The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

by James Martin

  Here’s a dramatic story to illustrate this. At least it was dramatic for me.

  FATHER? FATHER? FATHER?

  A few months before I was to be ordained a deacon (the final step before the priesthood), I started to get migraine headaches—almost every week. At the time I was in the middle of theology studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Life was only moderately stressful, and I had suffered from migraines before, but never with such intensity. I decided to see a doctor.

  After some tests, the doctor informed me that he had seen a “spot” on my test results. He suspected that it was a small tumor under my jaw that would have to be removed.

  At the time, I was something of a hypochondriac, so even though my father had had the same operation thirty years before and had recovered, I was terrified. What if it were cancer? What if I were disfigured? What if? What if?

  Fortunately, my friend Myles is a Jesuit physician. (That doesn’t mean that he is a physician who takes care of Jesuits only; he’s a physician who’s also a Jesuit.) Myles offered to arrange the surgery at the Catholic hospital in Chicago where he worked, with a doctor he knew well. By way of convincing me, he invited me to stay in his Jesuit community during the subsequent recuperation. What a relief! I was grateful for his friendship, his professional help, and his compassion.

  Until this time I had never had major surgery. Fear welled up within me, and with it self-pity. Yet when I saw all the others in the hospital waiting room a few weeks before the surgery, I realized the truth of what Myles had said: When you get your diagnosis you ask, “Why me?” When you meet others who suffer, you ask, “Why not me?”

  On the morning of the surgery, lying on a cold hospital table, with tubes snaking out of my arms, I was consumed with fear. Myles entered the room in his surgeon’s gown and introduced me as a Jesuit to the physicians and nurses in the operation room. After saying a few words of encouragement and promising he would pray for me, he left.

  A nurse stuck a needle in my arm, placed a mask over my face, and asked me to count backward from one hundred. I had seen this dozens of times in the movies and on television.

  Suddenly an incredible desire surged up from deep within me. It was like a jet of water rushing up from the depths of the ocean to its surface. I thought, I hope I don’t die, because I want to be a priest!

  The Energy of Life Itself

  We tend to think that if we desire something, it is probably something we ought not to want or to have. But think about it: without desire we would never get up in the morning. We would never have ventured beyond the front door. We would never have read a book or learned something new. No desire means no life, no growth, no change. Desire is what makes two people create a third person. Desire is what makes crocuses push up through the late-winter soil. Desire is energy, the energy of creativity, the energy of life itself. So let’s not be too hard on desire.

  —Margaret Silf, Wise Choices

  I had never felt it so strongly before. Of course I had thought about the priesthood from the day I entered the novitiate and felt drawn to the life of a priest throughout my Jesuit training. But never was there a time when I felt that desire so ardently. Perhaps it was something of what Bartimaeus felt when Jesus was passing by.

  When I awoke hours later, it was as if I had been asleep for only a few moments. In my foggy state I dimly heard someone calling my name. Since Myles had told the physicians and nurses that I was a Jesuit, they assumed I was already ordained (which I wasn’t). So the first thing I heard, seemingly immediately after having this intense desire to become a priest, was a nurse saying softly, “Father? Father? Father?”

  For me it was a surprising confirmation of my desire from the God of Surprises. During my recuperation I realized another reason why Jesus may have asked Bartimaeus what he wanted. Naming our desires tells us something about who we are. In the hospital I learned something about myself, which helped free me of doubts about what I wanted to do. And who I wanted to be. It’s freeing to say, “This is what I desire in life.” Naming our desires may also make us more grateful when we finally receive the fulfillment of our hopes.

  Expressing these desires brings us into a closer relationship with God. Otherwise, it would be like never telling a friend your innermost thoughts. Your friend would remain distant. When we tell God our desires, our relationship with God deepens.

  Desire is a primary way that God leads people to discover who they are and what they are meant to do. On the most obvious level, a man and a woman feel physical, emotional, and spiritual desire for each other, and in this way they discover their vocations to be married. A person feels an attraction to being a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, and so discovers his or her vocation. Desires help us find our way. But we first have to know them.

  The deep longings of our hearts are our holy desires. Not only desires for physical healing, as Bartimaeus asked for (and as many ask for today), but also the desires for change, for growth, for a fuller life. And our deepest desires, which lead us to become who we are, are God’s desires for us. They are one manner in which God speaks to you directly, one way that, as Ignatius says, the Creator deals with the creature. They are also the way that God fulfills God’s own dreams for the world, by calling people to certain tasks.

  A few weeks after the operation, I shared all this with Myles, who always combines prayerfulness with playfulness. He agreed that it was a grace to have this recognition, but then he laughed and said, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if you didn’t have to have major surgery to realize this?” (As it turned out, the tumor was benign and had nothing to do with the migraines.)

  Laughing, I replied that if I hadn’t had the operation, I probably wouldn’t have realized any of this. Not that God wanted me to be sick, or caused me to be sick, so that I could recognize his presence in this way. No more than Jesus caused Bartimaeus to be blind. Rather, when my defenses were down, I was able to see things more clearly.

