The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (43 page)

You may need to sacrifice some upward mobility in exchange for a clear conscience, since most workplaces rarely reward the prophet. One lawyer friend put it bluntly, “I don’t expect to make partner, because I don’t play the games that others play, but I don’t really want that; it’s not good for me.” If you are working in a corporation that prizes selfishness, you might have to choose between advancement and values. If you are more fortunate, you will be able to find a company whose values match your own.

Discerning your response to ethical questions can be aided by some Ignatian questions from the last chapter: What would you recommend to someone in a similar situation? What would you have wanted to do, from the vantage point of your deathbed? What would your “best self” do?

The Ignatian triad of “riches to honors to pride” can also shed some light here. Salary and wealth are the ultimate measures of value in our culture. That is one reason why salary is a taboo topic in most social gatherings. Once revealed, it brutally places people in a social hierarchy with one another.

So you have to be careful that the riches (a high salary) that lead to honors (the esteem of colleagues) do not lead to pride (the belief that you are better than others simply because your paycheck is bigger).

Remembering the Poor

Step into any airport bookstore today, and you’ll see a section marked
Business
filled with books on how to get ahead. These books betoken a lively conversation among former CEOs, successful entrepreneurs, and business writers on how to be more successful, how to trounce your competitors, and how to stay on top, with the goal of more and more wealth.

But in those discussions one group is missing: the poor. For at least two reasons: First, their presence is a reminder of the inability of the capitalist system to provide for all, and so they represent a silent reproach to the capitalist “way of proceeding.” Second, the material needs of the poor remind us of our responsibility to care for them. For both reasons, the poor appear, in the words of Pope John Paul II, as “a burden, as irksome intruders trying to consume what others have produced.”

And increasingly they are obscured—by gated communities that shut out the nonwealthy, television shows that focus on celebrities, and slick ads for all manner of expensive consumer goods. Where are the poor? As Dick Meyer says in his book on American culture,
Why We Hate Us,
“We have used our affluence and abundance to build screens and false idols that obscure what matters most, what is authentic, what is unmediated.” That authenticity includes the poor.

Thus, the final challenge: how to remember the need to care for the poor.

One of my friends, a corporate lawyer, told me he found three things that help: first, being grateful for what you have; second, helping out in a church community; and third, really stretching yourself when you give charitably.

Another goal might be to spend time with the poor. To get to know the poor one-on-one, rather than as objects of charity. And it is not only the poor who benefit; it is the more affluent, too, who discover one of the secrets of the kingdom of God: the poor are able to invite the wealthy to think about God in new ways, as the refugees did for me in Africa. As Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit who teaches theology in El Salvador, wrote in
The True Church and the Poor:
“The poor are accepted as constituting the primary recipients of the Good News and, therefore, as having an inherent capacity of understanding it better than anyone else.”

T
HOSE ARE A FEW
suggestions on living a spiritual life in the working world based on the way of Ignatius. Overall, it requires carving out time for both prayer and solitude, finding God around you, practicing a degree of detachment from some corporate values, and remembering the need for solidarity with God’s poor.

H
OW TO
B
RING
Y
OUR
B
EST
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ELF TO
W
ORK

There’s an old Jesuit joke that says that the clearest sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in the Society of Jesus is that, despite all the craziness and confusion, we’re still here. Only God could do that!

That’s a humble way of looking at our successes, and it reminds us that we are ultimately dependent on God for our future.

Willingness to trust in God’s providence is what Pedro Arrupe had in mind when a journalist innocently asked him the question, “Where will the Society of Jesus be in twenty years?” Arrupe laughed and said, “I have no idea!” Like the church, the Society may be managed by human beings, but we believe that God ultimately guides us. And who knows where God will lead us in the future?

Still, there may be a few concrete reasons that can be adduced for the success of many of our ventures: Jesuits have a common mission; we try to work hard; we are available for many kinds of work; and we are inspired by the example of Jesus, as all Christians are, to accept whatever sacrifices are needed in pursuit of the common good.

Today you could add to that list of reasons another important one: Jesuits work with talented lay colleagues who share in the Ignatian vision. What’s more, Jesuits often work
for
those lay colleagues who share our vision.

But there may be more specific aspects of “our way of proceeding” that have helped the Society of Jesus endure for over 450 years, ideas that may be useful to those in the business world. Chris Lowney’s book
Heroic Leadership
has as its subtitle
Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World
. His book examines the characteristics of “our way of proceeding” that have helped the
Compañia de Jesús
flourish, and then he proposes some of those ideas as models of “best practices” for workers, managers, and corporations.

A former-Jesuit-turned-investment-manager, Lowney boiled down the list of the “Jesuit leadership secrets” to what he calls the “four pillars.” They are self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism.

Let’s look at Lowney’s four pillars, add a few more, and think about how they might be applied in the working world.

The first pillar is
self-awareness
. “Leaders thrive by understanding who they are and what they value,” writes Lowney, “by becoming aware of unhealthy blind spots or weaknesses that can derail them, and by cultivating the habit of continuous self-reflection and learning.”

By now this should be a familiar part of Jesuit spirituality. The way of Ignatius is designed to help us not only grow closer to God, but also understand ourselves—our strengths and our weaknesses— and whatever it is that keeps us from freedom. The examen, for example, continually invites us to reflect on what we’ve done, what we are doing, and what we will do. Part of Ignatian spirituality is that constant process of reflection, action, reflection.

