by Chris Lowney
Go further than wholehearted service? How is that possible?
Strictly speaking, of course, it isn't possible. No one can give more than wholehearted service. But just as great athletes learn to play "beyond themselves" at peak moments, Jesuits learn through the meditation on the two kings and others like it that it is possible to give more. A heroic Jesuit is as much "coiled" as "poised" at equilibrium. And only heroically ambitious goals will inspire him to spring. Total victory is always the goal. And total victory demands more than total commitment: it requires going further than wholehearted service.
Early Jesuits captured this aggressive drive, this relentless energy, in a one-word motto plucked from elsewhere in the Exercises: magis, Latin for "more." Jesuits are exhorted to always "choose and desire" the strategic option that is more conducive to their goals. But the simple motto captures a broader spirit, a restless drive to imagine whether there isn't some even greater project to be accomplished or some better way of attacking the current problem.
Motivation is personal. And the meditative exercises transformed Jesuit company goals into personal ones. The meditation on the two kings presents an invitation, not an order. Accepting that invitation is a personal decision. Moreover, the metaphorical meditation lacks specific shape. It doesn't explain what one does to achieve the heroic goal. That detail comes as each recruit mentally shapes the mission and the magis to his circumstances, not only during the Exercises but throughout his life.
What would so motivate you that you would go further than wholehearted service to achieve it?
Few can answer that question. Most have never even asked it of themselves. But asking oneself, and coming up with an answer, all but guarantees motivated, imaginative engagement.
THE FOUNDATION OF LOVE: "STIRRED TO PROFOUND GRATITUDE, I MAY BECOME ABLE TO LOVE" 14
What kind of world does the energized recruit reenter after completing the Spiritual Exercises?
The previously mentioned Exercises might suggest a perilous place. Recruits have inventoried their weaknesses to arm themselves against the "enemy of human nature." They've been summoned to enlist in a high-stakes battle to conquer "the whole land of the infidels."
A final integrative meditation, the Contemplation to Attain Love, delivers the recruit back into the world. One commentator has called it "the masterpiece of the Spiritual Exercises."15 Early meditations turn each recruit inward. But the crowning exercise turns his gaze outward to contemplate the world in which he will realize his potential:
First. Love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words.
Second. Love consists in a mutual communication between the two persons. That is, the one who loves gives and communicates to the beloved what he or she has.-.-.-.
I will consider how God dwells in creatures; in the elements, giving them existence; in the plants, giving them life; in the animals, giving them sensation; in human beings, giving them intelligence; and finally, how in this way he dwells also in myself, giving me existence, life, sensation, and intelligence.-.-.-.
I will consider how God labors and works for me in all the creatures on the face of the earth; that is, he acts in the manner of one who is laboring. For example, he is working in the heavens, elements, plants, fruits, cattle, and all the rest-giving them their existence, conserving them, concurring with their vegetative and sensitive activities, and so forth. Then I will reflect on myself.16
The recruit is catapulted back into a world that is charged with love. This love drives action: "Love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words." And the same energy that courses through each recruit, "giving [him] existence, life, sensation, and intelligence," is also "working in the heavens, elements, plants, fruits, cattle, and all the rest."
The meditation rests on a theological vision of divine love poured out into the world. But nothing about it suggests dry theological argument. Rarely has an abstract notion like love-much less divine love-been reduced to more concrete, everyday physical images. And Loyola intended a concrete, everyday impact on recruits: they were made of the same stuff as the people and things around them; they were all equal, all endowed with the same worth, all shot through with the same energy and potential. Recruits shared bonds not only to family and friends but equally to all those who worked with, for, and around them-even the lazy, stupid, competitive ones who didn't bathe regularly. It was a worldview, a lens intended to color a recruit's mindset and every action.
"Love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words." This simple principle becomes a mantra of sorts for those who absorb the meaning of the Contemplation to Attain Love. The point of the meditation is not merely for the recruit to bask in the warm and cozy knowledge that he-along with all creation reflects an outpouring of divine love (although there's nothing wrong with that invigorating feeling). Rather, the point lies in the action unleashed by this realization. Appreciating himself as a loved person of unique dignity and potential inevitably affects the way the recruit lives his life, instilling in him the desire to make the most of his gifts and to avoid squandering them through laziness, self-abuse, poor self-confidence, or an aimless life path. The principle equally influences his relationships with others: the meditation leaves him convinced that they too have dignity and potential. They rate profound respect as individuals, because shared humanity means something. And for teachers, parents, managers, coaches, mentors, and friends, expressing love through deeds, not words means helping others bring their potential to fruition.
For teachers, parents, managers, coaches, mentors, and friends, expressing love through deeds, not words means helping others bring their potential to fruition.
THE EXAMEN: "UPON ARISING" "AFTER THE NOON MEAL," AND "AFTER SUPPER"
Recruits who successfully absorb the Exercises are injected back into the world as self-aware, ingenious, loving, heroic leaders. But no monthlong introspective journey, no matter how intense or sophisticated, is enough to fortify someone for a lifetime. Immersed in the world with all hell breaking loose around them, Jesuits-like anyone else-risk slipping away from their goals and values when faced with the pressures, distractions, and competing demands of everyday life.
