The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (29 page)

St. Peter Claver, the great missionary, was later canonized for his heroic efforts. St. Alphonsus Rodríguez was canonized for his own brand of heroism: a lifelong humility.

Alphonsus and Peter met every day to build up their friendship. But this did not prevent Alphonsus from encouraging Peter to volunteer for work in South America. Alphonsus gave Peter not only the gift of friendship but freedom, just as Ignatius, Peter, and Francis gave to one another.

S
OME
B
ARRIERS TO
H
EALTHY
F
RIENDSHIP

Given the centrality of freedom in relationships, it is not surprising that in his study on Jesuit friendship, Charles Shelton, the Jesuit psychologist, lists
possessiveness
as the first barrier to healthy friendship. Your friend may not be able to reciprocate the level of your feelings, given that his attention may be somewhere else, say, on a pressing family or work situation. The other person may also move to another town or city or may be less able to spend time with you, say, because of marriage or a new child. All these things may increase your sense of possessiveness and animate a desire to control the other.

Part of friendship is also giving the other person the freedom to grow and change. The desire for friendship should not overshadow the friend. But, as Father Barry noted in a conversation, there is another side to that desire for freedom. “The danger is that because people will move, or leave, or even die, you are tempted not to give your heart to people.”

Father Shelton’s cautionary list of other pitfalls is helpful not simply for Jesuits, but for anyone interested in healthy relationships.

Overactivity
is one area where friendships founder because people are too busy to keep up with one another. One simply loses touch. Happily, I am blessed with many friends, and since I don’t have the responsibilities of a marriage, I have more time to keep up with them. For married couples, though, the burdens can be overwhelming, and cherished friends may fall away.

Married people reading this might think,
How am I supposed to balance all the responsibilities of marriage
and
keep up with my friends?
The point here is not to add burdens, but to relieve them. Marriages can never fully provide for all the emotional needs of a couple. Nor were they designed that way: in the past, marriages presumed the nurturing support of an extended family and the wider community. Friends are needed even for married couples. Healthy friendships outside a marriage help husbands and wives in their own relationship.

Overactivity is an important consideration when it comes to a healthy approach to work, which we will look at in a coming chapter. For now, suffice it to say that when work is so overwhelming that you are unable to sustain friendships, your life becomes impoverished, though you may be working to get richer.

On the other hand, as Shelton points out, is the danger of
excessive emotional involvement
. Here the tendency is to focus too much on the friendship, focusing obsessively on the feelings that arise and analyzing every slight and comment. Clinginess smothers friendship and repels the most generous of friends. A healthy relationship is like a flame that gives off light and warms both friends: it can be extinguished for lack of attention but smothered by too much attention.

Competition
is another danger. In a culture where people are often defined by what they do and how much they make, the temptation to compete can be overwhelming. Shelton asks if your friend’s success is a threat to your own sense of self-worth. If it is, maybe it’s time to consider the blessings in your own life more carefully.

Envy,
I would add, is equally poisonous. You can move away from that by being grateful for the blessings in your own life (the examen can help) and by realizing that everyone’s life is a mixed bag of gifts and struggles. If you doubt that, just talk to your friends about their problems.

Shelton next calls attention to
complaint-driven
relationships, where getting together becomes an excuse for carping. In situations like this, the world begins to take on a dark cast. Complaining spreads like a virus through conversations until everything seems useless, and both parties end up bitter and despairing. Shelton also warns against
impairing relationships,
which encourage unhealthy or destructive behavior, like alcoholism or drug abuse.

In both these cases you need to ask if the friendship is healthy. If not, can you discuss the situation? Or do you have to move away from the friendship for your own health? One of my spiritual directors once asked me bluntly, “Is being with your friend good for your vocation?”

Still, an essential part of love is maintaining what you could call the
difficult friendship
. The story of Simon Rodrigues, one of Ignatius’s friends, will show what I mean.

A S
PECIAL
L
OVE

One of the early Jesuit companions was a trying person. Simon Rodrigues, a Portuguese student in Paris, was one of the six friends who pronounced vows of poverty and chastity with Ignatius in Paris in 1534. After the founding of the Society of Jesus, Rodrigues was asked by Ignatius to assume the important position of overseeing all the Jesuits in Portugal.

But, as William Bangert notes in
A History of the Society of Jesus,
Rodrigues soon “evidenced an instability and recalcitrance that pushed Ignatius almost to the brink of dismissing him.” The man was an inveterate complainer and excessively permissive with the Jesuits under his care; as a result, the Jesuits in Portugal were increasingly in disarray.

In time, Rodrigues also became the confessor to King John III of Portugal and took up residence in the royal court—while still functioning as Jesuit provincial. Word spread that Rodrigues was scandalizing others, as he could not live without the “palaces and pomp of the world,” as one contemporary wrote.

How did Ignatius respond to his difficult friend?

Rather than angrily berating him, Ignatius wrote his old friend several letters and asked Simon to correspond more frequently so that he could help him with his problems. But Ignatius was also serious about his role as superior general; in response to the growing crisis, he relieved Rodrigues from his post in December of 1551 and sent him to Spain. Unfortunately, Rodrigues’s behavior continued to be a source of embarrassment, and Ignatius was forced to call him back to Rome.

This must have been a painful time for even someone as balanced as Ignatius: one of his most trusted confidants had failed. Ignatius may have felt let down by a friend. Or embarrassed at the trust he placed in him. Or angry at Simon’s intransigence.

