Dr. Robbie Pinter taught English at Belmont University for forty years. She now enjoys what was once her “career within a career” as she offers Spiritual Direction, writes, and facilitates retreats and Centering Prayer groups. After a nudge to dwell more fully in the world of metaphor, symbol, ritual and social justice, she converted to Catholicism. Raised in the Baptist tradition, Robbie now speaks two spiritual languages.

A three-time graduate of Shalem Institute (The Spiritual Guidance Program, Transforming Community and the Soul of Leadership), Robbie has served as a Spiritual Director for 16 years. She is active on the Board at St. Mary’s Sewanee. A new organization, Catharsis, is also one Robbie’s passions—she serves on the board. She also serves as the point person for Contemplative Outreach in Middle Tennessee. She is passionate about Centering Prayer.

Robbie works with Wisdom Tree Collective as a Mentor in the Spiritual Direction program and as the Group Supervision facilitator.

Her years as a professor read like a spiritual director’s dream. She designed and taught a Spirituality and Writing course and developed Journaling courses within and beyond the Academy based on Ira Progroff’s eponymous program, “In a Journal Workshop.” She also routinely taught Literature of Dreams, Literature of Silence, Writing and Place, and travel-based classes in the Mid-East and with the Plains tribes of the US. In the last part of her career, she enjoyed coordinating the peer tutoring seminar: to her, tutoring and spiritual direction are both a little like “listening a person into existence” as Mary Rose O’Reilley once wrote. Both teaching and spiritual direction offer their own kinds of listening.

Robbie believes that spiritual direction is a way to offer people ways to be aware of, and live into, Presence. Direction is a way to listen for the Holy speaking in all parts of life, even and especially in the silence.

One of Robbie’s loves is poetry and she delights in noting the right passage (from literature or scripture) for the moment. To know Robbie is to know her favorite quote. She writes: I discovered this quote when I was sixteen, growing up in Arkansas. I didn’t know there was such a thing as spiritual writing but this one opened the door to me to a world imbued with the Holy Spirit. It also showed me the power of spiritual writing, inviting me to join in the work of a teacher and writer:

“There must be always remaining in every man’s [sic] life some place for the singing of angels — some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by an inherent prerogative, throwing all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness — something that gathers up in itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright light of penetrating beauty and meaning — then passes. The commonplace is shot through with new glory — old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. . . Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all of the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.

— (Howard Thurman, The Inward Journey, 42)

Robbie is wife to Mike, a Math professor at Belmont University, and mother to Nicholas who teaches pre-school at the Jewish Community Center (she’s thrilled he joined the family business of education).