Spiritual direction

I went for spiritual direction yesterday. I enjoy talking about myself! It's only through articulating how I am feeling, how I am experiencing God's mercy and how I am relating to others that I am able to understand these things. It's a great privilege as a priest to be able to take one's interior life seriously: it's part of the job. A wholesome development in the Church in recent years is that lay people are increasingly asking for spiritual accompaniment too. As a boy I thought that priests just reached a certain level of sanctity and then, sustained by the grace of Holy Orders, gave the rest of us the benefit of it. But it's not like that at all. It's like Jesus challenges each of us priests each morning, "Put out into the deep," as he did to Peter all those years ago. The more we surrender, the more we obey, the more authentic is our ministry. Our life is an adventure and we need to be courageous.