The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (23 page)

“In a few instances,” O’Malley writes in
The First Jesuits,
“this commitment attained heroic dimensions.” In 1553 the Jesuits remained almost alone in their willingness to minister to the sick during a plague in Perugia, Italy, with several Jesuits dying as a result. Aloysius Gonzaga, one of the earliest Jesuit saints, took ill and died after ministering to plague victims in 1591. He was twenty-one.

In all these works they were not only following the Judeo-Christian tradition of service, but also Ignatius’s dictum that “love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words.”

My own job in Kenya was to help the refugees who had settled in the sprawling slums of Nairobi start their own businesses so they could support themselves and their families. Much of the work consisted of visiting the refugees in their small shacks, which often contained nothing more than a mattress, a kerosene lantern, a cooking pot, some boxes, and a few plastic pails to hold water and food.

This kind of poverty—in which human beings are unable to satisfy their basic needs—is not something to which Jesuits, or anyone, aspires. Dehumanizing poverty is something that many Jesuits spend their entire lives combating, whether through direct work with the poor or advocacy on their behalf. The Jesuit goal of
voluntary
poverty in imitation of Christ is different from the
involuntary
poverty that is a scourge for billions across the globe.

But the two are inextricably connected: living simply means that one needs less and takes less from the world, and is therefore more able to give to those who live in poverty. Living simply can aid the poor.

Entering into the lives of the poor also encourages simple living. You see how the poor are able to manage with so little. How they sometimes live with greater freedom. How they are often more generous with what they have. And how they are often more grateful for life than the wealthy.

When I think about the ways in which the poor teach us, I remember some of the refugees I knew in Kenya. One had the wonderful name of Gaudiosa, which means “joyful” in Latin. Gauddy, as everyone called her, was a Rwandese refugee. She had settled in Nairobi in the 1960s with her family, a victim of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict that had long plagued her homeland.

She was also a talented seamstress who, the year before I arrived, had received a grant from JRS to purchase a single sewing machine. From that modest beginning, she and several other Rwandese women built a flourishing tailoring business called the Splendid Tailoring Shop.

One day Gauddy dropped by our office. At the time, we had just decided to open a shop—called the Mikono Centre—for refugees to market their wares. And I was trying to interest priests and members of religious orders in purchasing the handicrafts made by the refugees.

Gauddy and I discussed making liturgical stoles for priests with
kitenge,
a colorful cotton fabric used in Rwandese dresses and shirts. For a talented seamstress, a stole is an easy venture: just two long pieces of cloth sewn together in a V shape. Stoles, I suggested, might be big sellers to visiting Western priests as well as to missionary priests working in local parishes. And Gauddy always had plenty of leftover
kitenge
in her shop.

Gauddy’s
kitenge
stoles flew off our shelves; we could barely keep them in stock. When I ordered twenty more in the first week, Gauddy folded her hands in her lap, bowed her head, and said, “God is good.”

“Yes,” I said, but why did she think so?

“Why?” Gauddy laughed and clapped her hands, evidently surprised that I would ask such a ridiculous question. “Brother Jim!” she exclaimed. “God is helping me get rid of this leftover
kitenge
. God is giving me money for making these stoles, which are so easy to make. God is giving me this business for my shop, and for my ladies. Surely you can see that God is very, very good!”

As with many refugees, Gauddy’s thoughts, in good times and bad, turned to God. Perhaps I would have eventually discerned God’s hand, but Gauddy saw God
immediately
. She typified the relationship that many refugees had with God. To use the analogy of friendship, Gauddy had placed herself closer to God, and so was a better friend to God than I was.

Another friend was a Mozambican wood-carver named Agustino. We first met on a busy street corner in Nairobi, where Agustino was sitting on a piece of cardboard, carefully carving his beautiful ebony and rosewood statues and trying to sell them to passersby. When I asked if he wouldn’t rather sit under a tree outside the Mikono Centre and sell to more customers, he readily agreed and showed up at our shop the very next day. He has worked there ever since.

One morning Agustino showed me with great enthusiasm an enormous three-foot-tall sculpture carved from a single piece of ebony. It was called the “tree of life” and depicted men working in the fields, women nursing children, and children playing. Though beautifully made, the price was very high. I doubted we could sell it in our shop, and told him so.

After Agustino tried unsuccessfully to convince me to buy it, I agreed to take the piece on consignment. “Will you pray that it sells?” Agustino said. Yes, I said, I would. But I had doubts: it was too big and too expensive. We lugged the heavy piece of wood inside and set it atop one of our display tables.

A few minutes later, a woman in a green Land Rover pulled into our driveway, walked into the shop, spied the enormous sculpture, and promptly bought it—for a few hundred shillings more than our asking price.

“See?” said Agustino. “Your prayers were answered.”

When seeking help, Agustino’s first recourse was to ask God. When expressing gratitude, his first instinct was to praise God. He relied on God more than I did.

In later conversations it became clear that his trust had something to do with his poverty: his daily life had a precariousness that reminded him of his fundamental reliance on God, something that the more affluent often take for granted. Agustino seemed to be a close friend of God, too. Many of the poor, at least in my experience, evince this quality.

God meets us where we are. And the poor are often already close by.

Still, overly romanticizing the poor is a danger. Not all are cut from the same cloth. Not all are religious. Not all are believers. Even talking about “the poor” is problematic. Gauddy and Agustino are not so much members of a vague sociological group called “the poor” as they are individuals.

