The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (40 page)

Finally, the enemy acts like an
army commander
. This is my favorite image, and one that most likely draws on Ignatius’s military background. The army commander knows exactly where our weak spots are and targets them. The army commander, when preparing to attack a castle, makes his camp, carefully studies his target’s weaknesses and strengths, and then attacks at the weakest point.

In the same way the evil spirit “prowls around” (1 Pet. 5:8) and studies where we are weakest, where we are most likely to be tempted,
even in good times
. “There he attacks and tries to take us,” writes Ignatius. In other words, the evil spirit will attack where you are most vulnerable. Is your pride your weak spot? In that case, when all is going well in your life, the evil spirit will try to attack you there. “When the devil wishes to attack anyone,” Ignatius wrote elsewhere, “he first of all looks to see on what side his defenses are weakest or in worst order; then he moves up his artillery to make a breach at that spot.”

Let’s say you’ve just started to care for your aging parent, a generous act. Little by little, others start telling you how noble you are. Then you start to think,
I’m doing a good deed
. So far, so good. But the army commander is looking for a way to get in. So, little by little, you move from
I’m doing a good job
to
I’m such a good person
. And from there to
I’m so holy
. And finally to
I’m much holier than everyone else
. You become self-righteous, proud, and arrogant. From there you may start to judge, condemn, and even hate others who are not as “holy” as you.

What happened? You may wonder,
How did I get here?
The evil spirit has succeeded in finding your weak point and is winning the battle.

What’s the best defense against this? Shore up the weak parts of your spiritual castle. Pay special attention to the ways that you are tempted at your weak points, and work against those tendencies.

In time you’ll be able to predict the ways you’ll be tempted. For me, the temptations usually come in two ways: feeling lonely or worrying about my physical health. In the month before my ordination, for example, I found myself consumed with sexual desire. Then, just a week before, I ended up with a horrible virus, which plunged me into despair. It was almost comically easy to see how my weakest points were open for attack. So I shored up those points of my life, by making sure I spent time with my close friends and by reminding myself that health wasn’t the most important thing in life, and, on the day of my ordination, I marched happily up the aisle.

In time you’ll get to recognize those feelings. You’ll get to
know
when you’re being tempted to go down the wrong path.

The Angel of Light

That brings us to another Ignatian insight: the evil spirit can masquerade as the good spirit. That sounds like something out of a cheesy horror movie, but it’s a clearheaded insight into human nature. Simply put, it means that things that
seem
good to us can take a dramatically wrong turn and mask something darker. The evil spirit, says Ignatius, “takes on the appearance of an angel of light.”

Let’s take the case of a father who decides that he is going to pray more. He thinks he is doing this to be more contemplative and more loving as a husband and father. But perhaps his motives are not so pure. Perhaps unconsciously he wants to escape from his family. Gradually he becomes so consumed with his desire for prayer that he starts neglecting his wife and his children. Soon he grows bitter and resentful whenever his precious time in prayer is interrupted. “Get out!” he yells to his children, “I’m praying!” The evil spirit has subtly taken on the guise of the good spirit to draw the person into an attitude of bitterness.

Ignatius puts it this way: “[The evil spirit] brings good and holy thoughts attractive to such an upright soul and then strives little by little to get his own way, by enticing the soul over to his own hidden deceits and evil intentions.”

John English, a Canadian Jesuit, notes in
Spiritual Freedom
that the evil spirit can also use the pretext of a person’s beginning to live a spiritual life, and then suggesting,
“Well, now, everything is dependent on God, so let’s just take it easy.”
English writes that people “become lazy, wallow in discontent, and abandon” their enthusiasm for love and service.

This is a subtle experience. When it happens, says Ignatius, we should examine the ways that we were led by the evil spirit, in order to guard against this in the future. This is a good practice whenever we recognize how we’ve been led down this backward path.

In time, after putting these insights into practice, you’ll begin to know, really know, when you’re being led down the wrong path, because you will have the experience of having gone down that path. In the movie
The Matrix,
which stars Keanu Reeves as Neo, an average man invited to see the radical truth of his world, there is an illustration of just that kind of knowledge—of knowing the wrong path from experience. In one scene Neo is riding in a car with a woman who already knows the truth about Neo’s world. (Suffice it to say, this is a simple rendition of a devilishly complex plot.) Reluctant to accept her invitation to a new life, Neo opens the car door, ready to return to his former life. He peers down a dark rainy street. The woman counsels him not to choose that path. He asks why not.

