Spiritual Accompaniment 

The true director of the Missionary Cenacle Spiritual Exercises (MCSE) is the Holy Spirit. Your prayers and inspirations will not come to you as the result of expertise on the part of a human director but as graces bestowed upon you as a divine gift. Even so, as part of the process of the Missionary Cenacle Spiritual Exercises you will be accompanied by one of the confreres who will serve you as a spiritual guide. The relationship between the one making the retreat and the spiritual guide is not exactly equivalent to the relationship that you have with your spiritual director. It is not the role of the spiritual guide during the MCSE to provide counseling, to discern subtle movements of the spirit or to teach lessons about the spiritual life. No, the spiritual guide is there to pray with and for you, to listen to the fruits of your prayer, and to present the scripture readings and the writings from Father Judge, which provide the “grist” for your own meditations. The spiritual guide during the MCSE is there to be a loving, listening presence. 

Calling the ones who are accompanying those making the MCSE “spiritual guides” might be too strong a term since the only “guidance” that goes on is through the material of the exercises. In the literature, such persons are sometimes referred to as “spiritual mentors” or, in the felicitous term from Celtic spirituality, “soul friends.” But whatever they are called those accompanying the retreatants during the MCSE are there to offer “support and understanding, rejoicing with those who rejoice and sorrowing with those who sorrow” (Constitution #27). The spiritual guide does not steer the retreatant but walks with him. 

Thomas Merton goes back into the monastic tradition and describes the one serving as spiritual director to be God’s usher who “must lead souls in God’s way, and not his own. . . . He does not merely want to know our problems, our difficulties, our secrets. . . . He wants to know the action of grace in our souls. His direction is, in reality, nothing more than a way of leading us to see and obey our real Director – the Holy Spirit hidden in the depths of our soul.”

Those making the MCSE do not turn to the spiritual guide for answers. Rather, the guide is there as someone to whom the retreatant can talk, candidly and in depth, about what matters most in our lives as religious men – our relationship with God. The spiritual guides pledge on their part to offer complete confidentiality, genuine fraternal love and a ceaseless openness to the Spirit as their ministry during the Exercises.