Nonetheless, the refugees with whom I worked were, in general, more ready to rely on God and more ready to praise God than I was.

This gratitude made many of them more generous, too. One afternoon I visited Loyce, a Ugandan woman to whom we had given a grant for a single sewing machine. She lived outside of Nairobi in a wooden shack in a largely rural area. Upon entering her dimly lit home, I found that Loyce had prepared an elaborate meal: roasted peanuts, vegetables, and even meat, a rarity for her. It must have cost a week’s earnings. I was stunned by her generosity. Loyce gave, as Jesus said of a poor widow in the Gospels, “out of her poverty” (Mark 12:41–44).

Not every refugee was as generous as Loyce. So again, it’s wrong to generalize. But my experience with many of the refugees points out what happens when you refuse to take things, or people, for granted, and when you are able to take stock of your blessings. Your gratitude increases.

God is good, as Gauddy said.

Every time these things happened in Kenya, I thought of a line from Scripture that had long baffled me. “The Lord hears the cry of the poor.” It was also a line from a popular contemporary hymn we sang in the novitiate. But
why
would the Lord hear the cry of the poor in particular? Why wouldn’t God hear the cry of
everyone?
It seemed partial. So did the line from the Psalms, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted” (34:18). Why?

In Kenya I found an answer. In many of our lives a great deal comes between us and God: concerns about status, achievement, appearance, and so on. Less stood between the refugees and God. Overall, they were more aware of their dependence on God. So, like Gauddy, they praised God in good times; like Agustino, they called on God when they were in need; and like Loyce, they expressed gratitude with generosity.

The poor place themselves close to God, the poor have less between them and God, the poor rely on God, the poor make God their friend, and the poor are often more grateful to God. And so God is close to them. This is one reason why Ignatius asked the Jesuits to love poverty “as a mother.”

D
OWNWARD
M
OBILITY
?

Here’s what you might be thinking:
Those are inspiring stories about Gauddy and Agustino and Loyce, but what do they have to do with me? Do you expect me to live like a refugee?

In general, whenever I speak about living more simply, people’s reactions tend toward extremes. They fall into two categories.

1. Are you out of your mind? I can’t give up everything I own— that’s ridiculous! (That’s the most common response.)
   

2. I feel guilty when I think about how much stuff I have that I don’t need. When I think about the poor, I feel awful. But there’s no way I can live simply. It’s impossible for me to change. (This is closer to the response of the “rich young man” in the Gospel of Matthew.)
   

The two responses display (1) anger and (2) despair.

Both responses block us from freedom. If we dismiss the insights that come from the poor and reject the invitation to simplicity by saying, “I can’t live like that,” then these insights and invitations will never make a difference in our lives. Making the message unattainable also makes it easier to reject. Likewise, when we wallow in guilt and decide that it’s impossible to change, we are subtly letting ourselves off the hook, excusing ourselves from change.

Both responses mean that freedom cannot take hold.

The invitation to live a simple life does not mean giving up everything you have. Surrendering all your possessions is the right path for only a very few people, mostly those who choose to live in common with others. We’re not meant to live exactly like Gauddy or Agustino or Loyce. But the opposite of their situations—that is, a total immersion into our consumerist culture, which tells us that we can only be happy if we have more—is a dead end.

Nor does the invitation to a simple life mean you have to feel bad about yourself. But, from time to time, it’s good to feel the sting of conscience. Ignatius said the voice of conscience sometimes feels like the “drop of water falling onto a stone,” a sharp feeling that awakens you to reality. If you feel guilty about how much stuff you have, perhaps this is an invitation from God to give some of it away, to live more simply.

But it is an invitation to freedom, not to guilt. The turn to a simple lifestyle frees us, reminds us of our reliance on God, makes us more grateful, and leads us to desire “upward mobility” for everyone, not just for the few. Ultimately, it also moves us closer to the forgotten and outcast, something at the heart of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, and a theme frequently mentioned in the Old Testament. It reminds us that people like the refugees of East Africa, people you may never meet, are part of our lives. As Dean Brackley writes in “Downward Mobility,”

So, as it turns out, Gauddy, Agustino, and Loyce have a lot to do with you.

B
UT
H
OW
D
O
I D
O
I
T
?

That still raises the question, How can you live simply? Given that you’re not called to give up everything, how can you simplify your life and respond to the invitation to live with less stuff coming between God and you?

Let me suggest three steps, of increasing difficulty. Then a challenge. In all these things, trust that God will help you along this path, because it’s a path to freedom, which God desires for you.

First, get rid of whatever you don’t need
. It’s the obvious first step to simplifying. What should you do with all that stuff? Well, once again, the extra coat you’re not using doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the poor. Call a local church, shelter, or clothing distribution center.

But some friendly advice: don’t give your junky stuff to the poor—toss that out. During the novitiate, I worked in a homeless shelter in Boston for several months. One day I handed one fellow a tattered orange corduroy jacket. “Ugh,” he said, “I wouldn’t wear that!” Initially I thought,
He should be grateful
. Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “Would
you
want to wear it?” No, I wouldn’t. The poor deserve decent clothes, just like you do.

Second, distinguish between wants and needs
. Is it “nice to have” or “need to have”? Do you “need” a bigger television or the latest phone or the newest computer? Or is it something you want because your friends just bought one or because you’ve seen it advertised? It’s difficult to resist the desire to have what friends have and what marketers say you need, but again, turning these things down leads to freedom.