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

by James Martin

In brief, a spirituality is a way of living in relationship with God.

One afternoon I was struggling with the news of some family problems. But I was assiduously avoiding the topic since it had nothing to do with my “spiritual life.” David sat in his rocking chair, sipping his ever-present mug of coffee, and listened attentively. After a few minutes, he set his mug down and said, “Is there something that you’re not telling me?” Sheepishly, I told him how worried I was about my family. But wasn’t I supposed to be talking about spiritual things? “Jim,” he said. “It’s all part of your spiritual life. You can’t put part of your life in a box, stick it on a shelf, and pretend it’s not there. You have to open that box up and trust that God will help you look at what’s inside.”

Instead of seeing the spiritual life as one that can exist only if it is enclosed by the walls of a monastery, Ignatius asks you to see the world as your monastery.

When people ask me whether anyone could ever break the first commandment (“You shall have no other gods before me.”) I often say that while few people today believe in multiple gods, as in the past, many more may believe in newer “gods.” For some people their “god” is career. Or money. Or status. What would St. Ignatius say about all this? Most likely he would furrow his brow and say (in Basque, Spanish, or Latin, of course) that while you need to earn a living, you have to be careful not to let your career become a “disordered affection” that prevents you from being free to meet new people, spending time with those you love, and viewing people as ends rather than means. It’s an “affection” since it’s something that appeals to you. It’s “disordered” because it’s not ordered toward something life-giving. Ignatius would invite you to move toward “detachment.” Once you did so, you would become freer and happier.

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

For the Jesuit, if the Exercises are about how to live your own life, the Constitutions are about how to live your life with others. The Exercises are about you and God; the Constitutions, at least for Jesuits, are about you, God, and your brother Jesuits.

So Ignatian spirituality naturally embraces everyone from the devout believer to the tentative seeker. To use one of Ignatius’s favorite expressions, his path is “a way of proceeding” along the way to God.

This doesn’t mean that you need to believe in God in order to find Ignatius’s insights useful. But to do so, you have to understand where God fits into his worldview.

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, “The first and most elementary test of one’s call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect.” That holds for any religious organization. This is not to excuse all the problems, imperfections, and even sinfulness of religious organizations. Rather, it is a realistic admission that as long as we’re human, we will be imperfect. It’s also a reminder that for those on the path of independence—believers who have left organized religion—the search for a perfect religious community may be one without end.

When I was a novice, one of my spiritual directors quoted the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, who contrasted “real religion” and “illusory religion.” The maxim of “illusory religion” is as follows: “Fear not; trust in God and He will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you.” “Real religion,” said Macmurray, has a different maxim: “Fear not; the things you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.”

The benefit of walking along the path of exploration is plain. After a serious search, you may discover a tradition ideally suited to your understanding of God, your desires for community, and even to your own personality. Likewise, returning to your original community may give you a renewed appreciation for your “spiritual home.” Explorers may also be more grateful for what they have found and are not as likely to take their communities for granted. The most grateful pilgrim is the one who has finished the longest journey.

After Jacque’s mysterious answer moved me to give God another chance, I returned to church, but in a desultory way. I wasn’t sure exactly what, or who, I believed in. So for several years God the Problem Solver was replaced by a more amorphous spiritual concept: God the Life Force, God the Other, God the Far-Away One. While these are valid images of God, I had no idea that God could be anything but those abstract ideas. And I figured that things would stay that way until I died.

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. Isaac Hecker was a nineteenth-century convert to Catholicism who became a priest and founded the American religious order known as the Paulists. He may have summed it up best. Religion, said Hecker, helps you to “connect and correct.” You are invited into a community to connect with one another and with a tradition. At the same time, you are corrected when you need to be. And you may be called to correct your own community— though a special kind of discernment and humility is required in those cases.

life in the tension.

When you get your diagnosis you ask, “Why me?” When you meet others who suffer, you ask, “Why not me?”

