How at Age 50 I entered the Society of Jesus and Never Looked Back

By Henk Van Meijel, S.J.

There is an old folk saying: If you want to make God laugh then tell God your plans for life. Each one of us has an image of ourselves which represents some aspects of our true being. Proper discernment for whatever one undertakes in life is thus important. First, one naturally has to pray and reflect, but also confide this to spiritual persons, for the simple fact that a spiritual director will see dimensions about ourselves that we cannot perceive. As a teenager in the Netherlands during the late sixties and early seventies I did feel a religious calling, but there was no one around with whom I could talk to about this. In time this calling seemingly died out. During this period, as in North America, the Church was in a great flux which caused many to leave religious life, and only a scant few to enter. I married and had three children.