately through reflection, prayer, action, and revelation. In coming to know Jesus, we are able to connect with divine life on a daily basis and in ways that fit our unique situation, personality, and history. God intends for us to experience inner freedom. This freedom allows us to be who we are rather than try to be someone else. It helps us hold life lightly rather than grasp it anxiously.

Spiritual freedom encourages us to receive God''s ongoing acceptance, love, and help. We are designed to participate with God in bringing wisdom and healing to the world through our gifts, desires, and opportunities. Our friendship with God first of all brings healing to us personally; we become increasingly able to deal with our own spiritual conflicts, to offer and seek forgiveness, and to develop and use our particular traits and gifts. As a natural result of our personal healing, we become healers to others, and through our gifts we can''t help but do good in the world. These five points do not offer a comprehensive description of Ignatian spirituality, or even of Christian spirituality. But this book is not meant to be comprehensive. Our main theme is friendship with God. If we apply even one of these concepts with any consistency, the spiritual life will open up, and we will most certainly move forward as people who possess the stunning capacity for authentic life with God.

Experience and belief . The reflections and exercises in this book could be used by women or men. We respond to God first of all as humans, and in Christ "there is no male and female." But I have chosen language and illustrations that focus on women. This is not a book about femininity or feminism but about spiritual movement and how we, as women, interact with divine love. I have led many writers'' workshops, using exercises that helped participants experience the creative process. What I''ve done here is similar but with a different focus, introducing questions and imaginative exercises designed to help the reader pay closer attention to her life and God''s action in it. In these pages I''ve tried to create an experience, a sequence of chapters and interactions that provide opportunities for spiritual movement and helpful reflection.

If the reader does most or all of the exercises, she will truly participate in an unfolding account of her journey with God. The material is Christian, but I have avoided many religious terms, because often the woman who is ready to delve into a freer and truer friendship with God is in that frame of mind and soul because she has reached a critical point in her life. Many times that critical point comes as the result of suffering, sometimes in church experience or at the hands of religious people. The reader who enters such a season of wanting God''s friendship has probably grown weary of the familiar phrases and formulas. This doesn''t mean that she no longer believes in God or no longer appreciates church worship and traditional spiritual activities. She may need, however, some distance from a religious experience that has been, or has become, painful or frustrating. In other words, this material may appeal to someone who is cautious toward traditional religious practice. At the same time, the exercises and reflections will move the reader always toward the heart of authentic belief.

I try to help the reader reconnect with genuine Christian faith through inviting language and images. I wrote Days of Deepening Friendship with individual readers in mind; it is designed for you to work through on your own. It should work well also with the support of a spiritual director. If you intend to use this book with a small group, please read the suggestions on page 309, "How to use this book with small groups." Why friendship, and why now? For many years I have wrestled with belief. I have experienced Christianity with both passion and ambivalence. I have lost faith and found it again, and I have explored more ideas about grace and truth than I can easily remember. But now all I really want is to be God''s friend.

I say this without shame: my goal is friendship with the Divine. This is not a new idea. The great Old Testament patriarch Moses was called God''s friend, and Jesus called his disciples friends--in fact, he was quite adamant about that distinction. Some of our favorite saints, such as St. Teresa of Ávila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, included "friend" in their various descriptions of God. I grew up Baptist, without any acquaintance with such saints, but I have considered myself God''s friend through the years, even though the concept has grown blurry at times. But during the past few years, my heart has filled with desire and dissatisfaction, and I''m learning to pay attention to that sort of thing.

These symptoms tell me what my soul has known all along: we were made to love God and to increasingly experience God''s love for us. If a love relationship with God does not develop, we have missed our purpose, our joy, and our deepest, truest dream. Now that I am a couple of decades into a career and a marriage, I simply don''t have the time and energy I used to have for retreats, seminars, or parish missions. And while I''m not against new information, information does not hold the promise it once did. Especially in this frenetic information age, we are obsessed with data, with acquiring knowledge to catalog and analyze. I still love to learn, but if information does not culminate in friendship with the Divine, I''m not interested. The deep sense that we need something more . I suspect that whoever has picked up this book feels the same way.

After a point, we become weary of thinking so much and trying so hard. We more easily abandon the self-justifying and even the self-helping that in earlier days held such priority for us. Our souls have become needy in a profound, relentless way, and we cannot ignore the symptoms any longer: restlessness, exhaustion, sadness, and fresh desire. These signals tell us that nothing short of divine friendship will do. If God is not intimate with us, then what''s the point of everything else? If God has become mostly a concept or psychological projection--or even a belief system--then we have likely received already whatever benefit can be received from God. I have spent a lifetime conceptualizing God in various ways and projecting my needs and wants onto a divinity that helped me as I chose to be helped. But all of that brings a person only so far. We become tired of "God" only because much of the time the god we worship is of our own making, a violently skewed version of what the ancients have tried to describe and interpret for us.

The prophets and poets, preachers, priests, and popes have brought us to a certain point, but the rest is between us and God Who Is. Church, Scripture, morality, and what? . I belong to a faith community. I attend church regularly and have for most of my life. I understand that worship helps me and that the Eucharist feeds me; both of these traditional practices place my soul on a track that provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional grounding. Both help me open a little more to who God is and to what God is doing. Because I know this, I have committed myself to a Christian community that honors worship and Eucharist. Still, liturgy is not an end in itself, but a catalyst designed to help us connect to what is mysterious and far beyond our perception.

If, somewhere in all the phrases and pauses, the gestures and prayers, God do.