“Because you have been down there, Neo,” she says. “You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you want to be.”

It’s a good illustration of discernment. If you know that the path will lead you to a bad end, why take it? (By the way, the woman’s name in the movie is Trinity.)

By examining the ways that we have failed in the past, we’ll be better able to make good choices and lead happy and satisfying lives, nourishing our true selves and resisting our more selfish tendencies. We’ll be able to take the right paths and end up where we want to be.

S
AYING
Y
ES
TO
E
VERYTHING

One final comment about discernment: making good choices means accepting that even the best decisions will have drawbacks. Often, though, we believe that if we make the right choices, there will be no downside. Then, when we live out that choice and discover its drawbacks, we grow discouraged. A newly married man realizes how much freedom he has relinquished—he can no longer enjoy beers with his buddies as often as he used to. A newly married woman can’t hang out with her girlfriends as frequently. They start to doubt the good decision to marry.

Good decisions mean a wholehearted
yes
to both the positives and negatives that come with any choice. Saying
yes
to entering the Jesuits, for example, did not mean saying
yes
only to the positives— Ignatian spirituality, the loving Jesuit friends, the exciting work, the warm communities, the wonderful people with whom I’d minister, the intellectual stimulation. It also meant saying
yes
to the negatives—occasional loneliness, frequent overwork, problems in the church, and so on.

Every state of life, every decision, includes some pain that must be accepted if you are to enter fully into those decisions, and into new life. “All symphonies remain unfinished,” said Karl Rahner. There is no perfect decision, perfect outcome, or perfect life. Embracing imperfection helps us relax into reality. When we accept that all choices are conditional, limited, and imperfect, our lives become, paradoxically, more satisfying, joyful, and peaceful.

All this points us to the unconditional, unlimited, and perfect One to whom we say
yes:
God. All of our decisions should be focused on this reality. “Our only desire and our one choice,” said Ignatius, “should be this: I want and choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life in me.”

Ignatian discernment, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, may seem complicated—with its definitions of consolation, desolation, and confirmation, not to mention the Three Times and the Two Methods, as well as the spoiled child, the false lover, and the army commander.

But at heart it is simple. Ignatian discernment means trusting that through your reason and your inner life, God will help to draw you to good decisions, because God
desires
for you to make good, loving, healthy, positive, life-giving choices. So find whatever works for you, whatever draws you closer to God, and whatever helps you make good decisions. Most of all, trust that God is with you as you choose your paths in this life.

W
HEN
I
FIRST MET
John, he was already a revered Jesuit spiritual director in New England. A ruddy-faced man in his seventies with a snow-white beard, John was a friendly presence at the Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

John was one of those unruffled people in whose presence you always felt calmer. My spiritual director in Africa, George, who had helped me in my struggle with obedience, was like that as well. So was Joe, the elderly priest living in our novitiate whose refrain was “Why not?” If I were upset about anything, just a few minutes with any of these older men would make it seem as if any problems were manageable.

Why is that? First, thanks to their advanced age, they had experienced much and now possessed a wealth of wisdom—and compassion. Second, because each was a spiritual director and had spent years immersed in Ignatian spirituality, each grew to embody the lessons of the way of Ignatius—compassion, generosity, and, especially, freedom.

And they knew who they were. After decades of formation, retreats, prayer, and spiritual reading, and after facing the natural struggles of life, they knew themselves and understood their place in creation. They radiated a sense of peace.

One day at the retreat house, John gave a homily on the idea of vocation. That day the Gospel passage was the one in which Jesus asks Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, “What do you want me to do for you?” John was talking about how our desires help us to find our vocations; they help us to be who we are.

At the end of his homily John neatly summed it all up with a saying he heard from an old gentleman living in the Deep South: “You gotta be who you is and not who you ain’t!” he said, letting out a rumbling laugh. “Because if you ain’t who you is, then you is who you ain’t. And that ain’t good!”

