Accompanying Jesuit Novices to a Hope-Filled Future
By Rachel Amiri
Father Drew Kirschman, SJ, has served as novice director for the Jesuits USA Central and Southern (UCS) Province since 2018. In this important role for the life and future of the province, he accompanies men in the first two years of formation as they test and ultimately discern a Jesuit vocation.
“The novitiate is the ‘school of the heart,’ where a novice seeks to learn how God moves in his heart and in our world today,” said Fr. Kirschman of his work in the Jesuit Novitiate of St. Stanislaus Kostka, currently located in Denver.
Father Kirschman brings years of experience with young people during pivotal years of discernment to the intellectual, spiritual, personal and apostolic formation of Jesuit novices. During the regency stage of his Jesuit formation, he taught undergraduate sociology at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (the UCA) in El Salvador. Upon returning to the United States, he served for eight years as formation coordinator for the Alum Service Corps (ASC), providing guidance in Ignatian discernment for recent college graduates placed as teachers in Jesuit high schools.
“In all these experiences, the hope-filled future wasn’t coming from me. And to be honest, it wasn’t coming from us. It came from the creativity, the determination, the great desires in young people. It’s contagious,” Fr. Kirschman said. “The hope that young people inspire renews my commitment to be a Jesuit today.”
For Fr. Kirschman, hope today comes from seeing young men willing to serve the Church by living the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – what he calls “countercultural commitments” in the world today.
“We are blessed to have dynamic individuals who, in their great desires, want to join us in this work, giving their lives as vowed religious,” he said. “God continues to invite. I see great courage in these young people as they seek an authentic ‘yes’ to follow God’s call. This is pure gift.”
The novitiate is where a Jesuit’s free response to God’s call begins to take shape.
“The two years of the novitiate is a time for a novice to get to know our way of proceeding, while learning the inner movements of God’s desires. When these begin to intersect with the needs of the world, we begin to see a vocation take shape,” Fr. Kirschman said.
Beginning with the 30-day Spiritual Exercises in the first year, and through many “experiments,” or experiences of apostolic ministry and Jesuit life, Fr. Kirschman encourages novices to face challenges – internal and external – to find true freedom.
“For young people to be willing to challenge the fears that are present in our world, to find the freedom to give themselves generously, is profoundly courageous work,” he said.
Jesuit spirituality in the novitiate invites men, rooted in a personal relationship with Jesus, to see their lives “through the lens of gratitude,” Fr. Kirschman said. “When I see all of my life as a gift of God’s generosity, I find greater freedom to give myself over to God’s plan.”
The role of the novice director is to place novices in heart-stretching environments. The novice pilgrimage exemplifies this. “We send a novice out with a one-way bus ticket and a $5 bill, and great trust in God’s care,” Fr. Kirschman said. “It’s the journey of trusting that God is greater than my fears and my limitations.”
In accompanying novices as they internalize these experiences, Fr. Kirschman gets an on-the-ground appreciation of a novice’s apostolic engagement and offers support as they internalize these experiences to makes sense of what God might be asking. As director of novices, Fr. Kirschman is responsible for discerning if there is a correspondence of God’s call, an individual man’s gifts and Jesuit life. This difficult task requires his own freedom and discernment, rooted in prayer as he listens for God’s desires as seen in the gifts of the individual novice and the needs of the Church and Society today.
“This is the most intimate work I have ever done,” he said.
Recent years have seen changes to the structure of the UCS Province’s novitiate, including moves from St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, where it had been located for over a century, to Culver City, California, and now to Denver. Moving forward, the provincials of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States (JCCU) have announced a plan to consolidate the novitiates of the five provinces to two.
Father Kirschman sees the importance of healthy and strong cohort sizes that was evident through their collaboration with the USA West Province in Culver City in 2023 and 2024. “There’s a horizontal formation between novices, who can encourage and learn from each other,” he said. “I think there’s tremendous possibilities here; we’re on an exciting path.”
As he marks 25 years as a Jesuit this year, Fr. Kirschman is inspired by and grateful for his ministry of accompaniment in God’s work.
“Accompanying young people stirs in me a hope that God continually renews us as a Church laboring in the world today,” he said. “As I think of what my Jesuit life moving forward looks like, to see it through the lens of collaborating with God and God’s plan – what happens when we do it together – I find that tremendously hopeful. God is constantly recreating us as a Church; recreating us in our mission and ministry to respond to the needs present in the world today. The best is yet to come.”
Featured Image: Novice Director Fr. Drew Kirschman, SJ, blesses William Hayes, SJ, during Hayes’ vow Mass in 2024.