It may be difficult to identify exactly what you want, but at heart, you long for the fulfillment of all your desires, which is God. This is closely aligned with the feeling of awe, which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel identified as a key way to meet God. “Awe . . . is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding. Awe is itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. . . . Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Here’s the examen in the words of St. Ignatius Loyola, straight from The Spiritual Exercises: The First Point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits I have received. The Second is to ask grace to know my sins and rid myself of them. The Third is to ask an account of my soul from the hour of rising to the present examen, hour by hour or period by period; first as to thoughts, then words, then deeds, in the same order as was given for the particular examination. The Fourth is to ask pardon of God our Lord for my faults. The Fifth is to resolve, with his grace, to amend them. Close with an Our Father.

Seems healthy

Here is how I like to do the examen. It’s only slightly modified from what St. Ignatius suggests in the Exercises. Before you begin, as in all prayer, remind yourself that you’re in God’s presence, and ask God to help you with your prayer. 1. Gratitude: Recall anything from the day for which you are especially grateful, and give thanks. 2. Review: Recall the events of the day, from start to finish, noticing where you felt God’s presence, and where you accepted or turned away from any invitations to grow in love. 3. Sorrow: Recall any actions for which you are sorry. 4. Forgiveness: Ask for God’s forgiveness. Decide whether you want to reconcile with anyone you have hurt. 5. Grace: Ask God for the grace you need for the next day and an ability to see God’s presence more clearly.

For the beginner, that’s a key insight about prayer. God desires to communicate with us and can use all sorts of means to do so.

There are many definitions of prayer. A traditional one, from St. John Damascene in the seventh century, is that prayer is a “raising of one’s mind and heart to God.”

David’s favorite definition, which I’ve already alluded to, was Walter Burghardt’s: prayer is “a long, loving look at the real.” Prayer is “long,” said Burghardt, because it is done in a quiet, unhurried way. “Loving” because it happens in a context of love. Prayer is a “look” because it has to do with being aware. “I do not analyze or argue it, define or describe it,” wrote Burghardt. “I am one with it.” Finally, prayer is “real” because our spiritual life is primarily about what happened in our daily life. His superb definition emphasized the groundedness of prayer.

In a sense, Jesus of Nazareth was a story told by God. As Jesus communicated spiritual truths through parables, you might posit the same about God the Father. In order to communicate an essential truth, God offered us a parable: Jesus. Jesus is the parable of God. So for the Christian, if you want to learn about God, get to know Jesus.

Detachment, freedom, and a sense of humor are signposts on the road to holiness.

Overall, learning about God—through other people’s experiences of God, through Scripture, through holy men and women—is part of nourishing your spiritual life, because learning about God is part of being in relationship with God.

A few years ago, I told my spiritual director I was so frustrated that God didn’t seem to be doing anything to help me and that I used an obscenity in my prayer. One night I was so angry that I clenched my fists and shouted aloud, “How about some @#$% help, God!” Some readers might be shocked that a priest would use language like that, especially in prayer. And I thought my spiritual director, a wise and gentle Jesuit priest named Damian, would reproach me. Instead Damian said, “That’s a good prayer.” I thought he was kidding. “That’s a good prayer because it’s honest,” he said. “God wants your honesty, Jim.” Being honest also made me feel that God now knew exactly how I felt. Have you ever had the experience of confiding something to a friend and feeling relief? It felt like God could now better accompany me, as a good friend might. Or, more accurately, I would be able to allow God to accompany me.

Insights are another way that God speaks in prayer. Perhaps you’re praying for clarity, and you receive an insight that allows you to see things in a new light. You may see a novel way of approaching an old problem. Or you may, in a flash, perceive something surprising about God. Let’s say you’re reading a Gospel story that speaks of Jesus going off to pray by himself. You might have heard this story many times, but this time an insight arrives: If even Jesus could take time off from his busy schedule to pray, perhaps I could do the same. Here the experience is not so much emotional as intellectual. While a few spiritual directors may privilege emotional moments in prayer, it’s important not to neglect the way that an intellectual insight can be as meaningful.

Using my imagination wasn’t so much making things up, as it was trusting that my imagination could help to lead me to the one who created it: God. That didn’t mean that everything I imagined during prayer was coming from God. But it did mean that from time to time God could use my imagination as one way of communicating with me.

