The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (27 page)

So how can you love chastely in your own life?

Let me suggest five brief ways based on Ignatius’s dictum that love shows itself more in deeds.

First,
listen compassionately
. As I mentioned, my friend Bob (Holy Eagle with Gentle Voice) is a good listener. A few years ago, he helped me work through a difficult personal problem by listening first. But real listening is an art. Before Bob even said one word, he listened to my entire story, for almost an hour, with great concentration. Without true, compassionate, attentive listening the next steps—advice, counsel, comfort—will fail, because you haven’t taken the time to understand the other.

Compassionate listening is also an important way of making someone feel respected and loved. Often we are embarrassed by our problems, especially when we feel that we are in some way responsible for them. Having someone listen even to our most mortifying mistakes reminds us that we are loved in the midst of our struggles, which is always a welcome gift.

Listening in joyful times is important, too. Letting someone you love share good news with you—even if it relates to a part of her life that is unfamiliar to you—can magnify her own joy.

Second,
be present
. As Jesuit novices, when we were working as hospital chaplains we were taught that a “ministry of presence,” simply being with another person, is an important part of pastoral care. While there is often little that you can do for a sick person, you can be with him or her.

This is frequently the case when loved ones are going through a hard time: often, since we can’t solve their problems, the most loving thing we can do is just be with them. As Woody Allen said, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.” Something similar may hold true for chaste love. When Tim visited me every day during my long recuperation in Chicago, his quiet presence helped me on the road to recovery and did something else, too: it made me feel his affection more than any phone call or card could.

Third,
do something practical
. Sometimes, on the other hand, you need to
do
something beyond listening or being present. When Maddy went to Tanzania, she helped to build a school and teach young girls living in a remote area. When she came to our community in Nairobi, she cooked her famous Italian meals for us. She did something practical that helped people in a concrete way and in doing so expressed her love. Again: “Love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words.”

Here’s a good question to ask:
What active ways of chaste loving can be part of my life?
How about: Help your elderly mother clean her house. Drive a sick friend to the hospital. Babysit for a stressed young couple. Take a friend out to dinner even if it’s not her birthday or a special event. Write a letter to someone whom you know is lonely. Drop someone a note on his birthday and tell him why you value his friendship. These are all ways of loving.

Fourth,
love freely
. One of the hardest parts of love is this: allowing the other to love you as he or she can, not as you want to be loved. Have you ever caught yourself thinking that your beloved
should
do this or that? If she really loved me, you say, she would do this. We often expect the beloved to be completely focused on our needs. But your beloved may not be able to do precisely what you want. Now, in some marriages partners may have to ask each other to more closely attend to their needs. Still,
demanding
this (whether you say it aloud or just believe it) essentially takes away a person’s freedom. It can cheapen and even destroy loving relationships.

A few close friends of mine, for instance, aren’t very good at “keeping in touch.” They’ve always been that way—with me and others they love. It’s simply the way they are. Accepting them as they are means not only trusting in their love, but respecting how they choose to love.

Giving people the freedom to be who they are is a form of love. It says, “I love you for who you are, not for who I want you to be.” This reverences the person God created.

Fifth,
forgive
. Even those who love us most will occasionally hurt us. Perhaps they say something needlessly harsh, perhaps they disappoint us with a thoughtless action, perhaps they even betray us. Can you forgive them? Some of the unhappiest people I’ve ever met are those who refuse to forgive a spouse or a family member and find themselves trapped in a world of bitterness and recrimination.

Forgiveness releases the other from the trap of guilt and can also help to release you from your own anger. It is never easy, but in the end it is an act of love that heals both the forgiver and forgiven. That may be one reason why Jesus of Nazareth stressed it so often in his ministry of love.

Sixth,
pray
. Ask God to help those you love. Ask God to be close to them. Most of all, ask God to allow you to see others the way God does.

It may sound strange to hear these simple things described as acts of love. Yet they are ways of expressing love in a chaste way. And, by the way, like any act of real love, these actions can be difficult. “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky.

And when loving becomes hard, it helps to know that God desires for you to be loving and is always with you as you do so.

