The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (10 page)

“Yes,” she said. “Dying is about becoming more human.”

Her insight was true in at least two ways. First, becoming more human for my father meant recognizing his inborn connection to God. All of us are connected to God, though we may ignore it, or deny it, or reject it during our lives. But with my father’s defenses completely lowered, God was able to meet him in new ways. Whatever barriers that had kept God at a distance no longer existed.

This, not desperation, is why there are so many profound spiritual experiences near death. The person is better able to allow God to break through.

But there is a second way that Sister Janice’s insight made sense. My father was becoming more human because he was becoming more loving. Drawing closer to God transforms us, since the more time we spend with someone we love, the more we become like the object of our love. Paradoxically, the more human we become, the more divine we become.

This is not to say that God desires for us to suffer. Rather, when our defenses fall, our ultimate connection is revealed. Thus, vulnerability is another way in which we can experience our desire for God.

T
HESE EXPERIENCES, WHICH MANY
of us have had—feelings of incompletion, common longings and connections, uncommon longings, exaltation, clarity, desires to follow, desires for holiness, and vulnerability—are all ways of becoming aware of our innate desire for God.

Anyone, at any time, in any of these ways, can become aware of his or her desire for God. Moreover, finding God and being found by God are the same, since those expressions of desire have God both as their source and goal.

Thus, the beginning of the path to God is trusting not only that these desires are placed within us by God, but that God seeks us in the same way we seek God.

That’s another wonderful image of God: the Seeker. In the New Testament, Jesus often used this image (see Luke 15:3–10). He compared God to the shepherd who loses one sheep out of one hundred, and leaves the other ninety-nine behind to find the one lost. Or the woman who loses a coin and sweeps her entire house in order to find it. This is the seeking God.

But my favorite image is one from the Islamic tradition, which depicts God as seeking us more than we seek God. It is a
hadith qudsi,
which Muslim scholars translate as a divine saying revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad. “And if [my servant] draws nearer to me by a handsbreadth, I draw nearer to him by an arms-length; and if he draws nearer to me by an armslength, I draw nearer to him by a fathom; and if he comes to me walking, I come to him running.”

God wants to be with you. God desires to be with you. What’s more, God desires a relationship with you.

G
OD
M
EETS
Y
OU
W
HERE
Y
OU
A
RE

When I entered the Jesuit novitiate, I was baffled about what it meant to have a “relationship” with God. We novices heard about that quite frequently. But what was I supposed to
do
to relate to God? What did that mean?

My biggest misconception was that I would have to change before approaching God. Like many beginners in the spiritual life, I felt I wasn’t worthy to approach God. So I felt foolish trying to pray. I confessed this to David Donovan. “What do I need to do before I can relate to God?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “God meets you where you are.”

That was a liberating insight. Even though God is always calling us to constant conversion and growth, and even though we are imperfect and sometimes sinful people, God loves us as we are
now
. As the Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello said, “You don’t have to change for God to love you.” This is one of the main insights of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: you are loved even in your imperfections. God
already
loves you.

The Christian can see this clearly in the New Testament. Jesus often calls people to conversion, to cease sinning, to change their lives, but he doesn’t wait until they have done so before meeting them. He enters in relationship with them as he finds them. He meets them where they are and as they are.

But there is another way of understanding this. Not only does God desire to be in relationship with you now, but God’s way of relating with you often depends on where you are in your life.

So if you find happiness primarily through relationships, this may be how God wants to meet you. Look for God through friendship. If you are a parent, God may meet you through your son or daughter (or grandson or granddaughter). Just the other day a man told me that he was having a hard time being grateful. When I asked where he most found God, his face immediately brightened and he said, “My children!” It was easy for him to find God once he knew where to look.

Do you find joy through nature? Look for God in the sea, the sky, the woods, and the fields and streams. Do you engage the world through action? Look for God in your work. Do you enjoy the arts? Go to a museum, or to a concert, or to the movies, and seek God there.

