The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

by James Martin

A few years ago, I worked with an Off-Broadway acting company that was producing a new play about the relationship between Jesus and Judas called The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. After some meetings with the actor who would play Judas, as well as the playwright and the director, I was invited to help the cast better understand the subject material. In time they asked me to serve as “theological consultant” for the play. This isn’t as strange as it may seem: the Jesuits have historically been active in theater, having used it extensively in their schools from the earliest days. (More about “Jesuit theater” later on.)

  Over the course of six months, I found myself talking with the actors not simply about Jesus and Judas but also about their spiritual lives, answering questions prompted by our freewheeling discussions about the Gospels, about sin and forgiveness, and about faith.

  Several of the actors had toggled between one religious tradition and another, seeking something that would “fit.” One actor, named Yetta, who played Mary Magdalene, told me that her mother was Catholic and her father was Jewish. They decided to let her choose her own religion when she was grown. “But,” she said, “I haven’t chosen yet.” (By the way, when I quote people in this book, or tell their stories, it is with their permission.)

  My time with the actors was one of not only discovering the theater but also meeting people who were traveling along a path I hadn’t encountered before. They were on the path of exploration.

  Given their profession, this was not surprising. A good actor often researches a new role by spending time with a person from a particular background. An actor prepping for a role in a police drama, for instance, will hang out with real-life police officers. So the idea of “exploration” comes naturally to them. Stepping into another person’s shoes for a time is not that different from entering into another religious tradition for a time.

  Others—not just actors—more settled in their religious beliefs often find that their own spiritual practices are enhanced through interactions with other religious traditions. Several years ago I was astonished by the richness of my prayer one Sunday morning in a Quaker meeting house near my parents’ home outside Philadelphia. While I had ample experience praying contemplatively on my own, and worshipping together during Catholic Masses, the Quakers’ “gathered silence” (praying silently together) was a type of contemplation I’d never before imagined. Their tradition enriched my own.

  I have wandered freely in mystical traditions that are not religious and have been profoundly influenced by them. It is to my Church, however, that I keep returning, for she is my spiritual home.

  —Anthony de Mello, S.J. (1931–1987)

  Exploration comes naturally to Americans in particular and is a theme celebrated not only in U.S. history but in our great works of literature: Huckleberry Finn is an explorer. So are the heroes and heroines of the novels of Jack London and Willa Cather, to name but two favorite authors. Our homegrown religious writers—especially the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—were inner explorers. “Afoot and lighthearted, I take to the open road,” wrote Walt Whitman, “Healthy, free, the world before me, / The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”

  Exploration comes naturally in American faith as well. Turned off by their childhood faith, or by the failings of organized religion, and lacking extensive religious training, many Americans searching for a religion that “fits” embark on a quest—itself a spiritual metaphor.

  The benefit of walking along the path of exploration is plain. After a serious search, you may discover a tradition ideally suited to your understanding of God, your desires for community, and even to your own personality. Likewise, returning to your original community may give you a renewed appreciation for your “spiritual home.” Explorers may also be more grateful for what they have found and are not as likely to take their communities for granted. The most grateful pilgrim is the one who has finished the longest journey.

  The pitfall for this path is similar to the one for the path of independence: the danger of not settling for any tradition because none is perfect. An even greater danger for explorers is not settling on any one religious tradition because it doesn’t suit them: God may become someone who is supposed to satisfy their needs. God becomes what one writer called a “pocket-size God,” small enough to put in your pocket when God doesn’t suit you (for example, when the Scriptures say things that you would rather not hear) and take out of your pocket only when convenient.

  Another danger is a lack of commitment. Your entire life may become one of exploration—constant sampling, spiritual grazing. And when the path becomes the goal, rather than God, people may ultimately find themselves unfulfilled, confused, lost, and maybe even a little sad.

  The Path of Confusion

  This final path crosses all the other ones at various points. People on the path of confusion run hot and cold with their childhood faith— finding it relatively easy to believe in God at times, almost impossible at others. They haven’t “fallen away,” but they’ve not stayed connected either. They cry out to God in prayer and then wonder why there doesn’t seem to be an answer. They intuit God’s presence during important moments, and perhaps even during religious services, but find themselves bothered by the problems of belonging to a church, synagogue, or mosque. They may pray from time to time, particularly when in dire need, and they may go to services on key holidays.

  But for this group, finding God is a mystery, a worry, or a problem.

  The main benefit of this path is that it often helps people to fine-tune their approach to their childhood faith. Unlike those who consider themselves clearly religious or clearly nonreligious, these people have not yet made up their minds, and so they are constantly refining their ideas about a religious commitment.

  But confusion can lapse into laziness. Avoiding worship services because of a particular criticism can lead to leaving organized religion entirely because it’s too much work, or because it takes too much energy to belong to a group that demands, say, charity and forgiveness.

