The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything
Read The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything Online
Authors: James Martin
T
HE
J
ESUIT
G
UIDE TO
(A
LMOST
) E
VERYTHING
for Real Life
J
AMES
M
ARTIN
, S.J.
A Way of Proceeding
What Is Ignatian Spirituality?
W
HO IS
S
T.
I
GNATIUS
Loyola, and why should you care?
The short answer is this: St. Ignatius Loyola was a sixteenth-century soldier-turned-mystic who founded a Catholic religious order called the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. And you should care (or, more politely, you’ll be interested to know about him) because his way of life has helped millions of people discover joy, peace, and freedom and, not incidentally, experience God in their daily lives.
St. Ignatius’s “way of proceeding,” to use one of his favorite expressions, has led people to more fulfilling lives for over 450 years. All in all, not a bad record.
The way of Ignatius is about finding freedom: the freedom to become the person you’re meant to be, to love and to accept love, to make good decisions, and to experience the beauty of creation and the mystery of God’s love. It’s based on an approach found in his own writings as well as in the traditions, practices, and spiritual know-how passed down by Jesuit priests and brothers from generation to generation.
While these traditions, practices, and spiritual know-how have guided members of the Jesuit Order since its founding in 1540, Ignatius wanted his methods to be available to everyone, not just Jesuits. From the first days of his Order, Ignatius encouraged Jesuits to share these insights not only with other priests, brothers, and sisters, but also with lay men and women. “Ignatian spirituality” was intended for the widest possible audience of believers and seekers.
Maybe it’s good to ask another question before we go on: what is a “spirituality”?
In brief, a spirituality is a way of living in relationship with God. Within the Christian tradition, all spiritualities, no matter what their origins, have the same focus—the desire for union with God, an emphasis on love and charity, and a belief in Jesus as the Son of God.
But each spirituality emphasizes different aspects of the tradition—one accents the contemplative life, another the active life. This one emphasizes joy, this one freedom, this one awareness, this one sacrifice, this one service to the poor. All these emphases are important in every Christian spirituality, but they are highlighted differently by each spiritual “school.”
Practical Jesuits
Jesuits take their cue from Ignatius in terms of a practical spirituality. One joke has a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit celebrating Mass together when the lights suddenly go out in the church. The Franciscan praises the chance to live more simply. The Dominican gives a learned homily on how God brings light to the world. The Jesuit goes to the basement to fix the fuses.
In his book
The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice,
first published in 1964, which I read during my first few weeks as a Jesuit, Joseph de Guibert, a French Jesuit, offers a charming analogy first made in the Middle Ages.
A spirituality is like a bridge. Every bridge does pretty much the same thing—gets you from one place to another, sometimes over perilous ground, or a river, or great heights. But they do so in different ways. They might be built of rope, wood, bricks, stone or steel; as arches, cantilevers, or suspension bridges. “Hence,” writes Father de Guibert, “there will be a series of different types, with each one having its advantages and disadvantages. Each type is adaptable to given terrains and contours and not to others; yet each one in its own way achieves the common purpose—to provide a passage by means of an organic, balanced combination of materials and shapes.”
Every spirituality offers you a distinctive “passage” to God.
Many of the most well-known spiritualities in the Christian tradition flow from the religious orders: Benedictines, Franciscans, Carmelites, Cistercians. Each order has developed, over the centuries, its own spiritual traditions, some directly handed down by its founder, others that come by meditating on the life and practices of the founder. Today members of those religious orders live out what Father de Guibert calls a “family tradition.”
Spend time with a few Franciscans, for example, and you’ll quickly notice their love of the poor and the environment, a passion shared by their founder, St. Francis of Assisi. Live for a few days in a Benedictine community, and you will soon taste their expansive, welcoming spirit, passed down from St. Benedict—not a surprise for someone who said, “All guests should be welcomed as Christ.” Religious orders call this the “charism,” or founding spirit, passed on by the founder.
(Charism
comes from the Latin word for “gift.”)