Loyola anticipated this and made sure that the Exercises could also be used as a daily follow-up tool to maintain focus on newly embraced values. The Exercises were specifically designed for those immersed in a busy lifestyle in an ever-changing world. Every day "upon arising," Jesuits are to remind themselves of key personal goals. And twice each day they make a short mental pit stop, what they call an examen. Each examen begins by recalling the positive, loving worldview that was the Exercises' culminating meditation: "The First Point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits I have received." 17 Then comes a mental replay of the day thus far, "exacting an account of self with regard to the particular matter decided upon for correction and improvement. He should run through the time, hour by hour or period by period, from the moment of rising until the present examination." 18
In other words, the recruit recalls in his mind all the events of the day, the opportunities and challenges presented, and how he reacted to them-whether his subsequent attitudes and choices brought him closer to his long-term goals or moved him further away.
This self-reflective habit is as powerful as it is simple. Ambitious goals become manageable when broken down into smaller goals. Not smoking for the rest of one's life is a daunting proposition, but not smoking for the next few hours is a manageable goal. Wanting to become more assertive in order to boost one's career trajectory is a sprawling, ill-defined aspiration, but assessing whether one asserted oneself in the meeting that ended an hour ago is a way of focusing this aspiration with laserlike precision.
Moreover, the examens create an ongoing feedback loop. Relevant new information is incorporated and assessed in real time; I remind myelf of key goals each morning, not every six months, and I extract lessons learned from my successes and failures twice a day, not once a year. Finally and m
ost important, the examens work for busy people. Few people are willing to set aside even one day a year for self-reflection, but anyone can carve out five minutes three times each day.
Self-awareness, the first of the four Jesuit leadership pillars, is the foundation of the others. Ingenuity-confident, optimistic innovation-hinges on indifference, the freedom to read and respond to a changing world. Love, engaging others positively and supportively, flows from the worldview established through the Contemplation to Attain Love. And heroism evolves out of the spirit of magis, a reflexive response that keeps one motivated through ambitious personal goals.
Few people are willing to set aside even one day a year for self-reflection, but anyone can carve out five minutes three times each day.
The self-awareness accomplished during the Exercises is a prelude to action. Cut off from the world for a metaphorical desert experience, each recruit reemerges all the more committed and engaged. So too, our focus now moves from the introspective Exercises to what those Exercises enabled the early Jesuits to achieve-and what they teach us about leadership today.
CHAPTER 7
"The Whole World
Becomes Our House"
How Ingenuity Sparks Innovation,
Creativity, and a Global Mindset
ood enough. I'm ready-.-.-."
If Francis Xavier had more to say about what he'd just been asked to do, it hasn't been recorded. Just pues sus, heme aqui.1
Xavier was about to become the embodiment of ingenuity. In all likelihood, the term Jesuit ingenuity would have meant little to Xavier and his sixteenth-century colleagues. Ingenuity appears nowhere in Jesuit regulations or correspondence. But every early Jesuit would have instantaneously recognized ingenuity's telltale attitudes and behaviors as core to their modo de proceder, their way of doing things. Ingenuity is the readiness to cross the world at a moment's notice in full-hearted pursuit of a good opportunity, as Xavier was about to do. It is the willingness to work without a script and to dream up imaginative new approaches to problems that have stymied others, as Matteo Ricci demonstrated in China. And it is the creative embrace of new ideas and foreign cultures, as Roberto de Nobili exemplifies later in this chapter.
What distinguishes Jesuit ingenuity is not so much its characteristic behaviors. After all, leadership pundits have long championed the virtues described thus far: imagination, adaptability, creativity, flexibility, and the ability to respond rapidly. Rather, the defining mark of Jesuit ingenuity is what makes these behaviors possible in the first place. Loyola didn't merely exhort recruits to be adaptable and creative; he ensured through the Exercises that recruits would adopt the demeanor, attitudes, and worldview that make adaptability and creativity possible.
There are two vital ingredients for Jesuit ingenuity. Indifference frees Jesuits from the prejudices, attachments, fears, and narrow-mindedness that can block the enthusiastic pursuit of new ideas and opportunities. And the Exercises' final meditationthe Contemplation to Attain Love-endows recruits with an optimistic vision of a world thoroughly shot through with divine love. Ingenuity blossoms when the personal freedom to pursue opportunities is linked to a profound trust and optimism that the world presents plenty of them. Imagination, creativity, adaptability, and rapid response become the keys for finding and unlocking those opportunities. The Exercises equipped early Jesuits such as Xavier with the gift of ingenuity; Loyola then unleashed them on the world and let them lead.
Ingenuity blossoms when the personal freedom to pursue opportunities is linked to a profound trust and optimism that the world presents plenty of them.