  Much of my adult life, before entering the Jesuits, was spent on this path. As a boy, I was raised in a loving family with a lukewarm Catholic background. My family went to church regularly, but we didn’t engage in those practices that mark very religious Catholics— saying grace at meals, speaking regularly about God, praying before going to bed, and attending Catholic schools. And in college I grew increasingly confused about God.

  After Jacque’s mysterious answer moved me to give God another chance, I returned to church, but in a desultory way. I wasn’t sure exactly what, or who, I believed in. So for several years God the Problem Solver was replaced by a more amorphous spiritual concept: God the Life Force, God the Other, God the Far-Away One. While these are valid images of God, I had no idea that God could be anything but those abstract ideas. And I figured that things would stay that way until I died.

  Then, at age twenty-six, I came home one night after work and turned on the television set. After graduation, I had taken a job with General Electric but was beginning to grow dissatisfied with the work. After six years of working late at night and on the weekends, I had also started to develop stress-related stomach problems and was wondering how much more I could take.

  On television that night was a documentary about Thomas Merton, a man who had turned his back on a dissolute life to enter a Trappist monastery in the early 1940s. Something about the expression on his face spoke to me: his countenance radiated a peace that to me seemed unknown, or at least forgotten. The show was so interesting that the next day I purchased and began reading Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain.

  Gradually, I discovered within myself a desire to do something similar to what Thomas Merton had done; maybe not join a monastery (since I’m too talkative) but somehow lead a more contemplative, more religious, life. That experience helped me to step off the path of confusion and onto the path of belief, which led to the Jesuits.

  THOSE ARE THE
SIX paths on which many seem to travel. What does St. Ignatius have to say to people on each of those paths about finding God? The answer is: plenty.

  The way of Ignatius is an invitation to those who have always believed in God, who believe in God but not in religion, who have rejected God, who are coming back to God, who are exploring, and who are confused. Ignatius’s approach meets you on your path and leads you closer to God.

  SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS

  Before we tackle the question of how to find God, a digression on two important ideas: religion and spirituality. Everybody seems to be spiritual these days—from your college roommate to the person in the office cubicle next to yours to the subject of every other celebrity interview. But if “spiritual” is fashionable, “religious” is unfashionable. This is usually expressed as follows: “I’m spiritual but not religious.” It’s even referred to by the acronym SBNR.

  There are so many people who describe themselves as SBNR that sometimes I wonder if the Jesuits might attract more people if they promoted the Spiritual but Not Religious Exercises.

  The thinking goes like this: being religious means abiding by the arcane rules and hidebound dogmas, and being the tool of an oppressive institution that doesn’t allow you to think for yourself (which would have surprised many thinking believers, like St. Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, Dorothy Day, and Reinhold Niebuhr). Religion is narrow-minded and prejudicial—so goes the thinking— stifling the growth of the human spirit (which would have surprised St. Francis of Assisi, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, St. Teresa of Ávila, Rumi, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.).

  Or worse, as several contemporary authors contend, religion is the most despicable of social evils, responsible for all the wars and conflicts around the world.

  Sadly, religion is responsible for many ills in the modern world and evils throughout history: among them, the persecution of Jews, endless wars of religion, the Inquisition, not to mention the religious intolerance and zealotry that leads to terrorism.

  You can add to this list smaller things: your judgmental neighbor who loudly tells you how often he helps out at church, your holier-than-thou relative who trumpets how often she reads the Bible, or that annoying guy at work who keeps telling you that belief in Jesus is sure to bring you amazing financial success.

  There is a human and sinful side to religion since religions are human organization, and therefore prone to sin. And, frankly, people within religious organizations know this better than those outside of them.

  Some say that on balance religion is found wanting. Still, I would stack up against the negatives the positive aspects: traditions of love, forgiveness, and charity as well as the more tangible outgrowths of thousands of faith-based organizations that care for the poor, like Catholic Charities or the vast network of Catholic hospitals and schools that care for poor and immigrant populations. Think too of generous men and women like St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Ávila, St. Catherine of Siena, Mother Teresa, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Speaking of Dr. King, you might add abolition, women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movements, all of which were founded on explicitly religious principles. Add to that list the billions of believers who have found in their own religious traditions not only comfort but also a moral voice urging them to live selfless lives and to challenge the status quo.

  And Jesus of Nazareth. Remember him? Though he often challenged the religious conventions of his day, he was a deeply religious man. (This is something of an understatement.)

  By the way, atheism doesn’t have a perfect record either. In his book No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers, the writer Michael Novak points out that while many atheist thinkers urge us to question everything, especially the record of organized religion, atheists often fail to question their own record. Think of the cruelty and bloodshed perpetrated, just in the twentieth century, by totalitarian regimes that have professed “scientific atheism.” Stalinist Russia comes to mind.