Likewise, spend time with a Jesuit priest or brother, and you will begin to experience the distinctive spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuit Order, which we’ll soon describe. The sum total of the practices, methods, emphases, accents, and highlights of the Christian way of life that comes to us from Ignatius is known as “Ignatian spirituality.”
That spirituality has helped the Society of Jesus do some remarkable things in its colorful history. It’s impossible for me to talk about Jesuit accomplishments without sounding too proud (something we’re accused of daily), so I’ll let the English historian Jonathan Wright do so instead. This thumbnail sketch is from his marvelous book
God’s Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, and Power—A History of the Jesuits:
They have been urbane courtiers in Paris, Peking, and Prague, telling kings when to marry, when and how to go to war, serving as astronomers to Chinese emperors or as chaplains to Japanese armies invading Korea. As might be expected, they have dispensed sacraments and homilies, and they have provided educations to men as various as Voltaire, Castro, Hitchcock, and Joyce. But they have also been sheep farmers in Quito, hacienda owners in Mexico, wine growers in Australia, and plantation owners in the antebellum United States. The Society would flourish in the worlds of letters, the arts, music, and science, theorizing about dance, disease, and the laws of electricity and optics. Jesuits would grapple with the challenges of Copernicus, Descartes, and Newton, and thirty-five craters on the surface of the moon would be named for Jesuit scientists.
In the United States, Jesuits are probably best known as educators, currently running twenty-eight colleges and universities (including Georgetown, Fordham, Boston College, and every college named Loyola) and dozens of high schools and, more recently, middle schools in the inner city.
Since Ignatius wanted his Jesuits to be practical men who could speak to people clearly, it’s not surprising that over the years Jesuits have boiled down their spirituality into a few easy-to-remember phrases. No single definition captures the richness of the tradition, but together the phrases provide an introduction to the way of Ignatius. So here are four simple ways of understanding Ignatian spirituality. Think of them as the arches under that bridge we talked about.
F
OUR
W
AYS
There used to be a saying that Jesuit training was so regimented that if you asked five Jesuits from around the world the same question, you would get the same answer from all five. These days Jesuits are a more independent bunch, and you would probably get five different answers. Or six. The Italian Jesuits have a saying,
“Tre gesuiti, quattro opinioni!”
Three Jesuits, four opinions!
But there’s one question that would elicit a similar answer from those five hypothetical Jesuits. If asked to define Ignatian spirituality, the first thing out of their mouths would most likely be
finding God in all things
.
That deceptively simple phrase was once considered revolutionary. It means that nothing is considered outside the purview of the spiritual life. Ignatian spirituality is not confined within the walls of a church. It’s not a spirituality that considers only “religious” topics, like prayer and sacred texts, as part of a person’s spiritual life.
Most of all, it’s not a spirituality that says, “Well, that—whether it’s work, money, sexuality, depression, sickness—is something to avoid when talking about the spiritual life.”
Ignatian spirituality considers
everything
an important element of your life. That includes religious services, sacred Scriptures, prayer, and charitable works, to be sure, but it also includes friends, family, work, relationships, sex, suffering, and joy, as well as nature, music, and pop culture.
Here’s a story to illustrate this point; it comes from a Jesuit priest named David Donovan, who will be a frequent guest in this book. David served as a parish priest in Boston before he entered the Jesuits at the age of thirty-nine. He was a proud Bostonian “by birth and by choice,” as he liked to say.
After entering the Jesuits, David spent decades studying the spiritual traditions of Ignatius Loyola and, for many years, was responsible for the training of young Jesuits. A tall man who later in life sported a snow-white beard, David was also a trained spiritual director, someone who helps others with their prayer lives and relationships with God.
We first met on the day I entered the Jesuit novitiate in Boston. Over the next two years David served as my own spiritual director, guiding me along the path to God in discussions that were often filled with both laughter and tears.