Such chaste ways of loving can help those who are not in a committed relationship and who fear they might not be able to live a loving life recognize that they can lead lives of love and intimacy. While their actions are not sexual, they can be among the most powerful signs of love that one can give.

Also, for those who feel trapped in relationships that seem to be
only
about sex, these insights about chastity remind us that love is much fuller than simply sexual intercourse, as wonderful as that is.

Finally, these insights can help those who are leading healthy and sexually fulfilled married lives by reminding them that love can take many forms. The insights of chastity can enrich all of us, whether or not we make a vow to live that way of life.

Now, you may have noticed that many of the things being said about love can be said about friendship. And here is another area where the experiences of the chaste person are useful for everyone. Because the one who lives his or her chastity in a healthy way in a religious community is also the one who deeply values friends.

Friendship is essential for the healthy Jesuit. And for the healthy single person. And for the healthy married person. For everyone. So let’s talk about an underappreciated part of the spiritual life: friendship.

S
OME PEOPLE CLING TO
the idea that being a member of a religious order means you don’t have to care about real-life human relationships. The thinking goes like this: since we spend all of our time in prayer, we never have to relate to any actual human beings and never have to deal with any interpersonal problems. And we’re thought to be solitary types unconcerned with something as commonplace as friends.

But overall, Jesuits have a lot of experience developing friendships. First, as chaste men, we cannot enjoy the intimate sexual relationships that married men and women can. So besides relying on our friendship with God, our families, and our communities, we count on the love of close friends, both men and women.

Second, Jesuits move around frequently, sent from job to job, and place to place. Over the course of the past twenty years as a Jesuit, I’ve lived in Boston, Jamaica, New York, Boston again, Chicago, Nairobi, New York again, Boston again, and New York again. Each move meant discovering and rediscovering friends. Despite stereotypes people have about celibacy, Jesuits have to grow in the ability to make and keep close friendships. And we value them greatly.

Single, divorced, and widowed people know about this. A single friend of mine was once asked by her company to move far away. Her manager said, “You’re single. You don’t have any kids. Moving will be easy for you.” But precisely since she didn’t have a husband or children as a built-in and portable support system, she didn’t want to leave, because she would be leaving her
only
supports behind—her friends. They were her primary source of love and affection.

Another stereotype is that we Jesuits don’t know much about human relationships since we’re so “Christian.” My brother-in-law once said, “It must be nice to live in a place where no one argues.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “isn’t it sort of illegal for Jesuits not to be nice to one another?”

That sums up the common thinking about religious communities: they’re full of holy people who always get along. To that I say, “Ha!”

So the third reason we have become proficient in friendship is that living in a religious order means living with actual human beings who have competing interests and strong opinions. Over time you become adept at dealing with various kinds of personalities. Until my brother-in-law got to know some real-life Jesuits, he remained convinced of our superhuman goodness.

S
UNTNE
A
NGELI
?

It reminded me of a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the American Jesuits in the 1860s who were planning a new theology school for young Jesuits in rural Maryland, in a town called Woodstock. Huge numbers of men were then entering seminaries and religious orders, so the building would have to be vast.

The Jesuit provincial worked diligently with architects to draw up plans for the complex, with hundreds of rooms for the Jesuit priests, brothers, and scholastics (those in training); classrooms; an immense dining room; and an ornate chapel. No detail was left out. After poring over the blueprints, the provincial mailed the plans to the Jesuit headquarters in Rome.

A few months later the drawings were returned with a single Latin phrase scrawled on the bottom of the blueprints:
Suntne angeli?

Which means, “Are they angels?”

The architects had left out the bathrooms.

No, we are not angels. And that extends beyond our use of bathrooms. We can be short-tempered, shortsighted, and just plain short with one another. (As an aside, the architect quickly tacked on two tall towers for the bathrooms. Years later, a visiting nun wrote a poem that praised the Jesuits’ doing their thinking “in the white towers,” which was probably true.)

