The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

by James Martin

  “Is this just a series of hoops to jump through?” he asked. “Is it a ladder that you are climbing to get ahead?” He paused.

  “Or is this how God is forming you?”

  Embarrassed, I admitted that I had seen my formation as a series of hoops to jump through in order to reach the big goal: ordination. I still saw it more like work (where the goal was a promotion) or school (graduation). But maybe something bigger was going on. Maybe I really was being “formed” by God.

  With George’s help I recognized something: the joy I experienced as a Jesuit for the previous two years had been real; I was called to be a Jesuit in the midst of all of that, and so I was also called to accept the provincial’s decision. God’s hand, so hard for me to see, must be at work. So I decided to stay.

  After a few more conversations, the provincial assigned me for one year to a new task: to work at America magazine.

  The provincial’s “bad” decision led me to my writing career. If it hadn’t been for his decision, which I vehemently opposed, you wouldn’t be reading this book. In retrospect, I can see how different my life would have been had I not been faithful to my vow of obedience.

  Years later, I saw the former provincial at a Christmas gathering of Jesuits. By this point we were friends. But I had never talked with him about that time in Kenya.

  “You know,” I said, “you were right all those years ago.”

  “About what?” he said.

  “About delaying my theology studies,” I said. “Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t ready. I was too unsettled and confused, and I wouldn’t have been able to enter into theology studies or think about ordination. Plus that year at America really changed my life. So, in retrospect, you were right.”

  I expected him to say that now, with the benefit of hindsight, he could finally see the wisdom of his choice. Instead he laughed.

  “Jim,” he said good-naturedly, “I knew I was right even then!”

  THE REALITY OF THE SITUATION

  So Jesuits make a vow of obedience. Big deal, right? You’re probably asking what this has to do with you. You’re most likely not in a religious order or planning to join one. You’re probably never going to “vow obedience” to anyone—unless it’s in a traditional marriage ceremony, which is a different kind of “obedience” anyway. You may think that those stories about Jesuit obedience are ridiculous. In short, you may still believe that obedience is “desirable in dogs but suspect in people.”

  It may be hard to see how this aspect of Jesuit spirituality relates to your life. Poverty and chastity have more obvious applications: Poverty gives insights into the freedom of the simple life. Chastity offers perspectives on how to love freely and be a good friend. But what about obedience?

  Well, obedience is something that everyone has to face in the spiritual life. Because whether you’re in a religious order or not, you’ll find yourself having to surrender to “God’s will” or “God’s desires” or just God. But not in the way that you might think.

  Often when we think about God’s will, we think of trying to figure it all out. What is God’s will? What am I supposed to do? One of the themes of this book has been the Ignatian model of “discernment,” in which your desires help to reveal God’s desires for you. We look for signs of those desires in our lives.

  But there is a danger: We might overlook the fact that God’s “plan” often doesn’t need much figuring out or discernment.

  Sometimes it’s right in front of us. And that’s what one of my Jesuit heroes realized in a labor camp in the Soviet Union.

  At the beginning of the book, I mentioned the story of Walter Ciszek, the American-born Jesuit priest who had been sent by his superiors to work in Poland in the late 1930s. (Speaking of obedience, he had volunteered.) Originally hoping to work in the Soviet Union itself, Ciszek found it impossible to gain entrance and ended up in an Oriental Rite church in Albertin, Poland. When the German army took Warsaw in 1939, and the Soviet army overran eastern Poland and Albertin, Ciszek fled with other Polish refugees into the Soviet Union, hoping to serve there (in disguise) as a priest.

  In June 1941, Ciszek was arrested by the Soviet secret police as a suspected spy. He spent five years in Moscow’s infamous Lubianka prison and then was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in Siberia. In addition to his forced labor, he served as priest to his fellow prisoners, risking his life to offer counseling, hear confessions, and— most perilously—celebrate Mass.

  We said Mass in drafty storage shacks, or huddled in mud and slush in the corner of a building site foundation. . . . Yet in these primitive conditions, the Mass brought you closer to God than anyone might conceivably imagine.

  Ciszek wouldn’t return to the United States until 1963. By then many Jesuits assumed he was long dead. And why wouldn’t they? The Society of Jesus sent out an official death notice in 1947. But toward the end of his captivity, Ciszek was suddenly and surprisingly permitted to write letters home. Only then did family and friends learn of his “rebirth.”

  After a complicated diplomatic exchange was worked out with the help of President John F. Kennedy, he returned to the United States on October 12, 1963, coming directly to the Jesuit community of America magazine in New York. Thurston Davis, S.J., the editor-in-chief at the time, wrote in the next week’s issue, “In his green raincoat, grey suit and big-brimmed Russian hat he looked like the movie version of a stocky little Soviet member of an agricultural mission.”

