The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (30 page)

Paula agreed with Shelton’s warning against possessiveness, even—and she surprised me by saying this—in a marriage. She appreciated this in terms of Ignatian spirituality. “The Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises,” she said, “talks about not being attached to any one thing or person. And that includes your spouse.”

“When I first heard about being ‘detached’ from my husband, I thought it was ridiculous!” Paula explained. “But as I got older, I realized that as wonderful as the relationship is, it can’t be more important than my relationship with God, because one day it will end. You cannot be utterly dependent on anyone and look to only one person to fill all your needs. Because, eventually, they won’t be able to.” She often shares that insight with college students who are inclined to make their girlfriends or boyfriends the center of their lives.

Does putting God at the center mean that you have less love available for your spouse? “Oh no,” she said immediately. “If God is at the center, there’s always room for others. In fact, there’s more room.”

In his article Shelton noted that a good friend is also able to
share his true feelings
and listen to the other’s feelings, even when it may be uncomfortable. A good question to ask is,
Whom do I trust enough to freely share any negative feelings with?
In other words, with whom can I be honest?

That starts with being honest with yourself. One of my closest friends is George, who entered the novitiate the year before me. Today he is a prison chaplain in Boston. George offered some rich insights into how Ignatian spirituality can help with friendship.

“Since Ignatian spirituality helps us to be honest with ourselves, it also invites honesty in our relationships with friends,” said George. “My friends are those with whom I can be myself: they know my baggage and limitations. They also appreciate my strengths—perhaps more than I do. And when I think of the Ignatian idea of ‘sinners loved by God,’ it easily translates into ‘sinners loved by friends.’ ”

This means looking at both ourselves and our friends compassionately. “Having more compassion for myself,” says George, “allows me to have more compassion for friends.”

Like George, each of my friends made explicit connections between Ignatian spirituality and friendship. Bob is president of a Jesuit high school in Jersey City, New Jersey. He’s an excellent listener and, as a result, an excellent friend. Bob reflected on the link between friendship and the Ignatian understanding of desire.

“From an Ignatian standpoint, God interacts with a person on a direct basis,” Bob said. “And the way this often happens is through our friends. So friendship, in both its support and challenges, is one of the main ways we discover God. We discover who we are as loved individuals, and we discover that in our friends.”

That desire for friendship comes from God, he said. “It’s a desire to discover what’s going on with someone else. And it’s the desire for the infinite, which comes from God, and the desire to participate with the infinite, which is ultimately satisfied by God, who is our friend.”

One way Jesuits cultivate friendships is through a practice called “faith sharing.” The practice may provide hints about how you can build an honest relationship with your friends.

L
ISTEN
M
UCH

Every Sunday night in the novitiate our community gathered for “faith sharing,” which meant speaking to one another about our spiritual lives: where we had experienced God in our daily lives and what our prayer was like.

There were two rules. First, everything was confidential. Second, no comments were allowed after someone spoke, unless it was a question asked to clarify something.

The first rule made sense. The second seemed ridiculous. Early on, when people expressed their struggles, I wanted to say, “Why not try this?” If someone said he missed his old life, I wanted to say, “Me, too.” If someone talked about being lonely, I wanted to say, “Knock on my door.” I couldn’t understand why the novice director wanted us to be silent.

Gradually I realized: it was so we could listen.

Listening is a lost art. We
want
to listen, we want to
think
we’re listening, but we are often so busy planning what we’re going to say in response or what advice we’re going to give, that we fail to pay attention.

As Gerry, our novice director, explained, there was ample time in the novitiate to console, to counsel, and to advise. The practice echoed one of Ignatius’s lesser-known sayings: “Speak little, listen much.” We were also told that keeping everything strictly confidential made people feel more relaxed.

Gradually I grew to love faith sharing. When my fellow novices, as well as Gerry and his assistant, David, shared about how they had experienced God in the previous week, I was fascinated. What a wonder to see how complicated these men were and how much they were all trying to grow in holiness, trying to be better men, better Jesuits.

After a few weeks, I became not only amazed at how God was at work in their lives, but also more tolerant of their foibles. When one novice was short-tempered, I remembered that he had been dealing with a difficult situation in his family. When another was sullen, I remembered that he was dealing with an intractable problem in his ministry. The way they related to the world was colored by their own experience. It helped me to remember the Presupposition, and give them the benefit of the doubt.

My friend Chris is a Jesuit brother who worked for several years in the vocation office, helping to recruit and screen candidates to the Society of Jesus. Chris has a wide circle of friends—both Jesuit and otherwise. In our discussion on friendship and love he pointed out the value of listening, and he adverted to faith sharing.

“For a long time,” said Chris, “I’ve known that faith sharing is critical.” He offered an example why: “Early on, I lived with a Jesuit community member whom I found, well, difficult. Knowing his struggles from faith sharing was helpful because it is harder to dismiss or judge another person when you know he’s struggling.”

Listening attentively and compassionately to my fellow novices also helped me feel less crazy. Until then, I assumed that everyone led healthy and integrated lives. Except me—or so I thought. Faith sharing was the first time I grasped that everyone’s life is a full measure of joy and suffering. And that all of us are more complex than our surface appearance indicates.

Listening also made me better able to celebrate with my friends. When a novice who was having personal problems experienced some healing, I was more able to rejoice with him, since I knew what he had been through.

