Somewhere in your first year, usually around the time someone hands you a prayer book, you will hear the phrase spiritual father. It will be said casually, the way people say things that everyone in the room already understands. And you will nod, because you are new and nodding is what you do, and you will assume you already have one.
You almost certainly do not. Not yet.
That is not a failure. It is the most common misunderstanding among people coming into the Church, and nobody corrects it because nobody realizes you are carrying it. So let me take the long way around and say plainly what took me years to work out.
The Office and the Relationship Are Not the Same Thing
Here is where the confusion starts, and it is an honest one.
Your parish priest is the spiritual father of your parish. That is real language and the Church uses it. He is the pastor of the flock entrusted to him. He hears confessions, he knows your name, he will bury you. None of what follows is meant to diminish a single bit of that, and if you have a good parish priest you have been handed something many people do not have.
But the way I have come to understand it, there is a difference between an office a man holds and a relationship you enter.
The clearest proof of this is not an argument. It is a rule. The Orthodox Church in America’s own guidelines for clergy state that a priest beginning his ministry must seek out a spiritual father for himself — and that if he cannot find one, he is to turn to his bishop to have one appointed.
Sit with that for a second.
The man who is the spiritual father of an entire parish is required to have a spiritual father of his own. If the two things were the same, that sentence would be nonsense. They are not the same. One is an office, with a parish attached to it. The other is a particular relationship between one soul and one guide, and no ordination confers it automatically.
Nobody is assigned to you. You are expected to go looking.
What He Is Actually Taking On
The word people reach for is shepherd, and it is the right word, provided you do not let it go soft.
When a man agrees to be your spiritual father, he is taking responsibility for your soul. Not your schedule. Not your feelings about the parish council. Your soul — the actual thing, the part of you that will still exist when everything else about your life has been forgotten.
He is agreeing to know what you have done. To tell you the truth about it when the truth is unwelcome. To notice when you have gone quiet, and to come after you. To pray for you by name, for years, including the years when you are not praying for yourself. And, in the old understanding, to answer for how he handled you.
That is an enormous thing to accept on behalf of a stranger.
It should tell you something that the men who understand it best are often the slowest to take you on.
What Your Priest Is Already Carrying
Before I go further, I want to put something on the record, because the rest of this could be misread as a complaint about parish clergy, and it is not.
The load a parish priest carries is tremendous, and most parishioners see perhaps a tenth of it.
He serves the cycle of services, which does not pause for his own exhaustion. He hears confessions. He buries people and marries people and sits in hospital rooms at two in the morning. He teaches the catechumens, fields the emails, chairs the meetings, worries about the roof and the boiler and the budget. He absorbs the parish’s conflicts, usually without being allowed to have a side.
And most of our priests are married men. Which means there is a wife who married a man and received a parish along with him, and there are children who share their father with several hundred people, and there is a household to support on what a parish can pay — which in a great many places in this country is not much, and often means a second job on top of everything else.
So when I say the parish priest may not be the right man to be your spiritual father, I am not saying he is deficient. I am frequently saying the opposite. I am saying he is already carrying more than one man should, and that walking several more souls through years of direction is a further weight on a load that is already too heavy.
Asking honestly whether he has room for it is a form of respect, not a slight.
He Does Not Have to Be at Your Parish
This is the part that genuinely surprises people, so I will say it flatly.
Your spiritual father does not have to be the priest you see on Sunday. He does not have to be in your city. He can be fifty miles away, or a hundred. You might see him three times a year and write or call in between. He might be a monk at a monastery you visited once, who said four sentences to you that you have not been able to put down since.
That last one is more common than you would think, and it is older than the parish system. The whole monastic tradition of spiritual fatherhood runs on exactly this — people traveling a long way to ask one man for a word, and then going home to live on it.
So you attend your parish, where the Liturgy is served and the Mysteries are given and your life in the Church actually happens. And your spiritual father may be somewhere else entirely. Those two facts do not compete.