C
ALLED

In the last chapter we talked about making decisions according to the way of Ignatius. We talked about good everyday decisions. Now let’s talk about two big decisions:

1. What should I do?
   
2. Who should I be?
   

In other words, let’s talk about vocation. Let’s look at how Ignatian spirituality helps us know what we’re meant to
do
in life and become the persons we are meant to
be
. To quote John’s friend, let’s look at how the way of Ignatius helps you to “be who you is.”

Vocation is a word that is easily misunderstood. In some Catholic circles to “have a vocation” still means being “called” to the priesthood or religious life. Some Catholics used to think that a
real
vocation was confined to those two areas, while the rest of life’s choices—getting married, being single, being a parent, working as a doctor or lawyer or businessperson, and so on, were “less than.”

That’s a holdover of an older theology that placed the lives of priests, sisters, and brothers above those of married and single lay-people. In Sunday school my class was once given a little drawing to color. On the top of the sheet was written the word
Vocations
. On the left side was an image of a married couple. Under that image it said,
Good
. On the right side was an image of a priest and a nun. Underneath it read,
Better
.

But ever since the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, which stressed the “universal call to holiness,” Catholics have been reminded that everyone has a vocation. This is something that we could have easily learned from other Christian denominations: their churches have always sought the active participation of the lay members and have placed comparatively less emphasis on ordained ministries. Everyone has a vocation.

The root meaning of the word points to this. It has little to do with ordination or religious orders. It comes from the Latin
vocare,
“to call.” A vocation is something you’re called to.

Vocation is different from work or a job or even a career. You could say that work is the labor required to do a task. A job is the situation in which you do it. A career is the long-term trajectory or pattern of many jobs. But vocation is deeper than each of those concepts.

Recently I spoke with Chris Lowney about this. He is the author of
Heroic Leadership,
a book that uses the insights of Ignatius and applies them to organizations. Lowney is a former Jesuit who worked in the corporate world and so brings a wealth of experience to these topics. How did he see those terms?

“Work, career, vocation,” he said, considering the question. “There are some problematic ideas attached to those terms.
Work
tends to be construed as work for pay, but work is any purposeful activity, so it’s helpful to have a broader concept of work.
Career
tends to mean that you study for a profession that you do for the rest of your life. But for many people that’s not true any longer. In the modern sense, a career is less about a workplace, or even a specific profession, and more about how you develop your skills and talents.”

What about vocation?

“People tend to associate
vocation
with a specific work, job or career,“ he said. ”The Protestant reformers talked about a general calling to become holy people, and a specific calling to different kinds of ministries and work, which is more accurate.”

Vocation overarches our work, jobs, and career and extends to the kind of person we hope to become. It is what we are called to do, and who we are called to be. But how do we discover our vocations?

In the past few chapters I spoke briefly about my own vocation, which was jumpstarted when I saw a television documentary about the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. That led me to read his book
The Seven Storey Mountain,
which led me to contact the Jesuits, which led me to read more about their training program, which led me to consider entering, which led me to apply, and which ultimately led the Jesuits to accept me.

But how did this happen? Through desire. At each juncture I was drawn by a desire, an attraction or interest to that life. This is one primary way that we discover what we are meant to do and who we are: desire.

The easiest way to think about this is to use a familiar example: marriage. Most believers would readily agree that God calls a married couple together. Even if they don’t understand marriage as a sacrament, as Catholics do, most people would say that God has, in some way, drawn the two together. This happens in part through a wide variety of desires. A man and woman are drawn together in desire—physical, emotional, spiritual—and discover their vocations as a married couple. This is one way God draws these people together, and how the call to marriage manifests itself.

Desire works in a similar way in the lives of those drawn to specific professions. Accountants, writers, physicians, artists, lawyers, and teachers, among others, discover an attraction for their work, perhaps by hearing about those careers at an early age, meeting people in those lines of work, or reading about people in those professions. They find their vocations through their natural longings. Desire works the same in the lives of the saints, drawing each of them to different types of service in the church.

Let me give you an example outside of the seminary, novitiate, or convent. When I was working at General Electric, one of my peers loved reading business journals in his spare time. Where for me the job was something I did to support myself, he liked nothing better at the end of a long day than settling down with the
Wall Street Journal
. “How can you read that after work?” I once asked.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I
love
this stuff!”

Working in corporate finance was just a job for me; for him it was a real vocation. It flowed from a clear desire—an attraction to the business world, a desire to immerse himself in it and succeed. It was also an early indication that I might not be in the right place myself: for those who will succeed are those who love what they do, who find in it a real vocation.