Yet Ignatius treated his friend with dignity, remembering the Presupposition and giving him the benefit of the doubt. In the letter relieving Simon of his post in Portugal, Ignatius mentions not Simon’s shortcomings and problems—which both knew—but the burden that was placed upon Simon as provincial and how it “does not seem proper to hold you any longer in these labors.” After asking Simon to return to Rome, Ignatius wrote compassionately of his desire to maintain his friend’s good reputation and provide for Simon’s future. There is not an ounce of recrimination in his generous letter.

Moreover, says Ignatius, he treasures Simon’s friendship. If he loves the other Jesuits, he says, he feels an even greater affection for his first companions, “particularly toward you, for whom, as you know, I have always had a very special love in the Lord.” It is a remarkable letter that shows how well Ignatius understood the value, and challenges, of friendship and love.

We all have friends or family members who find themselves in trouble, who disappoint us with self-destructive behavior, or who seem incapable or unwilling to change, despite the best efforts of those who love them. These periods may last for a few weeks, a few years, or a lifetime. In these situations we are called to be special friends and to not only encourage them to lead healthy lives, but also to extend to them our “special love,” as Ignatius did with Simon Rodrigues.

And if you think your relationships are too complicated for this, remember Ignatius had to deal with a devilishly complex situation— having to balance the following: his responsibility for the Jesuits in Portugal and Spain; his duty toward those with whom they worked in their schools and churches; his need to remain in the good graces of the king of Portugal; his desire to uphold the reputation of the Society of Jesus; and his wish to be kind to one of his oldest friends.

Ignatius was able to navigate these waters because of his “way of proceeding.” To begin with, Ignatius, who was, after all, the author of the Presupposition, gave Simon the benefit of the doubt, trying to see things from his point of view. Second, he was honest without being insulting. Third, he was reasonable about what would work and what wouldn’t, making decisions and taking actions that would be painful for himself, and that even might lead him to be misunderstood. Fourth, he understood the absolute centrality of love. Fifth, he was “detached” enough to know that he might not be able to change his “difficult friend.” Eventually, according to
The First Jesuits,
Rodrigues came to accept the wisdom of Ignatius’s actions.

Ignatius had a talent for friendship because he had a talent for charity, honesty, reason, love, and detachment.

U
NION OF
H
EARTS AND
M
INDS

Just as I was writing this chapter, I got a phone call from a good friend. Dave was a mathematics professor before entering the Jesuits and is also one of the most organized and hardworking people I know. And one of the kindest, too—I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say an uncharitable word about another person. During philosophy studies in Chicago, we lived in the same community. (The wall between our two rooms was so thin that we also, unavoidably, heard each other’s phone conversations, and therefore we had few secrets!)

But as with many Jesuit friends, my days of living near him are over for now. Since Dave works in Chicago, we rarely see each other.

After I told Dave that I was working on this chapter, I asked him, “What do you think it takes to keep a good friendship?”

“Staying in contact is most important,” he said. Times when distance or overwork diminish one’s ability to maintain friendships are when one needs to be diligent about keeping in touch. And, said Dave, the times when you are most tempted to neglect friendships, which can move you toward loneliness, are precisely when you most need to care for yourself by nourishing those relationships.

Even with the hurdles of distance and time, deep friendships can be sustained. “Like most people who have known each other well, we have a commonality that enables us to reconnect,” said Dave. “So the distance is not so much a problem.”

Ignatius referred to this as a “union of hearts and minds,” in which Jesuits could be united in a common purpose, and as companions, even though many miles apart. That’s a good goal for any friendship: the union of hearts and minds.

After Dave’s providential phone call, I decided to call a few other friends, men and women who are well versed in Ignatian spirituality to ask them what the way of Ignatius taught them about friendship and love.

Many insights dovetailed with Father Shelton’s article on friendship, in which he offers not only some things to avoid, but also some positive tips on what leads to healthy friendships. Let’s look at some of Shelton’s recommendations and also some of my own friends’ wisdom.

Shelton begins by saying that good friends
know about one another’s lives
. That sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But a friendship can become one-sided. Sometimes you see your friend or a family member as existing to serve your needs—say, as psychologist or life coach—forgetting the need to take an active interest in the other person’s life. There has to be both giving and receiving. “Love consists in a mutual communication between the two persons,” wrote Ignatius in the Exercises. “Each shares with the other.”

Sister Maddy, my friend from Nairobi and Gloucester, also pointed to that dynamic—but wanted to emphasize the receiving. “You have to let your friend be a friend to
you,
” she said. “Sometimes it’s more difficult to receive.” She quoted one of her favorite sayings: “A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.”

When I asked Bill, president of a high school in Portland, Maine, if I could identify him as one of my oldest Jesuit friends, he laughed. “Say
longest,
not oldest!” Bill and I entered the novitiate the same year and have gone through over twenty years of Jesuit training, so we know each other well. He’s an easygoing, affable fellow with plenty of friends.

For Bill the “work” of friendship includes taking initiatives. “It’s easy to say you want to see one another,” he said, “but just as easy to let things slide. Friendships can die through attrition if you don’t take the initiative.”

Paula, a longtime friend from graduate school who studied alongside many Jesuits, is a lively but soft-spoken woman. Ten years after finishing her theology degree, she is now married with two young children and works as a campus minister at a Jesuit university in Cleveland, Ohio. She laughed when I asked about sustaining good friendships.

“You mean with Jesuits or with others?” she said. “Because friendships with Jesuits require a special set of strategies!”

More seriously, Paula pointed to “intentionality” as a key element. She asks, “Are there core values that go beyond the situation that brought you together? Was it only a great college friendship, or is it deeper? Are you able to talk about meaningful areas of your lives?”