He also does not have to be in your jurisdiction.
This one catches people, because Americans arrive at Orthodoxy and immediately start sorting it into denominations. It is an understandable mistake and it is the wrong map. The OCA, the Antiochians, the Greeks, the Serbs, ROCOR and the rest are not different churches. They are the same Church, in full communion, arranged along administrative lines that mostly reflect which immigrants arrived where and when. You commune at any of their altars. The Mysteries are the same Mysteries.
So you can attend an OCA parish and have an Antiochian priest or a Greek monk as your spiritual father. That is ordinary, and nobody involved will find it strange.
Two practical notes. The word that matters is canonical — there are groups out there using Orthodox vocabulary who are not in communion with the rest of the Church, and a newcomer cannot always tell by the sign out front. If you are unsure, ask your priest; it is a normal question and he will not be offended by it. And when you do settle on a spiritual father somewhere else, tell your parish priest, and ask his blessing if that is the custom in your parish. Mostly so that the man who serves you on Sunday knows who is walking with you, and the two of them are not working at cross purposes without knowing the other exists.
There is also a plainer reason to look further afield, and it is arithmetic rather than criticism.
The Church in this country is growing, and growing quickly. That is a good problem, and it is still a problem. Parishes that were forty people are now a hundred and forty. Men are being ordained to meet that need, and a fair number of them are converts themselves, or are simply young.
Think about what that means without any judgment attached to it. A priest who came into Orthodoxy fifteen years ago has fifteen years of Orthodoxy in him. He cannot have forty. That is not a deficiency of character or zeal — some of the most serious men I know came in as adults — it is a fact about time, and no amount of ability shortens it. The tradition is deep, and depth is one of the few things that cannot be acquired quickly.
Spiritual fatherhood in particular leans hard on exactly the thing time gives you: having seen this before. Having watched a hundred people pass through the stage you are in now, and knowing which part of it is temporary.
So a young priest may be an excellent pastor, a fine preacher, and a man you would trust with your life, and still not yet be the person to direct your soul. Those are different claims. He very likely knows it better than you do.
One more thing to listen for, and it has nothing to do with age. Look for a man who hands on the Tradition: the faith the Church has kept for two thousand years, from the apostles to now, which we believe is the truth, and which makes her the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church we confess in the Creed. Look for that, not for a man who believes he has been sent to improve it. Some priests, young and old, cradle and convert, speak as though the Church has been waiting for them to correct her. A spiritual father’s task is to bring you into the faith as it has been received, not into his opinions about what it ought to become.
What matters is fit. I am going to use an ordinary word here, because the ordinary word is the honest one: you have to click. Not be comfortable — that is different, and sometimes the right man will make you deeply uncomfortable. But something has to connect. You have to be able to tell him the truth. If you cannot tell him the truth, nothing else about the arrangement matters, however impressive he looks on paper.
Your Godparent Is Not Your Spiritual Father
Both matter. They are different jobs.
Your godparent — your sponsor — stood up for you. He or she is a guarantor to the Church that you will be raised in the faith, and that responsibility does not end when the service does. A good godparent is a lifelong presence: the one who checks on you, who answers the question you are embarrassed to ask the priest, who remembers your name day.
That is a real and serious thing, and it is not spiritual direction. Your godparent is a witness and a companion. Your spiritual father is a guide with authority in your life, which you have granted him. Confusing the two does a disservice to both.
The Failure Nobody Likes to Name
Now the harder part. I want to be careful here, because this is not an invitation to go around evaluating clergy.
Some men take on the mantle without doing the work.
They will agree to be your spiritual father because you asked, and because saying yes was easier than saying no. And then nothing follows. The appointments do not happen. The questions get answered in the parking lot in thirty seconds. You go six months without a conversation, and when you finally sit down it is clear he does not remember what you told him last time — because he was not carrying it.
That is usually not malice. Usually it is a good man with too many people and not enough hours, who said yes out of kindness and could not deliver. Parish priests in this country are stretched in ways most parishioners never see.
