Alan Jacobs writes about the diaconal charism rooted in the call of the first deacons:

So we see here the very common injustice that arises from people preferring members of their own cultural group to “others,” not realizing, or not accepting, that such distinctions are erased when one enters the Body of Christ. And when I consider what happened to David French in his family, I think: Every church needs deacons to do precisely what the first deacons did — that is, to give comfort and support to the people of God justly, that is, with no regard to differences in culture or race or politics, because, as Peter says a little later in Acts, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).

The key - the indifference he writes about - is, I think to be found to have its roots in another constituent part of diaconal spirituality, which is self-emptying (kenosis). I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few days, especially as I worked through spiritual reading suggested by my director and others over the last few years. Many of the books have been written by priests, and a few of them assume that the reader is also a priest. And so the advice and guidance in the book make perfect sense for a priest, but maybe not exactly for a deacon who is also married and holds a secular job.

This is not to say that the advice is misplaced, or that the reading can’t bear tremendous fruit. It does prompt the question of whether (and in what ways) the spiritual life of a deacon differs from priestly, monastic, or episcopal spirituality. Of course we should pray frequently and heroically, striving for a certain amount of consistent contemplative prayer. I also have a household to run, children to raise, and performance reviews to begin at work. Full acknowledging that priests have wall-to-wall schedules and endless demands of their own, it’s also fair to point out that the particular demands of married and family life are objectively different. It makes a sort of sense that the spiritual practices in support of them are also different, but I guess I’m not entirely sure how yet.

This could be just me overthinking again, though. Like the proverbial bee sampling from every flower along the way, I’ve fruitfully pulled bits and pieces from nearly all of the traditions I’ve studied. Maybe there isn’t one and, like everyone else, we have to sort out spirituality on our own. Feels like it might be worth a book or two, though.