The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life

by James Martin

Jesuits take their cue from Ignatius in terms of a practical spirituality. One joke has a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit celebrating Mass together when the lights suddenly go out in the church. The Franciscan praises the chance to live more simply. The Dominican gives a learned homily on how God brings light to the world. The Jesuit goes to the basement to fix the fuses.

FOUR WAYS

the first thing out of their mouths would most likely be finding God in all things.

After “finding God in all things,” the second answer you would probably get from those five hypothetical Jesuits is that Ignatian spirituality is about being a contemplative in action.

The third way of understanding the way of Ignatius is as an incarnational spirituality.

long, loving look at the real.” Incarnational spirituality is about the real.

That’s why Ignatius counseled people to avoid disordered affections. They block the path to detachment, to growing more in freedom, growing as a person, and growing closer to God. If that sounds surprisingly Buddhist, it is: that particular goal has long been a part of many spiritual traditions. So if anyone asks you to define Ignatian spirituality in a few words, you could say that it is: 1. Finding God in all things 2. Becoming a contemplative in action 3. Looking at the world in an incarnational way 4. Seeking freedom and detachment

Even the aspects of ourselves that we consider worthless, or sinful, can be made worthwhile and holy. As the proverb has it, God writes straight with crooked lines.

This was such that in the whole course of his life, through sixty-two years, even if he gathered up all the many helps he had had from God and all the many things he knew and added them together, he does not think they would amount to as much as he received at that one time.

The founder of the Society of Jesus was ambitious, hardworking, and practical. “Saint Ignatius was a mystic,” wrote William James, the American philosopher, “but his mysticism made him one of the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived.”

But Ignatius knew that God meets people where they are. We’re all at different points on our paths to God.

To use one of Ignatius’s favorite expressions, his path is “a way of proceeding” along the way to God.

Overall, don’t worry if you don’t feel close to God at the moment. Or if you’ve never felt close to God. Or if you have doubts about God’s existence. Or even if you’re reasonably sure that God doesn’t exist at all. Just keep reading. God will take care of the rest.

Since the Ignatian way is founded on the belief that there is a God and that God desires to be in relationship with us, it’s important to think about God first.

As the Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley once wrote, sometimes the question is not why so many Catholics leave the church—it’s why they stay.

It’s a healthy tension: the wisdom of our religious traditions provides us with a corrective for our propensity to think that we have all the answers; and prophetic individuals moderate the natural propensity of institutions to resist change and growth. As with many aspects of the spiritual life, you need to find life in the tension.

God of Surprises, which I first encountered in the novitiate. My own idea of God at the time was limited to God the Far-Away One, so it was liberating to hear about a God who surprises, who waits for us with wonderful things. It’s a playful, even fun, image of God. But I would have never come up with it on my own. It came to me from David Donovan, my spiritual director, who had read it in a book of that same title, by an English Jesuit named Gerard W. Hughes, who borrowed it from an essay by the German Jesuit Karl Rahner.

Here is where we can turn to an important insight of Ignatius: God can speak directly with people in astonishingly personal ways. This can lead even the doubtful and confused and lost to God. The key, the leap of faith required, is believing that these intimate experiences are ways God communicates with you.

In other words, the beginning of the path to finding God is awareness. Not simply awareness of the ways that you can find God, but an awareness that God desires to find you.

Yet there was a difference. When he was thinking about the things of the world, he took much delight in them, and afterwards, when he was tired and put them aside, he found that he was dry and discontented. But when he thought of going to Jerusalem, barefoot and eating nothing but herbs and undergoing all the things that the saints endured, not only was he consoled when he had these thoughts, but even after putting them aside, he remained content and happy.

He did not notice this, however; nor did he stop to ponder the difference until one day his eyes were opened a little, and he began to marvel at the difference, realizing from experience that some thoughts left him sad and others happy. Little by little he came to recognize the difference between the spirits that agitated him, one from the enemy and one from God.

