~ by Fr. Jack Bentz, SJ

For some of us the call to religious life is like an insane crank caller who keeps calling and then says nothing. You pick up the phone and there is silence on the other end or perhaps at best, garbled words that you can’t understand. So you hang up and try to ignore the next time it rings with that Unknown Caller on the blinking screen.

“Yeah,” you tell your friends, “I think I have a call to religious life.” What does that mean? You have figured out that you want to serve God, but don’t want to be a parish priest. You have read enough to suspect that following Christ as St. Ignatius did is a good fit for you. And finally you have met Jesuits you like and admire and you can imagine yourself living, working, and celebrating with for the rest of your life. All this makes sense on paper, and yet . . .

So you get a Jesuit spiritual director. He is good and you actually begin to learn that what you’ve already doing been doing is actually prayer. You even learn that God loves you whether you become a Jesuit or not. And you go to lunch with Jesuits, you have coffee with Jesuits, you have dinner with Jesuits, and you even get up early and meet a Jesuit for breakfast – And still you wonder is this for me. Is this me?

And you attend a Come and See weekend in Portland. You meet the novices, you meet the novice director, and you meet other men looking at the Jesuits. They all seem like really good men and, surprisingly to you, they seem normal. Whatever that means. And you drive back from the weekend and still you are unsure.

What more information do you need? Do you need more experience of the Jesuits? Do you need to read another book? Perhaps you need to meet with and actuary or oracle who will be able to accurately predict just exactly how good your life will be in the Jesuits. Or maybe just maybe you need to jump in.

Men are accepted into the Jesuits not because the man knows he will be a Jesuit forever and not because the Jesuits know the man will be a Jesuit forever but because it seems the man is able to do the Long Retreat. These thirty days of prayer happening in the first few months of the novitiate make up the key event for the man seeking Christ. This is an experience where the man encounters Jesus and moves into a bone deep, heart opening relationship with the living God.

Through that retreat men get the experience that allows them in freedom to become a Jesuit or to live happily not as a Jesuit. And then the crank calls become long conversation with Christ and the man can live peacefully with Christ in whatever state is best. Priest, husband, or single, whichever state the man can be most available to God working in the world.