In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my Father, and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In this meditation, we want to pray about the reality of spiritual direction. Spiritual direction, or as the Pope likes to call it, spiritual accompaniment,

is when we go to someone who is struggling to live holiness himself or herself, and we ask them for help, and particularly

with advice to counsel us on how best we can reach holiness ourselves.

When we look at Scripture, we find that St. Paul, when he converted, when he was Saul,

and he saw that great light on the way to Damascus, and he fell to the ground and spoke to our Lord,

that our Lord did not convert him all at once.

Our Lord wanted to avail himself of another person

to finish that conversion process in St. Paul's life.

And it's interesting how our Lord could have done everything himself, could have baptized Paul

himself, could have explained things to Paul himself. He could have catechized him. He could

have, you know, given everything he needs in order to just go and turn around and become a great apostle.

And yet he did not.

He wanted St. Paul to go to a man named Ananias.

And as we read in Acts of the Apostles where it says that this man, he was not particularly known.

In fact, we don't know anything else about him except that he was praying and he listened to

our Lord.

Our Lord came to him and he said, I want you to go to the street called Strait

and ask at the house of Judas for a man of Tarsus named Saul.

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