Many of us have had the feeling that, even though we have had some success and happiness, there is something missing in life. Way back in the 1960s Peggy Lee sang “Is That All There Is?” In the 1980s, U2 sang “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” We all feel that restlessness, the nagging feeling that there must be something more to life than our day-to-day existence.

Yet no matter how happy our lives are, part of this restlessness never goes away; in fact, it provides a glimpse of our longing for God. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” as Augustine wrote, 1,500 years before Peggy Lee and Bono. This longing is a sign of the longing of the human heart for God. It is one of the most profound ways that God has of calling us. In the echoes of our restlessness we hear God’s voice.

Sometimes those feelings are stronger than simple incompletion and feel more like an awful emptiness. One writer called this emptiness within our hearts the “God-shaped hole,” the space that only God can fill. Some people try to fill that hole with money, status, or power. They think: If only I had more I would be happy. A better job. A nicer house. Yet even after acquiring these things, people may still feel incomplete, as if they’re chasing something they can never catch. They race ahead, straining to reach the goal of fulfillment, yet it always seems tantalizingly out of reach. The prize of wholeness is elusive. Emptiness remains.

Somewhere deep in our hearts we already know that success, fame, influence, power, and money do not give us the inner joy and peace we crave. Somewhere we can even sense a certain envy of those who have shed all false ambitions and found a deeper fulfillment in their relationship with God. Yes, somewhere we can even get a taste of that mysterious joy in the smile of those who have nothing to lose.

This hole in our hearts is the space from which we call to God. It is the space where God wants most to meet us. Our longing to fill that space comes from God. And it is the space that only God can begin to fill.

Common longings and heartfelt connections are ways of becoming conscious of the desire for God.

Many of us have had experiences like this. We feel that we are standing on the brink of something important, on the edge of experiencing something just beyond us. We experience wonder. So why don’t you hear more about these times? Because many times we ignore them, reject them, or deny them. We chalk them up to being overwhelmed, overwrought, overly emotional. “Oh, I was just being silly!” you might say to yourself. Or we are not encouraged or invited to talk about them as spiritual experiences. So you disregard that longing you feel when the first breath of a spring breeze caresses your face after a long dark winter, because you tell yourself (or others tell you) that you were simply being emotional. This happens even to those practiced in the spiritual life: often, after an intense experience in prayer during a retreat, people are tempted to dismiss it as simply something that “just happened.” Or we simply don’t recognize these moments as possibly having their origins in God.

Mike said that our search for God is often like Naaman’s. We’re searching for something spectacular to convince us of God’s presence. Yet it is in the simple things, common events and common longings, where God may be found.

You may also fear accepting these moments as signs of the divine call. If you accept them as originating with God, you might have to accept that God wants to be in relationship with you or is communicating with you directly, which is a frightening idea.

Religious experiences are often dismissed—not out of doubt that they aren’t real, but out of fear that they are real after all.

Mysticism is often dismissed as a privileged experience for only the superholy. But mysticism is not confined to the lives of the saints. Nor does each mystical experience have to replicate exactly what the saints describe in their writings.

Needless to say, these experiences are hard to put into words. It’s the same as trying to describe the first time you fell in love, or held your newborn child in your arms, or saw the ocean for the first time.

While they may not be daily occurrences, mystical experiences are not as rare as some would believe. Ruth Burrows writes that they are “not the privileged way of the few.”

Looking toward the school on the brow of the hill, I felt an overwhelming happiness. I felt so happy to be alive. And I felt a fantastic longing: to both possess and be a part of what was around me. I can still see myself standing in this meadow, surrounded by creation, more clearly than almost any other memory from childhood. In such uncommon longings, hidden in plain sight in our lives, does God call us.

One evening, the English poet W. H. Auden gathered together with his fellow teachers at the Downs School, when something unexpected happened to him. He describes it in the introduction to a book edited by Anne Fremantle called The Protestant Mystics: One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had we any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. . . . My personal feelings toward them were unchanged—they were still colleagues, not intimate friends—but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it. Auden seems almost to have met the desire of his heart, almost to have found exactly what he was looking for, but when he arrived at the place, he was just as quickly taken away from it. Such powerful experiences increase our appetite for a relationship with God in the future, even if we never again experience God’s presence in quite so clear a way.

