A priest’s primary relationship is his relationship with God. A spiritual director accompanies a priest in this relationship by helping him face God and speak to him in all life matters. The director helps him sift through the various interior movements in the priest’s heart and mind during prayer and daily activities: thoughts, feelings and desires. This sifting helps the priest recognize which movements are from God and which are not. Thus he will be more aware of the choice to remain with God.

During sessions of spiritual direction, a priest may share with his director the experiences of prayer or events from pastoral work and daily life. Some priests find it helpful to keep a journal and note how they experienced (or did not experience) God’s presence during prayer, pastoral work or daily life. The priest can approach his upcoming direction session by prayerfully reading his journal in a lectio divina fashion, noting which experiences God is inviting him to bring to spiritual direction, some of which may be difficult to talk about; but with prayerful preparation, the priest can realize the experience may be what God desires for him to bring to the session. Preparation will help keep the session’s focus on the priest’s relationship with God.

The relationship between a priest and his director is more than a casual conversation about the priest’s life. The role of a director is to listen to what God is doing in the priest and to direct the priest both to notice and relate what is occurring in his prayer, pastoral work and daily life to God. A director may need to help a priest express the interior movements of his heart. This can occur through simple prompting. For example, the priest may share that he found it difficult to face disappointed parishioners from one of his parishes that will soon merge with another parish. The priest noticed thoughts of doubt arise in him, as he wondered if closing the parish was the right decision. The thoughts began to invade him with his other duties, and he experienced heaviness in his heart during his normal pastoral work.

A director may ask the priest, for example, “How did you experience God toward you as you shared with him these doubts and heaviness?” The prompting redirects the priest from focusing on his doubt and heaviness, to focus on God and his experience of God during the time of doubt and heaviness. Or, the priest may have yet to share his doubts and heaviness with God in his personal prayer time, and the direction session redirects the priest’s focus to God. As Deacon James Keating writes, “We are invited by our directors to pay attention to God reaching us precisely in direction, as well as during the hours outside of scheduled prayer” (“Remain in Me,” Paulist Press, $16.95).

As the priest faces God with doubt and heaviness, he may experience a new love God has for him that he had not noticed or taken time to notice. The priest may even become aware that he felt isolated from God during that time. The priest leaves this session of direction with a greater understanding that his spiritual life is influenced by interior movements that draw him closer to God or move him away from God. He leaves the session strengthened in his relationship with God, aware that he can turn to God as he encounters similar pastoral situations in the weeks ahead. He will more readily share with God the interiority of his life and notice God’s response to this sharing. The director’s role helped the priest remain in his primary relationship with God and to resist what led him into isolation.

Why Have a Spiritual Director?

One of the pitfalls, at least in the diocesan priesthood, is to focus on and measure productivity, according to worldly standards. Our lives as priests can be dominated by mounting tasks some of which are never resolved. We become conditioned to believe that our identity as priests is either enhanced or diminished by the successes and failures of productivity. Unreflectively, we become hyper-employed, constantly checking emails in our office and on our phones, responding to texts or trying to conduct management and administrative tasks through them.

Deacon James Keating, again in “Remain in Me,” notes: “Worry over governance can consume us and, because its demands are immediate, can become overbearing in its pressure. Once it becomes disproportionate in our imagination, it fills the space that communion with God ought to fill. We then no longer seek God’s face but rather seek to quiet the beast of disproportionate worry over competency, success, or achievement.”

Regular spiritual direction leads to an ordering of the spiritual life by guiding the priest to relate to God as his primary relationship, not his work. The priest is meant to be contemplative, not merely imitating Christ, but becoming a living image of him through mutual sharing of life. This ordering with the primacy of relationship on God opens a new interior dwelling space in the priest reserved for God alone.

As the priest continues to dwell in this interior space, he becomes perpetually available to God. He remains faithful to what Christ entrusts to him. He resists the desire to prove himself by worldly standards (see Josef Pieper’s work on virtues of the human heart). In this interior space, the priest continually says “yes” to God, and from here is sent on mission by God. With the help of his director, the priest protects this space through honest personal prayer, the sacraments and a virtuous life. Dwelling with God in this interior space protects against the temptation to believe that the priest is alone. He begins to experience that everything is mutual between him and God and develops a contemplative way of life.

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The Institute for Priestly Formation Training Program

Located in Omaha, Nebraska, “the Institute for Priestly Formation offers the Spiritual Direction Training Program for diocesan priests to deepen the priest’s personal rootedness in communion with Christ and to equip the priest to be able to nurture this communion with the Lord in the lives of others through contemplative spiritual direction.

For more information visit priestlyformation.org/programs.

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The contemplative priest is aware of his own desires for God and shares them with God. He also notices God’s desires for him and allows God to unfold those desires. Dietrich von Hildebrand writes that the reverent man does not project his ego on the world but allows space for “being” to unfold itself. The irreverent man projects himself as a know-it-all, or as preferring what is agreeable to him. A contemplative priest, with a deepening interior dwelling space for he and God, allows reverence to grow in his heart. He becomes moved by God’s unfolding desires for the priest, who can wait in patience for the gift of God and is not motivated by worldly desires, selfish preferences or his ego.

We see the fruitful, contemplative interior life on display in a story about Blessed Stanley Rother told by Bishop Daniel Mueggenborg of Reno, who at the time was a college student:

“Throughout that Mass [occurring in March 1981], I kept wondering why [this priest] had the qualities I so desperately wanted. It was while serving that Mass that I decided to be open to becoming a priest. When Mass was over, I asked my parents who was that priest, and they said, ‘That is Father Rother; he is the missionary in Guatemala.’ Four months later, he was martyred. That’s when I began to learn about his life and ministry. If I was going to be a priest, then I wanted to be a priest like him.”

At one point, Father Rother had returned from Guatemala and spent several months in Oklahoma, and several people expressed concern for his safety that he could face during Guatemalan civil unrest. In those months in Oklahoma, Father Rother faced a decision about whether or not to return to Guatemala. He could have remained in his Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, taken a pastorate in a country parish, and certainly would have lived out his years as a good parish priest. During those uncertain months, it became clearer to Rother that he wanted to respond to his deep desire to return to his people in Guatemala. Rother listened and waited on God’s desire to unfold in him during those months. He and God shared a mutual desire for him to return to Guatemala. He returned, became a martyr, and his faithful witness inspired many men to become priests, both in the United States and Guatemala.

Contemplative Priests Move Us

The lives of priests like Rother move our hearts. It is their contemplative life, and their disposition to let God’s desires unfold in them, that affects us. They choose to stay in the presence of Christ because of a deepening friendship with him, even though, at times, it may cause suffering. Contemplative priests like Rother are not moved and motivated by superficial thoughts, feelings or desires, but wait for God to move them. We, too, want our lives, as priests, ordered and moved, by God and God alone, and seek spiritual directors to help us face God with all matters of our lives. We then become living images of Christ, who always faced God his Father, and with all matters of his life.

FATHER BRIAN WELTER is executive director of the Institute for Priestly Formation in Omaha, Nebraska.