  On balance, I think religion comes out on top. And when I think about the maleficent effects of religion, I remember the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, a dazzling writer who was by many accounts a nasty person. (He once wrote to his wife, “I know you lead a dull life now. . . . But that is no reason to make your letters as dull as your life. . . . Please grasp that.”) One of Waugh’s friends, Nancy Mitford, once expressed astonishment that he could be so mean-spirited and a Christian. “You can’t imagine,” said Waugh, “how much worse I should be if I were not religious.”

  Still, it’s not surprising that, given all the problems with organized religion, many people would say, “I’m not religious,” adding, “I’m serious about living a moral life, maybe even one that centers on God, but I’m my own person.”

  Spiritual, on the other hand, is taken to mean that, freed from unnecessary dogma, you can be yourself before God. The term may also imply that you have sampled a variety of religious beliefs that you have integrated into your life. You meditate at a Buddhist temple (which is great); participate in Seders with Jewish friends at Passover (great too); sing in a gospel choir at a local Baptist church (great again); and go to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at a Catholic church (also great).

  You find what works for you, but you don’t subscribe to any one church: that would be too confining. Besides, there’s no one creed that represents exactly what you believe.

  But there’s a problem. While “spiritual” is obviously healthy, “not religious” may be another way of saying that faith is something between you and God. And while faith is a question of you and God, it’s not just a question of you and God. Because this would mean that you, alone, are relating to God. And that means there’s no one to suggest when you might be off track.

  We all tend to think we’re correct about most things, and spiritual matters are no exception. Not belonging to a religious community means less of a chance of being challenged by a tradition of belief and experience. It also means less chance to see that you are misguided, seeing only part of the picture or even that you are wrong.

  Let’s consider a person who wants to follow Jesus Christ on her own. Perhaps she has heard that if she follows Christ, she will enjoy financial success—a popular idea today. Were she part of a mainstream Christian community, though, she would be reminded that suffering is part of the life of even the most devout Christian. Without the wisdom of a community, she may gravitate toward a skewed view of Christianity. Once she falls on hard times financially, she may drop Christ, who has ceased to meet her personal needs.

  Despite our best efforts to be spiritual, we make mistakes. And when we do, it’s helpful to have the wisdom of a religious tradition.

  This reminds me of a passage from a book called Habits of the Heart, written by Robert Bellah, a sociologist of religion, and other colleagues, in which they interviewed a woman named Sheila about her religious beliefs. “I believe in God,” she said. “I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”

  More problematic than Sheilaism are spiritualities entirely focused on the self, with no place for humility, self-critique, or a sense of responsibility for the community. Certain New Age movements find their goal not in God, or even the greater good, but in self-improvement—a valuable goal—but one that may degenerate into selfishness.

  Religion can provide a check to my tendency to think that I am the center of the universe, that I have all the answers, that I know better than anyone about God, and that God speaks most clearly through me.

  By the same token, religious institutions need themselves to be called to account. And here the prophets among us, who are able to see the failures, weaknesses, and plain old sinfulness of institutional religion, play a critical role. Like individuals who are never challenged, religious communities can often get things tragically wrong, convinced that they are doing “God’s will.” (Think of the Salem witch tr
ials, among other examples.) They might even encourage us to become complacent in our judgments. Unreflective religion can sometimes incite people to make even worse mistakes than they would on their own. Thus, those prophetic voices calling their communities to continual self-critique are always difficult for the institution to hear, but nonetheless necessary. Ignatius, for example, exercised a prophetic role by asking Jesuits not to seek high clerical office in the church—like that of bishop, archbishop, or cardinal. In fact, Jesuits make a promise not to “ambition” for high office even within their own order. In this way, Ignatius not only tried to prevent careerism among the Jesuits, but also spoke a word of prophecy to the clerical culture rampant in the Catholic Church of his time.

  It’s a healthy tension: the wisdom of our religious traditions provides us with a corrective for our propensity to think that we have all the answers; and prophetic individuals moderate the natural propensity of institutions to resist change and growth. As with many aspects of the spiritual life, you need to find life in the tension.

  Isaac Hecker was a nineteenth-century convert to Catholicism who became a priest and founded the American religious order known as the Paulists. He may have summed it up best. Religion, said Hecker, helps you to “connect and correct.” You are invited into a community to connect with one another and with a tradition. At the same time, you are corrected when you need to be. And you may be called to correct your own community— though a special kind of discernment and humility is required in those cases.

  Religion can lead people to do terrible things. At its best, though, religion modifies our natural tendency to believe that we have all the answers. So despite what many detractors say, and despite the arrogance that sometimes infects religious groups, religion at its best introduces humility into your life.

  Religion also reflects the social dimension of human nature. Human beings naturally desire to be with one another, and that desire extends to worship. It’s natural to want to worship together, to gather with other people who share your desire for God, and to work with others to fulfill the dreams of your community.