God can meet us anywhere. One of my closest Jesuit friends is a prison chaplain named George, who has recently started giving the Spiritual Exercises to inmates in a Boston jail. Not long ago, one inmate told George that he was about to punch a guy in the face, when he suddenly felt God was giving him “some time” to reconsider. He decided against violence. Here was God meeting an inmate in his prison cell.

God also meets you in ways that you can
understand,
in ways that are meaningful to you. Sometimes God meets you in ways like those I’ve just described, and sometimes in a manner that is so personal, so tailored to the unique circumstances of your life, that it is nearly impossible to explain to others.

One of my favorite instances of this in fiction comes from Gustave Flaubert’s luminous short story, “A Simple Heart,” written in 1877, which tells the tale of a poor servant named Félicité.

For many years Félicité, a goodhearted young woman, patiently bears up under her grim employer, the imperious Madame Aubain. At one point in the story, Madame Aubain gives her hardworking maid a brightly colored parrot named Loulou, really the only extraordinary thing that Félicité has ever owned. (This is the eponymous bird in
Flaubert’s Parrot,
by Julian Barnes, the English author who “misses God.”)

Then disaster strikes: her beloved Loulou dies. In desperation, Félicité sends the bird to a taxidermist, who stuffs him. When it is returned, Félicité sets it atop a large wardrobe with other holy relics that she keeps. “Every morning,” writes Flaubert, “as she awoke she saw him by the first light of day, and then would recall the days gone by and the smallest details of unimportant events, without sorrow, quite serenely.”

After her mistress dies, Félicité grows old and retreats into a simple life of piety.

“Many years passed,” writes Flaubert.

Finally, at the moment of her own death, Félicité is given a strange and beautiful vision: “When she breathed her last breath she thought she saw, as the heavens opened, a gigantic parrot, hovering over her head.”

God comes to us in ways we can understand.

Let me give you an example of this from my own life: At one point during my Jesuit training I spent two years in Nairobi, Kenya, working with the Jesuit Refugee Service. There I helped East African refugees who had settled in the city start small businesses to support themselves. At the beginning of my stay, cut off from friends and family in the States, I felt a crushing loneliness. After a few months of hard work, I also came down with mononucleosis, which meant two whole months of recuperation. It was a trying time.

Happily, I worked with some generous people, including Uta, a German laywoman with extensive experience in refugee work in Southeast Asia. After I had recovered from my illness, our work flourished: over time Uta and I would help refugees set up some twenty businesses, including tailoring shops, several small restaurants, a bakery, and even a little chicken farm. Together we also founded a small shop that sold the refugee handicrafts, located in a sprawling slum in Nairobi.

It was a remarkable turnaround—from lying on my bed, exhausted, wondering why I had come there, anguished that I would have to return home, puzzled over what I could accomplish, to busily working with refugees from all over East Africa, managing a shop buzzing with activity, and realizing that this was the happiest and freest I had ever felt. Many days were difficult. But many days I thought,
I can’t believe how much I love this work!

One day I was walking home from our little shop. The long brown path started at a nearby church, on the edge of the slum, which was perched on a hill that overlooked a broad valley. From there the bumpy path descended through a thicket of floppy-leaved banana trees, thick ficus trees, orange day lilies, tall cow grass, and corn fields. On the way into the valley I passed people silently working on their plots of land, who looked up and called out to me as I passed. Brilliantly colored iridescent sunbirds sang from the tips of tall grasses. At the bottom of the valley was a little river, and I crossed a flimsy bridge to get to the other side.

When I climbed the opposite side of the hill, I turned to look back. Though it was around five in the afternoon, the equatorial sun blazed down on the green valley, illuminating the long brown path, the tiny river, the people, the banana trees, the flowers, the grass.

Quite suddenly I was overwhelmed with happiness.
I’m happy to be here,
I thought. After the loneliness, the sickness, and the struggles, I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

It was a surprising experience. Here was God speaking to me where I was—physically, emotionally, and intellectually—and offering what I needed on that day.