Prayer is not about producing.

You might be tempted to move on, but places of resistance may be precisely where God wants to meet you. Resistance is another fruit of prayer, like emotions, insights, and memories. Resistance is often an invitation to pray or think more deeply about those feelings. Why do I feel resistance? Are you being called to be free of whatever holds you back from a deeper love of God? Why am I frightened of those dark valleys? Is it because you don’t trust God to care for you? Perhaps you can recall dark times in the past where you were cared for—by friends, family, coworkers—and see God’s hand in this too. Your attention to resistance can lead you to a new level of trust or self-knowledge. This resistance always reminds me of massage. Every few weeks, because of some chronic pain, I visit a massage therapist. Often she focuses on a sensitive spot on my back. That spot needs attention because that’s where the most “energy” is, as she says. It’s an important spot to pay attention to. It’s similar in prayer. When you feel reluctant to pray about a particular topic, it may mean you are resisting looking at something urgent, or a situation or memory that needs to be attended to. Maybe God wants to comfort you in that place or release you from some un-freedom or “disordered attachment.” That’s the reason there’s so much “energy” around those passages. In these moments, God offers us the chance to stop resisting and let ourselves be healed. And freed.

Rezistance. I sure have a lot of this.

centering prayer is not about producing or doing or achieving. It’s about being. Or rather, being with.

when you pray, however you pray, and feel that God is speaking to you—pay attention.

Beyond the emphasis on a simple life, Jesus is showing his intuitive understanding of what was preventing the young man from growing closer to God. He has put his finger on what Ignatius would call the man’s “disordered attachment.” To another person Jesus might have said, “Give up your status.” To another, “Give up your desires for success.” Jesus was not simply inviting the young man to a simple life; he was identifying an unfreedom, and saying, “Get rid of anything that prevents you from following God.”

The point is not that you have to give everything away, but this: the more you stop buying stuff you don’t need, and the more you get rid of items you don’t use, the more you can simplify your life. And the more you simplify, the freer you will feel, and be.

Poverty of spirit is different: it is a life-giving goal. Poverty of spirit is another way of speaking of humility. Without it, we resist admitting our reliance on God, are tempted to try to make it on our own, and are more likely to despair when we fail. And since spiritual poverty recognizes our fundamental reliance on God, it lies at the heart of the spiritual life. “Thus poverty of spirit is not just one virtue among many,” writes Metz toward the end of his book. “It is the hidden component of every transcending act, the ground of every ‘theological virtue.’”

Poverty of spirit is a reflection of reality: we are often powerless to change things.

Summing up the work of another theologian, Genovesi calls chastity “honesty in sex,” where our physical relationships “truthfully express” the level of personal commitment we have with the other. In other words, the goal of chastity is receiving and giving love.

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.

most people are called to romantic love, marriage, sexual intimacy, children, and family life. Their primary way of loving is through their spouses and children. It is a more focused, more exclusive, way of loving. That is not to say that married couples and parents do not love others outside their families. Rather, the main focus of their love is God and their families. For the person in a religious order, the situation is the opposite. You vow chastity to offer yourself to love God and make yourself available to love as many others as possible.

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky.

“Take care, take care never to shut your heart against anyone.”

One of the best gifts to give a friend is freedom.

When John O’Malley was a Jesuit novice, an older priest told him three things to remember when living in community: First, you’re not God. Second, this isn’t heaven. Third, don’t be an ass.

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?

compassion is the willingness to enter into the “chaos” of another person’s life.

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.”

Men and women in religious orders believe that God is at work not only through their own daily lives and prayer, but also through the decisions of their superiors, who are also trying to decide the right course of action.

When a Jesuit is about to be “missioned” to a particular work, the superior is attentive to the Jesuit’s own desires, since he knows—and the reader knows by now—that this is one way that God’s desires are made known. This is what the founder of the Jesuits intended.

yes. if the passion of the follower is coupled with the delegation of the leader good thimgs happen.