Father Richard Bollman, S.J.

Well, put as simply as I can, what catches me up spiritually day-by-day is a friendship with God, sometimes felt mostly as Jesus, sometimes more abstractly as a beautiful and powerful presence I can feel when I’m touched by nature or the presence of a friend. The connection may make me well up in tears while listening to music or reading poetry or stories. It is a deeply felt “Hello,” like my life is claiming me again. I find it looking back at a day of gracious things, blessings. I learned it through the Bible stories, and the earliest practices of prayers and praise in school. This friendship, though it doesn’t always feel the same, does not go away. Nothing about God is more important for me than that: “I am with you; I do not go away. I don’t need you to be perfect. Your weakness is no hindrance to me with you.”

My own practice of prayer now is mainly to sit quietly with a candle and an icon of Jesus, to breathe, to become conscious of my thoughts and preoccupations, and give them over. And towards the end of some time, 20 minutes or so, I’ll feel clear and find a prayer that I just want to say, something to ask for or express, and then I get on and live the day. I learned about this process by meeting some Buddhist teachers along the way, who helped me ‘get’ the practice of simplicity and quiet that Christian mystics speak about. 

When I was 34 years old, five years ordained a priest by that time, I was following a special summer training for Jesuits who wanted to learn the Spiritual Exercises from the inside, as it were, to make them available for others. This program began with an extended, 21-day time with the Exercises. The moment I remember is a slow praying of the 23rd Psalm and coming to rest on the ‘nothing’ that I shall lack, and finding a movement in my whole body and a peaceful wave of tears that scared me, but that I still trust to have been an awakening, unplanned, of some kind of awareness of how to recognize and trust one’s own spiritual experience as an adult. I mean, it was just so very kind and personal from God. That’s what I believe about it.