Was it clarity? Uncommon longing? Common longing? Exaltation? Hard to say. Maybe all of those things. But it was especially meaningful to where I was at the time.

God speaks to us in ways we can understand. God began to communicate with Ignatius during his recuperation, when he was vulnerable and more open to listening. With me, on that day in Nairobi, God spoke to me through the view of that little valley.

God can also meet you at any
time,
no matter how crazy things may seem. You don’t have to have a perfectly organized daily life to experience God. Your spiritual house does not need to be tidy for God to enter.

In the Gospels, Jesus often meets people in the midst of their busy lives: Peter mending his nets by the seashore, Matthew sitting at his tax collector’s booth. Just as often he encounters people when they’re at their absolute worst: an adulterous woman about to be stoned, a woman who has been sick for many years, a possessed man not even in his right mind. In each of these situations God said to these people, busy, stressed out, worried, frightened,
“I’m ready to meet you, if you’re ready to meet me.”

If God meets you where you are, then where you are is a place to meet God. You don’t have to wait until your life settles down, or the kids move out of the house, or you’ve found that perfect apartment, or you recover from that long illness. You don’t have to wait until you’ve overcome your sinful patterns, or you’re more “religious” or you can pray “better.”

You don’t have to wait for any of that.

Because God is ready now.

F
OR
I
GNATIUS AND HIS
friends, finding God often meant noticing where God was already active in their lives. And we can notice God not only in peak moments, like the ones we just discussed, but also in daily events where God’s presence is often overlooked. God is always inviting us to encounter the transcendent in the everyday. The key is noticing.

This insight—that finding God is about noticing—helps the seeker in two ways. First, it makes the quest straightforward. As I mentioned, Walter Burghardt, S.J., defined prayer as “a long, loving look at the real.” Contemplating the real, rather than trying to grasp an abstract concept like the transcendence of God, or trying to puzzle out a complicated philosophical proof, is an easier place for most people to start.

This is not to deny the appeal of the intellectual path. In his book
A Testimonial to Grace,
first published in 1946, Avery Cardinal Dulles, a distinguished theologian and the first American Jesuit named a cardinal, wrote that his own religious awakening was encouraged by Greek philosophy, which helped him to see the world as an ordered whole. “The Platonic ideal of virtue,” he wrote, “had enormous consequences in my personal philosophy.”

Still, this most rational of men was finally moved to recognize God when he linked the philosophical idea of God with the natural world. His epiphany came as an undergraduate at Harvard, while he was walking along the Charles River in Cambridge and spied something more commonplace than a philosophical proof—a “young tree.”

“That law came from God,” wrote Dulles, “a Person of Whom I had no previous intuition.”

That brings us to the second reason for the importance of noticing, like Avery Dulles’s awareness of that tree. Noticing helps you realize that your life is already suffused with the presence of God. Once you begin to look around and allow yourself to take a chance to believe in God, you will easily see God at work in your life.

At this point you might be saying, “That’s fine. But how do I
do
this?” Here’s where the way of Ignatius can help.

T
HE
E
XAMEN

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius includes a prayer designed to enable believers to find God in their lives. (Actually, it’s more accurate to say that he popularized the prayer, since versions of it had been around for some time.) He called it the “examination of conscience.” And he used to say that it was so important that even if Jesuits neglected all other forms of prayer in their day, they should never neglect this one.

The prayer goes by many names today. The Jesuit George Aschenbrenner, a spiritual director and writer, popularized the term “examination of consciousness” or “consciousness examination,” since he feels that the English word “conscience” has “narrow moralistic overtones” that push people to focus primarily on their sinfulness. (In other languages, like Spanish and Italian, that single word expresses both meanings: conscience and consciousness.) Many Jesuits refer to the prayer by its original Spanish name—the
examen
. English-speaking Jesuits pronounce it “examine.” Which is not such a bad way of thinking about it. Because what you’re doing is examining your day for signs of God’s presence.

