Jesuit Journeys
Fall 2001

By Phil Nero

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Think of Fr. Dick Rice, SJ and his colleagues at Loyola as combination travel agents and guides for life's spiritual journey. They listen to where you want to go and offer suggestions. The final decisions are yours, however, and how much you enjoy the trip is up to you.

Fr. Rice and Loyola have been at this a long time, so long that the coming calendar year brings two important milestones. Fr. Rice will celebrate 30 years as a Jesuit priest while Loyola commemorates its 25th anniversary as a spiritual resource in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area.

Loyola offers retreats and workshops, typically at retreat centers throughout the area and state. Over the years, however, Loyola has come to specialize in another mode of spiritual travel as well - spiritual direction.

"Our mission is to help people be adult Christians. To help people take their own life seriously. To help people reflect, understand, and act on the movements of the spirit of God within them," Fr. Rice says.

A candidate for spiritual direction at Loyola should spend at least five minutes each day in prayer and work no more than six days a week, indicating a willingness to be available to God. Sessions are confidential, one-on-one, and usually on a monthly basis with a trained director whose primary responsibility is to listen.

"I'm listening for evidence of the Holy Spirit," Fr. Rice says. "Is what they're saying inviting them to be more loving, joyful, peaceful, gentle, patient people? I'm listening as well for areas of incongruence, a lack of harmony, a lack of peace, and what might be going on with other spirits. There are times when I'm hardly hearing words. I'm listening for melody and whether what they're saying sounds harmonious."

In the Ignatian tradition, directees are guided toward areas of their lives that offer harmony and consolation and away from disharmony and sources of desolation.

Loyola was born of providence in 1976 when Fr. Rice was asked to fill in at the last minute for the first of what would become an annual retreat for bishops of the region.

"The Archbishop wanted them to be praying together and to become a community of bishops to each other with the possibility of offering each other assistance," Fr. Rice recalls. "I needed credibility and someone closer to their own age, so I quickly called Fr. Joe Sheehan, SJ, one of the great holy men of our province." The retreat went so well that Fr. Rice believed a resource offering off-site retreats for groups and on-site individualized spiritual direction might be useful for a broader scope of people.

He thought the concept through and in July 1977 enlisted the help of Sr. Helen Dolores Sweeney, CSJ to help him co-found Loyola.

"I was doing Saturday recollections for a group of 125 sisters from around the Twin Cities and asked did any of them know a woman who might well be an administrator for me? Some other Sisters of Saint Joseph were there and they mentioned her name. A couple of weeks later I happened to be at their residence to visit a friend when a woman came around the corner. I asked her name and it was Sr. Helen Dolores."

Sr. Helen Dolores was 65 at the time and fearful that her sense of enterprise might be waning. Fr Rice gave her his best recruiting pitch.

"I realized she had a lot more life in her than she thought she had." A skilled and loving administrator, Sr. Helen Dolores "prayed us into being," Fr. Rice says. "She would pray carefully for each of the people coming every day. She prayed that I would be a good companion for them. She prayed that the right people for this ministry would appear. She prayed that we would be financially provided for. She started her day every day formally in prayer for Loyola. I did too, but not nearly at the length and depth she did. As soon as we opened the door people started coming in, and within a year I was overwhelmed by the response of exactly the kind of people I wanted to serve.

"By the second year we hired two other full time people and a part-time person. So we just exploded from two to five and I attribute a lot of that to her prayer."

Tears stream from Fr. Rice as he recalls Sr. Helen Dolores' devotion to Loyola, which by the time of her death in 1989 was solidly established as a spiritual renewal resource.

"Our mission is to help people be adult Christians. To help people take their own life seriously. To help people reflect, understand, and act on the movements of the spirit of God within them."     -Fr. Dick Rice, SJ

Staff conduct most spiritual direction sessions at Loyola's modest headquarters, a former convent in an unpretentious St. Paul neighborhood. When Fr. Rice emphasizes Loyola is a resource, not a center, he is in part saying that Loyola's charism is tied to having the freedom to go forth and offer its gifts anywhere. Renting rather than owning its office space is designed to reinforce that image. Holding retreats off- site at area retreat centers strengthens it further.

If there is one characteristic that truly defines Loyola it is the one-for-all, all-for-one, egalitarian spirit among the eight-person staff of three men and five women, half of whom are lay persons.

"This is an incredibly supportive environment that is fully open to new ways of doing things," says Anne "Tuny" O'Rourke, a former elementary school teacher and homemaker. "It is a wonderful model for the Church of how men and women can work together." She joined the staff five years ago after training in spiritual direction at the Cenacle Retreat House in Minneapolis. Loyola offered a place for her to re-enter the workplace, a place for her gifts to grow and flow into the lives of others at a time when she was filled with inner fire, desire, and ability but short on experience. Loyola staff welcomed her as a woman, a peer, and a partner.

Partnership is another hallmark of the Loyola way. All eight members of the staff including the current director, all spiritual directors, and Jackie Barrett, Loyola's administrator-receptionist, are compensated on an equal basis. No one is the superstar. All are equal members of the team.

"It's not a competition," says Wayne Hergott, an attorney turned spiritual director who loved the practice of law and courtroom competition but was drawn to do more with his life. "It's about how to build a better person, build a better world."

Fees and other sources of revenue are pooled. The long-term hope is to establish salaries substantial enough to modestly support a family and thus make it possible to attract lay collaborators. Salaries are currently just beyond halfway to the desired $40,000 benchmark.

"We ask $50 an hour for our services and we take what you can give," Fr. Rice says. "I don't even want to know what you give. I ask people to see
Jackie downstairs."

Loyola currently offices seven spiritual directors, all of whom have undergone Ignatian training in various spiritual direction programs.

Adds Barrett: "Some people pay nothing. Of those who pay maybe $10 is the least I've ever seen someone contribute. The only people who are aware of that are me and maybe their spiritual director. And we don't ever turn anyone away. If they can't afford anything, we have scholarship funds. Some people are very generous and will give us $200 for their hour."

Offering envelopes are also inserted in each newsletter and Loyola conducts an annual fund-raising mailing at Christmas. Sometimes the offerings reflect a person with a heart many times the size of their bank account.

"One time a sister sent us two $1 bills and an apology that she could not send more," Barrett says. "We were as grateful to her as the person who gave us $2,000."

The spectrum of people seeking spiritual direction is equally broad. Doctors, grocers, attorneys, priests and other religious, psychologists, teachers, and a part-time, born-again Federal Express delivery person - people of all social, economic, religious and ethnic backgrounds find their way to Loyola. All have two things in common, Hergott says. "They're on the journey, and they're not quite there yet. That's what excites me so much about this work - the people on the journey."

Regardless of where that spiritual journey leads, the people of Loyola use their special gifts to help others find suitable passage.

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