Spiritual Direction is the help that one person gives another to enable him or her to become more conscious of how God is working in his or her life and how he or she may become more responsive to God.
Spiritual direction is offered to priests, sisters, seminarians, and to lay people alike.
It takes on different emphases with different people. In the spiritual direction of Associates, the emphasis is on helping a person examine carefully the desire and attraction to become a priest or brother in the Society of Jesus. As an Associate, a man and his director, over a period of several months, will prayerfully try to discern whether the desire for a religious vocation is from God, that is, whether God is calling the man now, or in the near future, to be a Jesuit priest or brother. Anyone who believes that he or she may have a vocation to religious life should be willing to invest time in conversations with a director he or she can trust and with whom he or she can talk openly about matters that have a close bearing upon a religious vocation. Within the context of the Society of Jesus, the director will want to know about the origin and growth of the desire for the priesthood or brotherhood as a Jesuit.