The examen is a simple prayer with five easy steps.

It can be done once a day (usually before going to bed) or twice (usually during midday and evening). Here’s how it goes:

As with every prayer, you prepare by asking for God’s
grace
. It’s a way of consciously inviting God to be with you and reminding yourself that you are in God’s presence.

The traditional first step is
gratitude
. You recall the good things that happened to you during the day, and you give thanks for any “benefits,” as Ignatius wrote. This is an essential step. As David Fleming, S.J., an expert on spirituality, recently wrote me in a letter, “Ignatius saw the examen as prayer, not just focused on the person, but as directed to God. That’s why the examen begins with thanks to God, establishing the focus. It’s not simply self-examination or dreamy introspection, it is a way of prayer, a way of being with God.”

Ignatius meant “benefits” in the broadest possible sense. Obvious things would include any good news, a tender moment with a spouse, finishing an important project at work. But also less-obvious things: the surprising sight of sunlight on the pavement in the middle of a bleak midwinter’s day, the taste of a ham-and-cheese sandwich you had for lunch, satisfaction at the end of a tiring day spent caring for your children.

For Ignatius many things—no matter how seemingly inconsequential—are occasions for gratitude. You recall them and you “relish” or “savor” them, as he would say.

Savoring is an antidote to our increasingly rushed lives. We live in a busy world, with an emphasis on speed, efficiency, and productivity, and we often find ourselves hurriedly moving on to the next task at hand. Life becomes an endless series of tasks, and our day becomes a compendium of to-do lists. We become “human doings” instead of “human beings.”

Savoring slows us down. In the examen we don’t recall an important experience simply to add it to a list of things that we’ve seen or done; rather, we savor it as if it were a satisfying meal. We pause to enjoy what has happened. It’s a deepening of our gratitude to God, revealing the hidden joys of our days. As Anthony de Mello said, “You sanctify whatever you are grateful for.”

The second step in the examen is asking for the
grace to “know my sins,”
to see where you have turned away from the deepest part of yourself, the part that calls you to God. Where did you act contrary to your better judgment or to God’s voice inside you, to the divine spark within? Perhaps during a mean-spirited conversation about a coworker you contributed your own snotty remark. Perhaps you treated someone in your family or at work without the respect everyone deserves. Perhaps you ignored someone who was truly in need.

Reflecting on your sinfulness sounds like an unhealthy outgrowth of the stereotypical Catholic emphasis on guilt. But today guilt may be undervalued. The voice of our conscience, which tells us we did something wrong and moves us to make amends, is a voice that can lead us to become more loving and, ultimately, happier. In his diaries, Peter Favre, one of the early Jesuits, when speaking about his sins, calls it a “certain good spirit” that moves him to remorse.

When thinking about your sins, you might consider a helpful idea from my moral theology professor, James F. Keenan, S.J.

Father Keenan observed that, in the New Testament, when Jesus condemns people for sinful behavior, he typically does not condemn weak people who are trying to do better, that is, public sinners struggling to make amends. Time and again Jesus reaches out to people who are ready to change and invites them to conversion.

More often, Jesus condemns the “strong” who could help if they wanted, but don’t bother to do so. In the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, those who pass by the poor man along the road are fully able to help him, but simply don’t bother. Sin, in Father Keenan’s words, is often a “failure to bother.”

This insight can help you see where you failed to respond to God’s invitation in your day. Where did you fail to bother? Where could you have been more loving? Perhaps you neglected to help a friend who needed just a few minutes of your time, or a sick relative hoping for a friendly phone call. You could have, but you didn’t—you failed to bother. This is a new way of meditating on what theologians call “sins of omission.”