Because of his extensive training, David was always in demand at retreat houses, seminaries, parishes, and convents across the world. After working in the Jesuit novitiate, he spent four years as spiritual director at the prestigious North American College, the residence where promising American diocesan priests live during their theology studies in Rome. Just a few years ago David died suddenly, from a heart attack, at age sixty-five. At the time of his death, David’s sister estimated he was seeing roughly sixty people for spiritual direction. Much of what I learned about prayer I learned from him.
One afternoon I was struggling with the news of some family problems. But I was assiduously avoiding the topic since it had nothing to do with my “spiritual life.” David sat in his rocking chair, sipping his ever-present mug of coffee, and listened attentively. After a few minutes, he set his mug down and said, “Is there something that you’re not telling me?”
Sheepishly, I told him how worried I was about my family. But wasn’t I supposed to be talking about
spiritual
things?
“Jim,” he said. “It’s
all
part of your spiritual life. You can’t put part of your life in a box, stick it on a shelf, and pretend it’s not there. You have to open that box up and trust that God will help you look at what’s inside.”
David’s image always stuck with me. In Ignatian spirituality there is nothing that you have to put in a box and hide. Nothing has to be feared. Nothing has to be hidden away. Everything can be opened up before God.
That’s why this book is called
The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything
. It’s not a guide to understanding everything about everything (thus the
Almost)
. Rather, it’s a guide to discovering how God can be found in every dimension of your life. How God can be found in everything. And everyone, too.
Here are the kinds of questions that are proper to Ignatian spirituality, which we’ll discuss in the coming chapters:
How do I know what I’m supposed to do in life?
How do I know who I’m supposed to be?
How do I make good decisions?
How can I live a simple life?
How can I be a good friend?
How can I face suffering?
How can I be happy?
How can I find God?
How do I pray?
How do I love?
All these things are proper to Ignatian spirituality because all these things are proper to the human person.
After “finding God in all things,” the second answer you would probably get from those five hypothetical Jesuits is that Ignatian spirituality is about being a
contemplative in action
.
That idea resonates with many people today. How would you like a more contemplative life, or simply a more peaceful one? Wouldn’t you like to disconnect from the distractions of—take your pick—cell phones, faxes, e-mail, instant messaging, iPods, iPhones, and BlackBerrys for just a little quiet? Even if you enjoy all those cool gadgets, don’t you ever wish for some downtime?
Well, one insight of Ignatian spirituality is that while peace and quiet are essential to nourish our spiritual lives, most of us aren’t going to quit our jobs and join a monastery to spend our days in constant prayer. And, by the way, even monks work hard. (Some of them even have e-mail now!)
So while Ignatius counseled his Jesuits always to carve out time for prayer, they were expected to lead active lives. “The road is our home,” said Jerónimo Nadal, one of the early companions of Ignatius. But they were to be active people who adopted a contemplative, or meditative, stance toward the world. To be “contemplatives in action.”
Most of us lead busy lives with little time for prayer and meditation. But by being aware of the world around us—in the midst of our activity—we can allow a contemplative stance to inform our actions. Instead of seeing the spiritual life as one that can exist only if it is enclosed by the walls of a monastery, Ignatius asks you to see the world as your monastery.
The third way of understanding the way of Ignatius is as an
incarnational spirituality
.
Christian theology holds that God became human, or “incarnate,” in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. (The word
incarnation
comes from the Latin root
carn,
for “flesh.”) More broadly, an incarnational spirituality means believing that God can be found in the everyday events of our lives. God is not just
out there
. God is right here, too. If you’re looking for God, look around. To this end, one of the best definitions of prayer is from Walter Burghardt, a twentieth-century Jesuit theologian, who called it a “long, loving look at the real.” Incarnational spirituality is about the real.
Ultimately, we cannot know God completely, at least in this life. St. Augustine, the fourth-century theologian, said that if you can comprehend it, then “it” cannot be God, because God is incomprehensible. But that doesn’t mean we can’t
begin
to know God. So while Ignatian spirituality recognizes the transcendence, or otherness, of God, it is also incarnational, recognizing the immanence, or nearness, of God in our own lives.