  These are a few reasons why Ignatius asks us repeatedly in the Spiritual Exercises to pray for our desires. At the beginning of each prayer, Ignatius asks you to ask God “for what I want and desire.” For instance, if you are meditating on the life of Jesus, you ask for a deeper knowledge of Jesus. The practice reminds you of the importance of asking for things in the spiritual life and of realizing that whatever you receive is a gift from God.

  Desire plays an enormous role in the life of a Jesuit. A young Jesuit who dreams of working overseas, or studying Scripture, or working as a retreat director, will be encouraged to pay attention to his desires. Likewise, Jesuit superiors reverence these desires when making decisions about where to assign a particular Jesuit. This is part of the decision-making process known as “discernment” in the Jesuits. (More about making decisions later.)

  Sometimes a Jesuit might find himself lacking the desire for something that he wants to desire. Let’s say you are living in a comfortable Jesuit community and have scant contact with the poor. You may say, “I know I’m supposed to want to live simply and work with the poor, but I have no desire to do this.” Or perhaps you know that you should want to be more forgiving of someone in the community, but you don’t desire it. How can you pray for that with honesty?

  In reply, Ignatius would ask, “Do you have the desire for this desire?” Even if you don’t want it, do you want to want it? Do you wish that you were the kind of person that wanted this? Even this can be seen as an invitation from God. It is a way of glimpsing God’s invitation even in the faintest traces of desire.

  Some people find that their deep desires are difficult to identify. What then? Margaret Silf, an English spiritual writer, retreat director, and popular lecturer, provides one answer in her book Inner Compass: An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality.

  She suggests two ways that you may come to know your hidden desires. One is “Outside In”; the other “Inside Out.” The Outside-In approach considers those desires already present, which may point to deeper ones. Desires like “I want a new job�
� or “I want to move” may signify a longing for greater overall freedom.

  The Inside-Out approach uses archetypal stories as signposts to your desires. What fairy tales, myths, stories, films, or novels appealed to you when you were young? The same could be asked about stories from your sacred Scriptures. Are you drawn toward the story of Moses’ freeing the Hebrew slaves? Or Jesus’ healing the blind man? Why? Might these real-life stories hold clues about your holy desires?

  Desire is a key part of Ignatian spirituality because desire is a key way that God’s voice is heard in our lives. And ultimately our deepest desire, planted within us, is our desire for God.

  EXPERIENCES OF THE DESIRE FOR GOD

  Maybe you’re surprised by the notion that everyone has an innate desire for God. If you’re an agnostic, you might believe that intellectually but haven’t experienced it yourself. If you’re an atheist, you might flat-out disbelieve it.

  So for the disbelieving, the doubtful, and the curious (and everyone else, for that matter), let’s turn to how these holy desires manifest themselves in everyday life. What do they look like? What do they feel like? How can you become aware of your desires for God?

  Here are some of the most common ways that our holy desires reveal themselves. As you read, you might take a moment and consider which have been at work in your own life.

  Incompletion

  Many of us have had the feeling that, even though we have had some success and happiness, there is something missing in life. Way back in the 1960s Peggy Lee sang “Is That All There Is?” In the 1980s, U2 sang “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” We all feel that restlessness, the nagging feeling that there must be something more to life than our day-to-day existence.

  Feelings of incompletion may reflect dissatisfaction with our daily lives and point us to something that needs to be rectified. If we are trapped in a miserable job, a dead-end relationship, or an unhealthy family situation, it might be time to think about serious change. Dissatisfaction doesn’t have to be stoically endured; it can lead to a decision, change, and a more fulfilled life.

  Yet no matter how happy our lives are, part of this restlessness never goes away; in fact, it provides a glimpse of our longing for God. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” as Augustine wrote, 1,500 years before Peggy Lee and Bono. This longing is a sign of the longing of the human heart for God. It is one of the most profound ways that God has of calling us. In the echoes of our restlessness we hear God’s voice.

  Sometimes those feelings are stronger than simple incompletion and feel more like an awful emptiness. One writer called this emptiness within our hearts the “God-shaped hole,” the space that only God can fill.

  Some people try to fill that hole with money, status, or power. They think: If only I had more I would be happy. A better job. A nicer house. Yet even after acquiring these things, people may still feel incomplete, as if they’re chasing something they can never catch. They race ahead, straining to reach the goal of fulfillment, yet it always seems tantalizingly out of reach. The prize of wholeness is elusive. Emptiness remains.

  That was my experience early in my business career. After graduating with a business degree, I thought that once I landed a good job, pumped up my bank account, and filled my closet with elegant suits, I would be happy. But even with a job, money, and the best suits I could afford, I wasn’t satisfied. Something was missing. It would take me several years to figure out what it was.

  One of the best reflections on this topic comes from the twentieth-century spiritual writer Henri Nouwen. Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest and psychologist, wrote a perceptive book called The Selfless Way of Christ in which he examined this relentless quest to fill the empty hole in our lives. He observes that those rushing to fill that hole already sense that it is a useless quest.