But the effect on you is the same either way. You believe you are under direction and you are not. You think the lights are on and the house is empty.
If you have been in that position, hear this clearly: it was not your failure, and you are not obligated to pretend it is working. You are permitted to need something you are not receiving.
A Good One Points Away From Himself
Here is how you tell the difference, and it is simpler than you would expect.
A good spiritual father is working toward your maturity, not your dependence.
He is not building a following. He does not need you to need him. He wants you standing on your own feet in front of God, and every piece of counsel he gives is bent in that direction — not toward making himself a permanent intermediary between you and your own repentance.
Which means, and this surprises people too, that the relationship may well complete itself.
You may find after some years that you do not need him the way you once did. The questions you used to bring him, you can now answer — because he taught you how. That is not a falling-out and it is not a failure. It is the point. A father who raises a man and then still requires him to ask permission has not raised a man.
What a Great One Sounds Like
Let me show you instead of describing it.
My spiritual father was not a ten-Our-Fathers-and-five-Creeds man. I want to be careful with that, because it can be made to sound like laxity and it was the opposite. He simply did not believe the point of confession was to assign you a quantity of prayers and send you home feeling settled.
I came to him once after a terrible argument with my son. A bad one. I had been carrying it for days and I felt wretched about it, and I confessed it the way you confess something you have already convicted yourself of — half hoping to be told it was not as bad as all that.
He did not comfort me. He asked me a question.
“Did you apologize? Did you ask for forgiveness?”
That stopped me. I had come expecting the conversation to be about my sin, which is to say about me. He had gone straight to the other person in the room who was not in the room.
I told him I had. I had apologized.
And he said it plainly, without any weight on it, the way you would mention the weather:
“Good. Because that is how you will be judged.”
I have never gotten over that sentence.
He did not elaborate. He did not need to. It is the Gospel’s own arithmetic — the thing we say every time we pray forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and mostly manage not to hear. The measure you use is the measure you will be given. He simply set it down where I could not step around it.
Notice what he did not do. He did not relieve me of the work by handing me a prayer rule instead of it. He did not make himself the point, or arrange for me to keep coming back for reassurance. He pointed at my son — at the actual relationship, the actual repair — and then he pointed at the Judgment, and then he let me go.
Nine words. Years later they still do more work in me than most of what I have read.
That is what I mean by a great spiritual father. Not a man with a reputation. A man who knows you well enough, and the Gospel well enough, to say the one true sentence and then stop talking.
Why I Am Careful About This
I had a spiritual father. He fell asleep in the Lord a few years ago, and I have not taken another since.
I want to be honest about why, because I suspect some of you are in the same place and have been quietly wondering whether something is wrong with you.
It is not that no one is available. It is that I know what I would be handing over. I watched a man carry me for years, patiently, with no advantage in it for himself, and I know what it cost him and what it was worth. I am not going to hand that same access to my soul to someone simply because he is nearby and the position is open.
I am not holding this up as a model. A long stretch without direction is not something to romanticize, and I know perfectly well what I am doing without. If anything, take it as evidence of how seriously the thing deserves to be taken — that having had a real one, I would rather wait than settle.
So What Do You Actually Do?
Start by dropping the assumption. You may not have a spiritual father yet, and knowing that is the beginning of getting one.
Then talk to your parish priest. Not to appoint him by default, but because he is the right person to ask. Say you are looking for a spiritual father, and ask what he would recommend. He may offer himself, and that may be exactly right. He may point you toward someone else — a brother priest, or a monastery he trusts — and that is not a rejection. It is a man who knows his own capacity, which is its own kind of recommendation.
Visit a monastery if you can. Go more than once. Pay attention to whether you can tell the truth in that room.
And do not rush it. You are not behind. The man who is willing to take responsibility for your soul is worth waiting for, and so is the honesty of admitting you have not yet found him.
May the Lord send you a true father, and give you the patience to recognize him when he comes.