Sometimes we feel that we are tantalizingly close to understanding exactly what this world is about. On the day of my ordination, at a church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I entered the back of the church a few hours before the Mass was to begin. The choir was rehearsing, and as I stood in the empty church, which would soon be filled with friends and family, I thought, This is right where I should be.

Rather, they ask, What have I done to deserve all this?

This can lead to the realization that you are, as Jesuits say, a “loved sinner,” imperfect but loved by God. Typically this prompts gratitude, which leads to a desire to respond. You may feel so overwhelmed by God’s love for you, even in your “imperfect” state, that you want to say “Thank you! What can I do in return?”

But holiness resides not only in canonized saints like Ignatius but also in the holy ones who walk among us—that includes the holy father who takes care of his young children, the holy daughter who attends to her aging parents, and the holy mother who works hard for her family. Nor does holiness mean perfection: the saints were always flawed, limited, human. Holiness always makes its home in humanity. So we can be attracted to models of holiness both past and present. Learning about past examples of holiness and meeting holy people today often makes us want to be like them. Holiness in other people is naturally attractive, since it is one way that God attracts us to himself.

But as he neared death, he asked my Jesuit friends to pray for him, he treasured holy cards that people sent him, he mused about which family members he longed to see in heaven, he asked what I thought God would be like, and he made some suggestions about his funeral Mass. My dad also became more gentle, more forgiving, and more emotional. I found these changes both consoling and confusing. One of the last people to visit him was my friend Janice, a Catholic sister, who had been one of my professors during my theology studies. After his death, I remarked that my dad seemed to have become more open to God. In response, she said something that I had never heard but seemed to have already known. “Yes,” she said. “Dying is about becoming more human.”

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.

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

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.”

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.

Because God is ready now.

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.”

As Margaret Silf writes in Inner Compass, “You will quickly find that you start to look out for God’s presence and his action in places you would not have thought to look before.” The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds. —Jean-Pierre de Caussade,

Closer to home than Teilhard de Chardin is a Jesuit named Joe. When I first met Joe, he was in his late sixties and was living with us in the novitiate as a “spiritual father,” a resource and example for the younger men. Joe was one of the freest people I’ve ever known. Once, on a trip to visit some Jesuits in Kingston, Jamaica, his plane was delayed for five hours in Boston. Ultimately, the flight was canceled and Joe returned home. That night I ran into Joe in the living room of the novitiate, calmly reading a book. “You’re back!” I said. “What happened?” “The funniest thing!” he said. “We were supposed to take off, and then we were delayed for an hour, and then waited another hour until they delayed us again.” Joe chuckled as he recounted the delays that led to his trip’s eventual cancellation. Afterward, he tracked down his luggage and took a long ride on the subway (the T in Boston) to get home. “So here I am!” he laughed. Had that happened to me, I would have been boiling over in frustration. “Weren’t you angry?” I said, amazed. “Angry? Why?” he said. “There was nothing I could do about it. Why get upset over something you can’t change?” Equanimity in the face of stress does not make you holy. Much less does it make you a saint. But it’s a start. Detachment, freedom, and a sense of humor are signposts on the road to holiness. Joe, a man well acquainted with the way of Ignatius, knew that a healthy spirituality requires freedom, detachment, and openness. Often when yo...

Like two great rivers, two traditions of prayer flow through Christian spirituality. One is called “apophatic” and the other “kataphatic.” Apophatic, from the Greek word apophatikos, which means negative, is an approach to God that moves away from images, words, concepts, and symbols. It is more “content free.” The underlying theology is that God is beyond our comprehension, beyond any mental images we might have, unknowable; and so one seeks to find God by emptying oneself of preconceived notions of the divine.