  Ciszek settled down to work on the story of his time in Russia, called With God in Russia, detailing the extreme conditions in which he lived—his sudden capture by the Soviets, the grueling interrogation, the long train ride to Siberia, the wretched prison camps, and his eventual release into the Russian population as an ex-convict under surveillance. The book, still in print, was a huge success. But a few years later he realized that the book he really wanted to write was the story of something else: his spiritual journey. That book is called He Leadeth Me.

  Ciszek wrote that he wanted to answer the question everyone kept asking: “How did you manage to survive?” His short answer was “Divine Providence.” The full answer is his book, which shows how he found God in all things, even in a Soviet labor camp.

  In one of the most arresting chapters of the book, Ciszek describes a startling epiphany about what it means to follow “God’s will.”

  For a long time, as he toiled in the labor camps, he had been wondering how he would be able to endure his future. What was God’s will? How was he supposed to figure it out? One day, along with another priest friend, he had a revelation. When it comes to daily life, God’s will is not some abstract idea to be figured out or puzzled over or even discerned. Rather, God’s will is what is presented before us every day.

  [God’s] will for us was the twenty-four hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances he set before us in that time. Those were the things God knew were important to him and to us at that moment, and those were the things upon which he wanted us to act, not out of any abstract principle or out of any subjective desire to “do the will of God.” No, these things, the twenty-four hours of this day, were his will; we had to learn to recognize his will in the reality of the situation.

  This truth was so freeing that Ciszek returns to that theme again and again in his book. This recognition sustained him through many years of hardship, suffering, and pain.

  The plain and simple truth is that his will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. The trick is to learn to see that—not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God’s grace, but every day. Each of us has no need to wonder about what God’s will must be for us; his will for us is clearly revealed in every situation of every day, if only we could learn to view all things as he sees them and sends them to us.

  What is Ciszek’s response to the question of how he survived? Obedience to what life has placed before him. �
�The challenge lies in learning to accept this truth and act upon it,” he writes. This is something that everyone experiences: our lives change in ways we cannot control.

  Now, when life changes for the better, acceptance is no problem! You meet a new friend. You get a promotion at work. You fall in love. You learn that you’ll soon become a mother or a father or grandmother or grandfather. In these cases acceptance is easy. All one needs to do is be grateful.

  But what happens when life presents you with unavoidable or overwhelming suffering? This is where the example of the Jesuit approach to obedience may be helpful. What enables a Jesuit to accept difficult decisions by his superior is the same thing that can help you: the realization that this is what God is inviting you to experience at this moment. It is the understanding that somehow God is with you, at work and revealed in a new way in this experience.

  Let me be clear: I’m not saying that God wills suffering or pain. Nor that any of us will ever fully understand the mystery of suffering.

  Nor that you need to look at every difficulty as God’s will. Some suffering should be avoided, lessened, or combated: treatable illnesses, abusive marriages, unhealthy work situations, dysfunctional sexual relationships.

  Nonetheless, Ciszek understood that God invites us to accept the inescapable realities placed in front of us. We can either turn away from that acceptance of life and continue on our own, or we can plunge into the “reality of the situation” and try to find God there in new ways. Obedience in this case means accepting reality.

  SURRENDERING TO THE FUTURE

  This point was driven home a few years ago by my close friend Janice, a Catholic sister. Sister Janice was one of my professors during graduate theology studies at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a beloved figure among the students. A member of the French-founded Religious of Jesus and Mary, Janice, small in stature, with short gray hair and a cheerful demeanor, taught church history and Christian spirituality. At the end of my second year of studies, at my diaconate ordination, she met my parents, with whom she became fast friends.

  A few years after theology studies ended, my family got the disastrous news that my father had cancer. As I mentioned earlier, he had fallen in a parking lot, which alerted his doctors to a problem. Tests showed that lung cancer had traveled to his brain, and he would have to begin chemotherapy and radiation treatments immediately.

  When I heard the news, I froze. How could I do what it seemed God was now asking—help my mother in Philadelphia, accompany my father in what might be his last months, and continue my regular day-to-day work?

  Besides these new responsibilities, I was dealing with something else: a sadness beyond anything I had ever experienced. My father had moved from job to job in the previous few years, never finding happiness at work. And that image of him collapsed in a parking lot in the dark, in the rain, seemed infinitely sad. It seemed certain that his future would be even sadder.

  At one point I confessed to Janice my fear of facing all of this. “I know that I have to step on this path,” I told her, “but I don’t know if I can.”

  Janice said, “Can you surrender to the future that God has in store for you?”

  Those words helped me to understand obedience in daily life. It was the acceptance of what life put in front of me, the “reality of the situation,” as Ciszek said. For most people, obedience is not being sent away to work in a foreign land. It is stepping onto the path of daily life and continuing on it.

  Everything Is Precious

  Those who have abandoned themselves to God always lead mysterious lives and receive from God exceptional and miraculous gifts by means of the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences in which there appears to be nothing unusual. The simplest sermon, the most banal conversations, the least erudite books become the source of knowledge and wisdom to these souls by virtue of God’s purpose. This is why they carefully pick up the crumbs which clever minds tread underfoot, for to them everything is precious and a source of enrichment.