Jesuit community is a great blessing. The men with whom I’ve lived for the past twenty-one years are joyful, prayerful, and hard-working—and so different from one another. As the saying goes, “If you’ve met one Jesuit, you’ve met one Jesuit!” One friend is a gerontologist who enjoys fly-fishing. Another is a prison chaplain who keeps pet ferrets. Another is a former political consultant who sings in piano bars. All enrich my life with their insights, inspire me with their faith, and challenge me to become a better person. After twenty-one years as a Jesuit, I couldn’t imagine my life without my Jesuit friends. Whenever I think of Jesus’ promise to his disciples that anyone who follows him will receive a “hundredfold” of whatever he has given up, I think of my Jesuit friends.

But community life can be a challenge. One Jesuit thinks we aren’t living simply enough. Another thinks we’re living too simply. One thinks that if you find someone’s wet clothes in the community washing machine, you should put them in the dryer. That’s common courtesy, he says. Another is angry when you do just that with his clothes: “You’ve shrunk my cotton shirts!”

More seriously, as in any human environment, resentments creep into communities, grudges intensify, and relationships become cold. One friend joked that his friends used to speak of the “Ice House,” the fictional Jesuit residence for the coldest men of the province. “But we always debated,” he said. “Who would be the superior? Who was the coldest?”

The seventeenth-century Jesuit saint John Berchmans, who died at age twenty-two, before finishing his Jesuit training, said,
Vita communis est mea maximapenitentia
. Some Jesuits translate that as “The
common life
is my greatest penance.” That is, the common life of all men and women is difficult enough. But most Jesuits believe it’s more accurately translated as, “Life
in community
is my greatest penance.” (On the other hand, as Avery Cardinal Dulles once remarked about Berchmans, “I wonder what the community thought of
him!
”)

Like any group—a family, a business, a parish—a Jesuit community can be the source of both joy and grief. Living peacefully with others and maintaining healthy friendships requires a great deal of love, patience, and wisdom.

But that’s a challenge for everyone—not just Jesuits. All of us are called to live compassionately with one another and maintain healthy friendships with love, patience, and wisdom. None of us are angels.

So given our common desires for love and friendship, and our common human shortcomings, what does the way of Ignatius and the traditions of the Jesuits say about love, friendship, and human relationships?

T
HE
P
RESUPPOSITION

The Spiritual Exercises
begins with good advice. In what he calls his Presupposition, Ignatius says that we “ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it.”

Always give people the benefit of the doubt. What’s more, says Ignatius, if you’re not sure what a person means, you should, says Ignatius, “ask how the other means it.” Ignatius placed that crucial advice at the beginning of the Exercises to ensure that both the spiritual director and the retreatant don’t misunderstand each other. Each presupposes that the other is trying to do his or her best.

This wisdom is applicable not simply for spiritual direction. It’s a key insight for healthy relationships within families, in the workplace, and among friends. And while most people would agree with it, in principle, we often do just the opposite. We expect others to judge us according to our
intentions,
but we judge others according to their
actions
.

In other words, we say to ourselves,
My intention was good. Why don’t they see this?
But when it comes to other people, we often fail to give them the benefit of the doubt. We say, “Look what they did!”

The Presupposition helps us remember the other person’s intention, which helps ground relationships in openness. You approach every interaction with an open mind and heart by presuming—even when it’s hard to do so—that the other person is doing his or her best and isn’t out to get you.

The Presupposition also helps to release you from grudges and resentments. It makes it less likely that you will approach a thorny relationship in terms of a battle. Rather than steeling yourself for another confrontation with your enemy, which takes a great deal of energy, you can relax.

Sometimes the other person
is
out to get you—for example, in a contentious office environment. Few people are
angeli
. But that doesn’t mean human interactions should be approached as battles. Instead of preparing for war, you can set aside your armor. This may help the other person feel better able to deal with
you
—because most likely you are part of the problem. The Presupposition steers you away from anger and so provides the other person with the emotional space needed to meet you on more peaceful territory. It may even invite him or her to change.