This spiritual practice is applicable to the professional life. Good workers or leaders will be familiar with weaknesses and stumbling blocks that may derail them, can address those problems and also reflect on what motivates them to excellence.

Second,
ingenuity
. “Leaders make themselves and others comfortable in a changing world,” writes Lowney. “They eagerly explore new ideas, approaches, and cultures rather than shrink defensively from what lurks around life’s next corner. Anchored by nonnegotiable principles and values, they cultivate the ‘indifference’ that allows them to adapt confidently.”

This is clearly seen in the life of Ignatius, who determined that the times demanded that his men should not be cloistered monks but rather “in the world.” His indifference enabled him always to be adaptable and not overly concerned with incidentals.

That kind of ingenuity also finds expression in the lives of the great Jesuit missionaries. St. Francis Xavier, for example, used any possible means to spread the Gospel, including ringing a bell to attract attention and singing songs in native tongues.

Perhaps the most notable example of this ingenuity comes from Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit who immersed himself in the study of Chinese and donned the robes of the Mandarin scholar, as ways of presenting himself as a man of deep learning to the Chinese nobility. He wrote to his superiors:

Soon Ricci’s home became a gathering place for scholars and Chinese thinkers. “His high intellectual prestige,” writes William Bangert in
A History of the Society of Jesus,
“was magnified by his more than twenty works in Chinese on apologetics, mathematics and astronomy, some of which have honored places in the history of Chinese literature.”

Ultimately, Ricci’s venture was scuttled after the Holy See disapproved of the Jesuits’ acceptance of the notion that “ancestor worship” and veneration paid to Confucius in Chinese culture were compatible with Christianity. (Ricci saw them simply as respect paid to families and to one of the most important men in Chinese history, and, in his words, “certainly not idolatrous, and perhaps not even superstitious.”) In time, Ricci would establish a Jesuit house in Peking, with the approval of the emperor, and by his death in 1610, twenty-five hundred Chinese had become Catholics.

These innovations flowed from the Jesuit emphasis on learning, the importance of which Ignatius understood from his own life, and ingenuity. Added to this was the Jesuit “indifference” to incidentals and their desire to try something new.

Ingenuity also means flexibility and adaptability: what works well in one place may not in another. Ignatius grew his hair long as a way of trying to be more ascetical. When he saw that this had little to do with his spiritual progress, he cut it. Ricci, on the other hand, realized that in order to be accepted at all, he would have to grow his hair. Ignatian flexibility can be a component for success in the modern workplace, too.

But of all the stories of Jesuit ingenuity, the one that delights me most is the largely forgotten history of Jesuit theater.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jesuit priests and brothers were well known throughout all of Europe for their expertise in producing immensely popular plays, mainly through their schools, which in many towns were the leading civic and cultural institutions.
The Catholic Encyclopedia,
for example, estimates that between 1650 and 1700 roughly one hundred thousand productions of Jesuit plays took place, some often staged for royal visits. In 1574 one play performed in Munich transformed almost the entire town into an elaborate backdrop, with one thousand actors taking part. At a performance in seventeenth-century Vienna, the audience was so vast that police from neighboring towns had to be called to keep the surging crowds in check.

What distinguished the Jesuit theatrical productions was their ingenuity: the creative use of scenery and staging, including intricately designed backdrops, realistic props, and complicated mechanical devices. René Fülöp-Miller in
The Power and Secret of the Jesuits,
writes:

For added measure, Jesuits either invented or perfected the screen known as the scrim, a modern-day theatrical mainstay, as well as the trap door. (The next time you see someone disappear through a trap door, remember Jesuit ingenuity!)

Lowney’s third quality of heroic leadership is
love
. “Leaders face the world with a confident, healthy sense of themselves as endowed with talent, dignity, and the potential to lead. They find exactly these same attributes in others and passionately commit to honoring and unlocking the potential they find in themselves and in others. They create environments bound and energized by loyalty, affection, and mutual support.” Lowney contrasts the way of Ignatius with that of his near contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli, who counseled that “to be feared is safer than to be loved.”

The clearest indication of this comes from Ignatius’s instructions for the director of novices, often called the most important man in the province. The person must be not simply a man who can give young Jesuits “loving admonition,” but—most striking—someone whom all the novices “may love” and to whom they may “open themselves in confidence.” At the very beginning of Jesuit training, Ignatius wishes to instill a sense of love to engender the confidence needed to help young men progress.

How different this was from my own experience in the working world. Occasionally it seemed that it was precisely the angry, mean-spirited, and foul-mouthed people who rose to the top. (My workplace was by no means normative: most people in the working world are caring, decent, and compassionate.) Still, imagine my surprise when I observed that Jesuits seemed to grow
kinder
as they assumed roles in governance. This not only fostered a sense that I wanted to be like them, but also that I would gladly follow them.

In the
Constitutions,
Ignatius emphasizes the overarching value of love during each stage of Jesuit training, beginning with the novitiate. And he includes it in the qualities required for a good superior general, to which he devotes several pages. (Many Jesuits at the time believed that Ignatius was unconsciously describing himself.) The superior general needs to be closely united with God, says Ignatius, from whom “charity toward all his neighbors should particularly shine forth . . . and in a special way toward the members of the Society; likewise a genuine humility which will make him highly beloved of God our Lord and of human beings.”