Tending The Holy Graduate 1998

Alice Fryling is a graduate of Christos’s Tending the Holy Spiritual Direction program, a Spiritual Director and a best-selling author.

Her books on relationships, spiritual formation, and spiritual direction have sold over half a million copies and are published in over ten languages.

She has been actively involved in church ministry and teaching workshops on Enneagram and Myers Briggs Temperament Inventory. She and her husband worked with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for over fifty years. alicefryling.com

Alice is the author of a new book, Aging Faithfully.

Read a longer profile of Alice on our blog:

How did your Christos training influence the way you’ve approached this book?

I really can’t overstate how helpful Christos and spiritual direction have been to me in my own experience of aging and as I have companioned others. In the early 1990s, when I took the Tending the Holy distance learning program, it was quite undeveloped – with cassette tapes! But it was still amazing and launched me into more than 25 years of offering spiritual direction. Becoming a Spiritual Director opened a whole new vista of opportunity and ministry. When we listen deeply to someone, we are loving that person.  And love heals.

As I wrote the book, I was surprised to find that it became a spiritual director to me. Sometimes the book would say back to me – probably thanks to the gentle way of the Holy Spirit, “You know Alice, you really don’t believe that … Can you think of another way to say it?” Like a good spiritual director, the book helped me find things in myself that I didn’t know were there.

“My sense in talking with people is that making changes puts them in liminal space – the unknown place between where we are and where we will be. It can be scary. My impression so far in my own life is that aging is an ongoing liminal space for us. It really does describe our aging experience. We spend our lives organizing solutions to problems. You can’t organize aging.”