My mother once told me that at her local supermarket worked a checkout clerk who had a “mean look and a grumpy disposition.” None of the other clerks liked her. My mother remembered something her own mother had told her, another version of the Presupposition: “Be kind to everyone, because you never know what problems they have at home.” So my mother decided to shower the grumpy clerk with kindness and made it a point to talk with her whenever she could. In time, the woman softened. “I discovered,” said my mother, “that her mother, whom she cared for, was ill and that she herself had neck problems after a car accident.” You never know what problems people might have.

The Presupposition also helps
you
stay open to change, growth, and forgiveness. Peter Favre, one of the first Jesuits, spent many years interacting with the new Christian denominations of his age. In that era Catholics and Protestants were intensely suspicious of one another. For many Protestants, Catholics were “papists,” Rome was “Babylon,” and the pope was the “Antichrist.” For Catholics, Protestants were simply heretics.

Favre adamantly refused to let those beliefs close his heart, which was extraordinary for the time. “Remember,” he wrote to a Jesuit asking for advice, “if we want to be of help to them, we must be careful to regard them with love, to love them in deed and in truth, and to banish from our souls anything that might lessen our love and esteem for them.” That is an astonishing comment in an era of bad feelings.

My favorite quote from Favre on the matter is even simpler: “Take care, take care never to shut your heart against anyone.”

Openness will not cure every relationship, but it can provide an opening for change, and it certainly won’t make things any worse. The Presupposition can make healthy relationships healthier and unhealthy relationships less unhealthy.

I
GNATIUS AND
H
IS
F
RIENDS

With his prodigious talent for friendship, Ignatius enjoyed close relations with a large circle of friends. (That is one reason for his enthusiasm for writing letters.) Indeed, the earliest way that Ignatius referred to the early Jesuits was not with phrases like “Defenders of the Faith” or “Soldiers of Christ,” but something simpler. He described his little band as “Friends in the Lord.”

Friendship was an essential part of his life. Two of his closest friends were his college roommates, Peter Favre, from the Savoy region of France, and Francisco de Javier, the Spaniard later known as St. Francis Xavier.

The three met at the Collège Sainte-Barbe at the University of Paris, then Europe’s leading university, in 1529. By the time they met Ignatius, Peter and Francis were already fast friends who shared lodgings. The two had studied for the previous few years for their master’s degrees; both were excellent students. And both had heard stories about Ignatius before meeting him: the former soldier was a notorious figure on campus, known for his intense spiritual discipline and habit of begging alms. At thirty-eight, Ignatius was much older than Peter and Francis, who were both twenty-three at the time. And Ignatius’s path to the university was more circuitous. After his soldiering career, his recuperation, and his conversion, he had spent months in prayer trying to discern what to do with his life.

Ultimately, he decided that an education was required. So Ignatius went to school, taking elementary grammar lessons with young boys and, later, studying at the universities of Alcalá and Salamanca. His studies provide us with one of the more remarkable portraits of his newfound humility: the once-proud soldier squeezed into a too-small desk beside young boys in the classroom, making up for lost time.

Several years later, he enrolled at the University of Paris, where he met Favre and Xavier. There, in Favre’s words, the three shared “the same room, the same table and the same purse.”

Ignatius’s commitment to a simple life impressed his new friends. So did his spiritual acumen. For Favre, a man troubled all his life by a “scrupulous” conscience, that is, an excessive self-criticism, Ignatius was a literal godsend. “He gave me an understanding of my conscience,” wrote Favre. Ultimately, Ignatius led Peter through the Spiritual Exercises, something that dramatically altered Favre’s worldview.

This happened despite their very different backgrounds. And here is one area where Ignatius and his friends highlight an insight on relationships: friends need not be cut from the same cloth. The friend with whom you have the least in common may be the most helpful for your personal growth. Ignatius and Peter had, until they met, led radically different lives. Peter came to Paris at age nineteen after what his biographer called his “humble birth,” having spent his youth in the fields as a shepherd. Imbued with a simple piety toward Mary, the saints, relics, processions, and shrines, and also angels, Peter clung to the simple faith of his childhood. Ignatius, on the other hand, had spent many years as a courtier and some of them as a soldier, undergone a dramatic conversion, subjected himself to extreme penances, and wandered to Rome and the Holy Land in pursuit of his goal of following God’s will.