The ministry of Vocation Director is essential, yet busy – very busy. Each Vocation Director knows personally the inner tension of having so much to do, yet so little time to do it all. As calendars fill and travel plans increase Vocation Director need to balance their ministry with prayer.
At the 2006 Chrism Mass, Pope Benedict XVI urged his own clergy, “The priest must above all be a man of prayer. The world in its frenetic activism often looses its direction. Its action and capacities become destructive if they lack the power of prayer, from which the waters of life that irrigate the arid land.”
Later in 2006 the Holy Father added, “Time spent in direct encounter with God in prayer can rightly be described as the pastoral priority par excellence; it is the soul’s breath, without which the priest necessarily remains breathless, deprived of the oxygen … which he needs if he is to allow himself to be sent … as a worker into the Lord’s harvest.”
Responding to this need, the Institute for Priestly Formation (IPF) has partnered with the National Conference for Diocesan Vocation Directors (NCDVD) for a 5 or 8-day silent directed retreat designed to invite busy Vocation Directors into the silence which will “irrigate the arid land” and provides the “oxygen” for his ministry.