Most of us don’t have the time to do faith sharing, or any kind of sharing, with our friends for an hour every week.

But the concept may provide important lessons for developing loving relationships within families and maintaining good friendships. First, before you start to console or advise or sympathize, really listen. Second, try to listen without judging. Third, the more you know about your friend, the easier it will be to understand, sympathize, console, and even forgive your friend. Fourth, the more you can share honestly, the greater will be your ability to say challenging things. Fifth, the more you listen and understand his or her life, the more you will be able to celebrate with your friend over joys.

In these simple ways you will deepen your relationships, your conversations, and your compassion for your friends, and you’ll begin to develop real intimacy, where, as St. Francis de Sales says, “Heart speaks to heart.”

H
UMILITY AND
F
RIENDSHIP

James Keenan, S.J., a professor of moral theology, once wrote that compassion is the willingness to enter into the “chaos” of another person’s life. But even the best of friends sometimes avoid getting involved in the chaos of another life. You might feel overwhelmed by a friend’s problems or frustrated that you can’t fix or solve things for him or her. You might find yourself unconsciously pulling away from friends or family members who are facing job stress, marriage or relationship problems, serious illness, or even death. What happens when you feel you can’t help someone?

This is when you are often called not to do but to be. To remember that you are not all-powerful. Shortly after I entered the novitiate, for example, two friends of mine had an explosive argument and stopped talking with each other. I confessed to David, my spiritual director, how frustrated I felt that I wasn’t able to get them to reconcile. Consequently, I felt like a failure. And a bad Jesuit. It was driving me crazy.

“Shouldn’t a Jesuit be able to do all this?” I asked.

“Where did you get that idea from?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “that’s whatJesus would do.Jesus would help them to reconcile. Jesus would get them to talk to each other. Jesus would work until there was peace between them, right?”

“That’s true,” David said. “Jesus would probably be able to do all of that. But I have news for you, Jim. You’re not Jesus!”

We both laughed. Not because it was silly, but because it was true. In some of the most painful moments in the lives of friends and families—illness, divorce, death, worries about their children, financial problems—we usually cannot work miracles. Sometimes our efforts do effect change, but sometimes they do not.

Paradoxically, admitting your own powerlessness can free you from the need to fix everything and allow us to be truly present to the other person, and to listen. A cartoon in the
New Yorker
had one woman saying testily to her friend, “There’s no point in our being friends if you won’t let me fix you.”

Humility doesn’t apply just to the way you relate to your friends, but to
you
. Besides not being able to solve all of your friends’ problems (and recognizing that your friends won’t be able to solve yours), admitting your own shortcomings is critical if you want to nurture healthy relationships. In other words, you need to both apologize and forgive.

Over the years I’ve done many thoughtless things to people. I’ve gossiped about them, suspected the worst about them, and tried to manipulate them into doing what I wanted them to do. On these occasions I’ve found it necessary to seek forgiveness, something that is at the heart of the Christian message. Just as often, they have come to me to ask for forgiveness.

Sinfulness exists within any human setting, Jesuit communities included. So in any human setting, apology and forgiveness are always needed. Seeking forgiveness is difficult and, since it goes against our ego-driven desires to be right all the time, is always an exercise in humility.

Almost always people have forgiven me and the friendship has grown stronger. But on one or two occasions, the person has not. Here I find it helpful to pray for the person and always be open to reconciliation, but also remember, once again, that just as I cannot force another person to love or even like me, I cannot force another person’s forgiveness.

H
EALTHY
F
RIENDSHIPS

Let’s return to some of Father Shelton’s tips for healthy friendships and see if you can find insights for your own relationships with friends and family.

Without
honesty,
he says, a friendship will wither and die. William Barry provided a concise description of how this happens. “It’s difficult to be honest,” he told me recently, “but when something painful happens—for example, the other person is sick or dying, of if you’re angry for some reason—if you can’t talk about it you become more and more distant. And if there’s something that you’re holding onto, then eventually you can’t talk about anything. And pretty soon, you haven’t got a friend.”

Being
open to challenge,
Shelton notes, is not just something that we expect to do
for
our friends; it is something to expect
from
our friends. Can you accept the occasional challenge from your friends— that you have acted selfishly and may need to apologize from time to time?

“There are two difficulties in being honest,” my friend Chris said. “One is when you know your friend doesn’t want to hear something. The other is when
you
don’t want to say it—especially when you know you’re at fault. But it’s important to be humble about admitting our own wrongdoing or faults.”

Friends also
wish the good
of the other. That goes for members of the same family who want to love one another. Ignatius gave Francis Xavier the freedom to be the person he was called to be, even if it was half a world away from Ignatius. It also means celebrating the times when the other person does well or succeeds.

Jesuits can sometimes be competitive. In many instances this is a good thing: natural competitiveness spurs us to greater achievement. St. Ignatius Loyola, in effect, was being “competitive” with St. Francis and St. Dominic when he lay on his sick bed and thought, “What if I should do this which Saint Francis did and this which Saint Dominic did?” Without a healthy sense of competition in Ignatius, there would be no Society of Jesus. But as Ignatius grew older, he gave up the darker side of ambition and even wrote rules into the Jesuit
Constitutions
designed to limit and moderate unhealthy ambitions and competition among Jesuits.