As we’ve seen in previous chapters, desire is an essential element in the spiritual life. That’s why Ignatius asks you to pray for what you desire at the beginning of each prayer in the Spiritual Exercises. The very first exercise includes the invitation “to ask God our Lord for what I want and desire.” It’s also why William Barry writes, “Retreat directors, I believe, do their most important work when they help their directees to discover what they really want.”

God calls each of us to different vocations. Or, rather, God plants within us these vocations, which are revealed in our desires and longings. In this way God’s desires for the world are fulfilled, as we live out our own deepest desires. Vocation is less about
finding
one and more about having it
revealed
to you, as you pray to understand “what I want and desire.”

Desire, of course, has a bad reputation in religious circles. But selfish wants are not what Ignatius is talking about. As Margaret Silf notes in
Wise Choices,
“There are deep desires and there are shallow wants.”

One way to distinguish between deep desires and shallow wants, and to more fully understand our vocations, is to reflect on what you are drawn to over the long haul. You can use the techniques of the examen to look at where you’ve been drawn. You may ask yourself,
What desires have lived long in my heart? What do I most enjoy doing? What are my dream jobs?

If your job requires you to hunch over a desk crunching numbers but you have long dreamt about working more closely with people one on one, your desire may point to your true vocation. Maybe you’re meant to work in human resources or counseling. Conversely, if you’re a harried teacher who dreams of doing something more solitary, your desire may point to your vocation. Maybe you’re meant to be a writer—or, if that is impracticable, maybe to spend
some
time writing. Recently a friend told me that he had started to volunteer in a prison as a lay chaplain, though his current work is as a financial manager in a large corporation. His volunteer work gives him enormous reserves of joy and energy, and he grew enthusiastic just talking about it. You could see the elation in his face as he discussed his volunteering.

Sometimes an image may help you uncover such desires. Let me suggest one that has helped me over the years.

When I was in elementary school, our science teacher once asked our class to visit a nearby stream and draw out a glass of water, whose contents we would bring into class to peer at under a microscope. But before we could use the microscope, said our teacher, we would need to set the glass on a windowsill overnight: the water needed to clear. Plunging a glass directly into a pond will bring up all sorts of dirt, leaves, and twigs. Even after a few hours the water will still be cloudy. But if you let it
settle,
things become clearer.

Can you sit with yourself and let some of the dirt, leaves, and twigs of your life—your selfish wants—settle down so that things will be clearer? Or here’s another watery image: think of skimming things from the surface of your soul, getting rid of what is preventing you from seeing clearly, seeing what lies deeper down.

I was astonished to run across this precise metaphor—which I thought was my own!—in
A Time to Keep Silence,
published in 1953 by the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who visited the La Grande Trappe, the original Trappist abbey in Normandy, France. In his secluded cell, he wrote, “the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”

Likewise, can you wait for something to
surface?
Sometimes when your glass is still, something will rise up from the bottom, a small bubble, a little leaf or even a tiny fish. Maybe this is what God wants you to see. Can you let your dreams and desires rise to the surface?

Also using the analogy of the stream, David Lonsdale reminds us in
Eyes to See, Ears to Hear
that often what is most important is not on the surface of the stream. “The surface of a fast-flowing river is often broken by waves and eddies in which the water seems to rush off in all directions and even contrary to the main flow; while underneath all this busyness there is a constant, steady current which can be felt more strongly below the surface where the river is deepest.”

Looking back on your life, to see where you’ve been drawn, can also lead to the uncovering of desires. Or you can take an opposite tack: the question that enabled me to see my vocation looked
ahead
not backward. After months of wondering about the Jesuits, the psychologist asked me to imagine a brand-new life
without
thinking about the past. “If you could do anything you wanted,” he asked, “what would it be?” That forward-looking question surfaced an answer that was buried under a lot of life’s sediment. When the glass cleared, the answer rose to the surface.

What would your answer be to that question? And is there a realistic way to move at least a little closer to the answer?

A less metaphorical way to think about these questions is by using some of the key images from Ignatian discernment that we looked at in the last chapter: Imagine yourself on your deathbed. Imagine yourself before God. Imagine giving advice to someone in a similar situation.