  —Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (1675–1751),

  The Sacrament of the Present Moment

  There is a choice involved: instead of acceptance, you can avoid plunging into the “reality of the situation.” You can hold it at arm’s length and see it as a distraction from life, rather than life itself. You tiptoe on the path, walk gingerly along its edges, or avoid it completely.

  Janice’s advice enabled me to step onto the path on which God was inviting me to walk. This is something of what Walter Ciszek realized: obedience came in accepting what was presented to him at that moment. The eighteenth-century French Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote two entire books on that topic: The Sacrament of the Present Moment and Abandonment to Divine Providence. “Once we grasp that each moment contains some sign of the will of God,” he said, “we shall find in it all we can possibly desire.”

  My father died in a hospital bed nine months later, losing his battle with brain and lung cancer. A few days before his death Janice took a six-hour train ride all the way from Boston, stayed overnight in a nearby convent, and spent two hours talking with my father as he lay in his hospital bed—an unforgettable act of charity and love.

  My father’s death opened up a bottomless well of sadness in me. Yet I was able to preside at his funeral Mass and preach about his life, which was a very human one, full of joy and sorrow. In the end, I was grateful that I was able to help my mother, accompany him, and even continue my daily work as a Jesuit. And I couldn’t have done any of that if I had resisted stepping on that path.

  FINDING GOD IN THE MIDST OF SUFFERING

  This raises an essential question in the spiritual life: How do you find God in suffering? But that in turn raises another difficult question: Why do we suffer? This is a question we need to reflect on briefly before we move on to what Ignatian spirituality has to say about it.

  The immense question, Why do we suffer? or the “problem of evil,” has bedeviled theologians, saints, mystics—all believers—for thousands of years. How could a good God allow suffering?

  First, we have to admit that no one answer can completely satisfy us when we face real suffering—our own or that of others. The best answer may be, “We don’t know.”

  Second, we may have to admit that we believe in a God whose ways remain mysterious. In an article in America magazine, Rabbi Daniel Polish, author of Talking About God, put it succinctly. “I do not believe in a God whose will or motives are crystal clear to me. And as a person of faith, I find myself deeply suspicious of those who claim such insight.”

  Polish goes on to quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “To the pious man knowledge of God is not a thought within his grasp.” This is the greatest challenge of faith, says Polish, “to live with a God we cannot fully understand, whose actions we explain at our own peril.”

  Third, while there are no definitive answers to the question of suffering, and while we may never fully understand it, there are some time-honored perspectives offered by the Jewish and Christian traditions, which have helped believers as they move through periods of suffering and pain.

  During theology studies I took a fascinating course called “Suffering and Salvation,” taught by Daniel Harrington, the New Testament scholar I mentioned earlier. In that course, later adapted into a book called Why Do We Suffer?, Father Harrington looked at the traditional explanations presented in Scripture. None answers the question and each may, in fact, raise more questions. Yet, taken together, they can provide, as Harrington wisely says, “resources” for the believer.

  So our class read in the Old Testament the psalms of lament, the Book of Job, passages in the Book of Isaiah about the “suffering servant;” excerpts from the New Testament about the passion and death of Jesus; as well as meditations on the meaning of the Cross in St. Paul’s writings.

  We studied the main approaches to suffering found in Scripture: Suffering is a punishment for one’s sins (or an ancestor’s sins). Su
ffering is a mystery. Suffering is a kind of purification. Suffering enables us to participate in the life of Jesus, who himself suffered; likewise, the Christ who understands suffering can be a companion to us in our pain. Suffering is part of the human condition in an imperfect world. And suffering can enable us to experience God in new and unexpected ways.

  A few of these perspectives I have found, at best, wanting; at worst, unhelpful. For example, the notion that suffering is a punishment from God makes no sense in the face of innocent suffering, especially when it comes to terrible illness or a natural disaster. Can anyone believe that a small child with cancer is being punished for his or her “sins”? It is a monstrous image of a vengeful and cruel God.

  Jesus himself rejects this image of God in the Gospel of John, when he comes upon a man who has been blind since birth (9:2). His disciples ask him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

  Jesus replies, “It was not this man who sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him” (v. 3). And he heals him.

  But many of these traditional biblical and theological resources have been of inestimable help in my own life during different periods of suffering. One incident stands out, not for its severity, but for its durability, because it continues today. And the insights that I learned still provide me with some perspective.

  At the beginning of theology studies, I began to experience shooting pains in my hands and wrists. Initially I figured it would subside, but after a few weeks I found myself in near-constant pain, incapable of typing, barely able to write, and slowly losing the ability to do simple things like turning a doorknob or holding a pen.

  After six months of visiting all sorts of doctors—internists, neurologists, orthopedic specialists, even hand specialists—I was given a generic diagnosis: repetitive strain injury. Stop typing immediately, my doctor said, lest you risk further injury. By the way, he said, it’s probably incurable.