  Somewhere deep in our hearts we already know that success, fame, influence, power, and money do not give us the inner joy and peace we crave. Somewhere we can even sense a certain envy of those who have shed all false ambitions and found a deeper fulfillment in their relationship with God. Yes, somewhere we can even get a taste of that mysterious joy in the smile of those who have nothing to lose.

  In their drive to fill this hole, some are pulled toward addictive behaviors, anything to fill them up: drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping, sexual activity, compulsive eating. But those addictions lead only to a greater sense of disintegration, a more cavernous emptiness and, eventually, to loneliness and despair.

  This hole in our hearts is the space from which we call to God. It is the space where God wants most to meet us. Our longing to fill that space comes from God. And it is the space that only God can begin to fill.

  Common Longings and Connections

  Sometimes you experience a desire for God in very common situations: standing silently in the snowy woods on a winter’s day, finding yourself moved to tears during a movie, recognizing a strange sense of connection during a church service—and feeling an inexpressible longing to savor this feeling and understand what it is.

  In the first few years after my sister gave birth to my first nephew, I often felt overwhelmed with love when I was with him. Here was a beautiful new child, a person who had never existed before, given freely to the world. One day I came home from a visit to their house and was so filled with love that I wept—out of gratitude, out of joy, and out of wonder. At the same time, I longed to connect more with this mysterious source of joy.

  Common longings and heartfelt connections are ways of becoming conscious of the desire for God. We yearn for an understanding of feelings that seem to come from outside of us. We experience what the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross calls the desire for “I know not what.”

  Many of us have had experiences like this. We feel that we are standing on the brink of something important, on the edge of experiencing something just beyond us. We experience wonder. So why don’t you hear more about these times?

  Because many times we ignore them, reject them, or deny them. We chalk them up to being overwhelmed, overwrought, overly emotional. “Oh, I was just being silly!” you might say to yourself. Or we are not encouraged or invited to talk about them as spiritual experiences. So you disregard that longing you feel when the first breath of a spring breeze caresses your face after a long dark winter, because you tell yourself (or others tell you) that you were simply being emotional. This happens even to those practiced in the spiritual life: often, after an intense experience in prayer during a retreat, people are tempted to dismiss it as simply something that “just happened.”

  Or we simply don’t recognize these moments as possibly having their origins in God.

  “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” That’s Julian Barnes, beginning his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Barnes is the acclaimed author of many books, including Flaubert’s Parrot. (More about that unusual bird later.) He takes as his subject his overpowering fear of death. Barnes writes, “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.”

  Barnes misses God. Who is to say that this “missing” does not arise from the very desire for God, which comes from God?

  One friend, a self-described workaholic who hadn’t been to church for many years, once went to a baptism of a friend’s child. Suddenly she was overtaken by powerful feelings—mainly the desire to live a more peaceful and centered existence. She began to cry, though she didn’t know why. She told me that she felt an intense feeling of peace as she stood in church and watched the priest pour water over the baby’s head.

  To me, it seemed clear what was happening: she was experiencing in that moment, when her defenses were down, God’s desires for her. And it makes sense that a religious experience would happen in the context of a religious ceremony. But she laughed and dismissed it. “Oh,” she said
, “I guess I was just being emotional.” And that was that.

  It’s a natural reaction: much in Western culture tries to tamp down or even deny these naturally spiritual experiences and explain them away in purely rational terms. It’s chalked up to something other than God.

  Likewise we may dismiss these events as being too common, too simple to come from God. Mike, a Jesuit high school teacher, once preached a short homily in our house chapel. The reading for the day was a story from the Old Testament, 2 Kings 5:1–19, about Naaman the Syrian. Naaman, commander of the Syrian king’s army, is suffering from leprosy and is sent by the king to ask the prophet Elisha for healing. In response Elisha tells him to do something simple: bathe in the Jordan River seven times.

  Naaman is furious. He thought that he would be asked to wash in some other river, some more important river. His servants say, “If the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?” (v. 13). In other words, why are you looking for some spectacular task? Do the simple thing. Naaman does it and is healed.

  Mike said that our search for God is often like Naaman’s. We’re searching for something spectacular to convince us of God’s presence. Yet it is in the simple things, common events and common longings, where God may be found.

  You may also fear accepting these moments as signs of the divine call. If you accept them as originating with God, you might have to accept that God wants to be in relationship with you or is communicating with you directly, which is a frightening idea.

  Fear is a common experience in the spiritual life. Confronted with an indication that God is close to you can be alarming. Thinking about God wanting to communicate with us is something that many of us would rather avoid.

  That is why so many stories in the Bible about men and women encountering the divine begin with the words, “Do not be afraid.” The angel announcing the birth of Jesus to Mary says, “Do not be afraid” (Luke 1:30). Nine months later, on the eve of the birth of Jesus, the angel in the fields greets the shepherds with “Do not be afraid“ (Luke 2:10). And when Jesus performs one of his first miracles in front of St. Peter, the fisherman falls to his knees out of awe and fear. ”Go away from me!“ says Peter. And Jesus says, again, ”Do not be afraid” (Luke 5:10).