A SMALL COMPANY WITH BIG PLANS: THE JESUIT WHO TOOK ON ASIA
It is fitting that the Jesuits' first great overseas opportunity came from a country taking its own rare turn as star on the world stage. Tiny Portugal had long languished at Europe's literal and littoral periphery. But if its remote location removed the country from the commercial mainstream, it proved an ideal launching point for Atlantic Ocean voyages of exploration. Portuguese and Spanish expeditions didn't waste the opportunity. The Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias had reached the southern tip of Africa by 1488; four years later Columbus planted the Spanish flag in the Americas.
As the two nations undertook an aggressive campaign of conquest in Asia and the Americas, Europe's balance of power was fundamentally realigned. Tiny Portugal was tiny no more. And in a rare if fleeting moment of sanity, Portugal and Spain decided that the world just might be big enough for both of them. Rather than rushing headlong toward potentially ruinous confrontation, they cut a deal-an elegantly simple, charmingly naive, and incredibly arrogant deal. Their ambassadors agreed to divide the world between them from a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. (Neither country, incidentally, even remotely understood just where this point lay.)
From their imaginary and poorly defined starting point, Portugal and Spain sketched a line girdling the globe through the North and South Poles, dividing the world in two. Half the world went to Spain, half to Portugal-what could be simpler? Portugal waltzed away with exclusive rights to colonize newly discovered or undiscovered lands east of the demarcation line if not already occupied by Christian princes. Not a bad outcome for a country half as large as the state of Idaho and about as populous then as Idaho is today.
All these "undiscovered" lands had already been occupied for millennia, of course, but their governing "non-Christian princes" had somehow been overlooked when invitations to the negotiating party were engraved. They weren't the only ones slighted: no other European power had been invited either. Not surprisingly, no other nation ever recognized the treaty's validity. But rather than giving in to messy, protracted multilateral negotia tions, Spain and Portugal enticed a higher authority to bless the arrangement. In return for each country's pledge to propagate Christianity throughout its conquered lands, the Vatican gave approval for their Treaty of Tordesillas.
Nearly fifty years after the treaty's ratification, King John III of Portugal received reports of "certain learned clerics of exemplary life" from a courtier in Rome who knew Loyola's team from Paris.2 They were exactly the kind of men the king wanted for his "spices and souls" expeditions to the Indies, and he instructed his delegate in Rome to retain them. The king's ambassador asked Loyola for six Jesuits. Loyola, putting a suave spin on his sorry staffing situation, replied, "And what will your Lordship leave for the rest of the world?"3
If Portugal was a dark-horse candidate for world dominion, the Jesuit company was entirely out of the running. In fact, the Jesuits weren't even really a "company," still scrambling after formal papal approval for their charter. Loyola wasn't being flip in his response to the Portuguese ambassador. His whole "company," such as it was, numbered ten full-fledged Jesuits, and only six of them were in Rome at the time. So sending six would truly have left none "for the rest of the world." Still, it was an opportunity no ambitious fledgling company could pass up. Twenty percent of the company (two Jesuits) was designated for India. One fell ill on the verge of departing. Informed that he was needed to replace his sick colleague, Xavier instantly replied, "Good enough. I'm ready" or "Splendid. I'm your man," as later Jesuit generations often rendered it.
Within forty-eight hours Xavier had patched up his extra pair of pants, visited the pope for a blessing, packed up his life, and departed.
Within forty-eight hours he had patched up his extra pair of pants, visited the pope for a blessing, packed up his life, and departed.
The Jesuits' first hero
Francis Xavier is here depicted drafting his farewell letter to Loyola, presumably on the island off the Chinese coast where Xavier died. The print was based on a sketch by Jesuit-educated Peter Paul Rubens.
MAKING IT UP AS HE WENT
It was just as well that Xavier didn't plot a strategy before leaving, for any plans would have soon become laughably outmoded. Xavier's companion didn't even make it past their Lisbon transit stop. The same King John who later gushed that he would sacr
ifice his empire to bring the Jesuits to Portugal started by insisting that Simao Rodrigues remain there instead of traveling on to India. Xavier was left to travel onward without his Jesuit companion.
Rodrigues missed the fun of ocean cruising, sixteenth-century style. A journey anticipated to take six months lasted more than a year. More than four hundred passengers and crew stewed in unsanitary conditions while the ship sat in doldrums off the coast of Guinea. Passengers afflicted with scurvy nursed bleeding gums and teetered on swollen legs, praying for relief from the sweltering equatorial sun-that is, until rain actually fell. Xavier's biographer stitched together correspondence from Xavier and others to describe what happened next:
The tropical showers brought no relief. The rainwater was lukewarm and toxic. If it was left standing for an hour before drinking, it swarmed with worms; if rain fell upon the hanging meat, it also began to crawl with life; if it fell upon clothes, they too became wormy and musty and began to rot if they were not immediately washed in sea water.-.-.-.
Food also became spoiled. Drinking water turned yellow and stank. It was so nauseating that one who drank it had to hold his nose and close his eyes or hold a cloth in front of his mouth, and yet it was still drunk in order to stifle the dreadful thirst that tormented all.4
Well, at least Xavier survived. That's about the best one can say about the journey, no small feat in an era when barely half the ships bound for Goa, India, safely completed the trip there and back.