Does reviewing your sins still seem a manifestation of the worst stereotypes of Christianity? Well, an admission of our own sinfulness, or our inability to do what is right, helps not only to move us closer to God, but also to become more loving people. We are also able to see more clearly our
need
for God, who invites us to grow in love, no matter how many times we take a step backward. This second step of the examen reminds us of our humility. We become more aware of the way that we hurt others and can move away from those parts of ourselves that prevent others from loving us back.

That is, as long as you don’t get mired in guilt. An awareness of your sins can be an invitation to growth but also a trap. Sometimes guilt mistakenly leads a person to believe either that he cannot be forgiven by God or that sinfulness makes him worthless. This leads to despair, a sure sign of moving away from God. All of us struggle with sin, all of us must seek forgiveness from God and others, yet all of us are still loved by God—more than we can ever imagine. Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32), where the father not only forgives the wayward son but lavishes him with love, captures some of this insight, expressed in Ignatian spirituality as the “loved sinner.” Guilt is a means to an end, not the end of the story.

Awareness of one’s sinfulness is important for spiritual growth. This is why Anthony de Mello wrote, “Be grateful for your sins. They are carriers of grace.”

The traditional third part of the examen is the heart of the prayer, a
review of your day
. Basically you ask, “What happened today?” Think of it as a movie playing in your head. Push the Play button and run through your day, from start to finish, from your rising in the morning to preparing to go to bed at night. Notice what made you happy, what made you stressed, what confused you, what helped you be more loving. Recall everything: sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, textures, conversations. Thoughts, words, and deeds, as Ignatius says. Each moment offers a window into where God has been in your day.

Now you may say, “I already
know
what happened today!” But without the discipline of the examen you could miss it. That’s something I learned, in a very surprising way, during my philosophy studies in Chicago.

When my Jesuit brothers and I were in the midst of our philosophy studies, after our time as novices, we were also expected to do ministry. Though our superiors instructed us that our primary work was studying philosophy, we were not to lose touch with the outside world or to forget that our studies had a practical end, the end to which Ignatius geared his studies: to help souls.

During my first year of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago I worked in an outreach program for members of street gangs in the inner city. During my second year, I was assigned to a community center in a lower-middle-class neighborhood near our Jesuit residence. Using my business experience, I helped unemployed men and women with the ins and outs of finding a job: writing résumés, learning how to track down job openings, and preparing for interviews.

After the challenges of working with the street gangs, working at the community center seemed comparatively easy. And more physically comfortable: working with gang members meant standing outside of public housing projects and speaking with them during Chicago winters, when the bitterly cold Lake Michigan wind cut through however many layers of clothing I wore. At least the Howard Area Community Center had heat.

But where the gang ministry was exciting, this work seemed more prosaic. And it didn’t feel particularly Christian. Where was God? I enjoyed the friendly staff at the community center, and I enjoyed meeting the unemployed men and women, who seemed interested in what I was teaching them. But the work itself seemed dull. On top of that, the clients were having a hard time finding jobs. I felt bored and unsuccessful at the same time.

One woman, whom I’ll call Wanda, embodied this. Wanda was overweight and unkempt (neither surprising, given her limited finances) and had faced an unbroken string of bad breaks. Her education consisted mainly of high school and a desultory few months at a local community college.

Out of work for several months, Wanda was desperate for a job; this drew her to the community center. We met several times, and together we crafted a résumé that highlighted her skills, pored through the newspaper want ads, and ran through some practice interviews.

But no matter how hard we worked, Wanda never found a job, and I began to feel frustrated working with her.

One day, I confessed this to my Jesuit spiritual director, named Dick, a cheerful middle-aged priest with a great deal of experience in Ignatian spirituality. As with many spiritual directors, you felt that you could tell Dick anything. And he knew when you
weren’t
telling him everything.

“Is your ministry coming up in your examen much?” he asked.

It wasn’t. Since my primary work was studying, I said, I was more focused on that. In my examen, I would carefully review what experiences I had in my classes, during my study time, and over lunch and dinner with my Jesuit friends in community. The work with Wanda and the other clients was an afterthought. Or not even a thought at all.