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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Martin
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March 14, 2018 - January 9, 2019
Jesuits are supposed to be clever—if not crafty—when it comes to obedience. One joke has a Jesuit feeling guilty about one of his bad habits. He asks his superior, “Father, may I smoke while I pray?” The horrified superior says, “Certainly not!” He relates the story to another Jesuit who has the same habit. After pondering the matter, the second Jesuit asks, “Father, may I pray while I smoke?” “Of course!” says the superior.
Obedience is about freedom, too. It frees you from excessive self-interest, careerism, and pride and allows you to respond more readily to the larger needs of the community. Rather than wondering, What’s the best way for me to get ahead?, obedience asks you to trust that your superiors, who presumably have a better idea of larger needs, will be able to answer another question: What’s the best use of this man’s talents, given the needs of the community? Obedience frees you for that kind of service.
Interesting. Obedience has an aspect of freedom.
what happens when life presents you with unavoidable or overwhelming suffering? This is where the example of the Jesuit approach to obedience may be helpful. What enables a Jesuit to accept difficult decisions by his superior is the same thing that can help you: the realization that this is what God is inviting you to experience at this moment. It is the understanding that somehow God is with you, at work and revealed in a new way in this experience. Let me be clear: I’m not saying that God wills suffering or pain. Nor that any of us will ever fully understand the mystery of suffering. Nor
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Rabbi Daniel Polish, author of Talking About God, put it succinctly. “I do not believe in a God whose will or motives are crystal clear to me. And as a person of faith, I find myself deeply suspicious of those who claim such insight.” Polish goes on to quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “To the pious man knowledge of God is not a thought within his grasp.” This is the greatest challenge of faith, says Polish, “to live with a God we cannot fully understand, whose actions we explain at our own peril.”
Richard’s answer to his mother was, in essence, that God was with them in their suffering. “I think God is devastated,” said Richard. “Like the God who groans with loss in Isaiah, and like Jesus who weeps at his best friend’s tomb, God was not standing outside our pain, but was a companion within it, holding us in his arms, sharing our grief and pain.”
The logic goes like this: If I want to follow Jesus, then I will choose to become like him. And if becoming like Jesus means accepting hardships, then I will seek those things, assuming that this is not against God’s will.
some struggles in life are unavoidable. And, at least in my own life, embracing them may sometimes lead to new ways of finding God. This small insight may pale in the face of whatever suffering you are experiencing. But it has helped me in my life, and I wanted to share it with you, and I hope it might help you during tough times. The insight goes by many names: accepting the “reality of the situation,” as Walter Ciszek would say; surrendering to “the future that God has in store,” as Sister Janice would say; taking up “your cross daily,” as Jesus would say. Acceptance. Abandonment. Humility.
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Ignatius realized that if you act in accord with God’s desires for you, you will naturally feel a sense of peace. That insight—that following God’s invitation leads to peace—is a central part of Ignatian discernment. If you are in accord with God’s presence within you, you will feel a sense of rightness, of peace, what Ignatius called “consolation.” It is an indication that you’re on the right path.
For many years I wondered about the connection between making a good decision and feeling consolation. It seemed almost superstitious. Does God zap you with consolation, like a magic trick, to help you make the right choice? No. As David Lonsdale writes, we feel peace about a particular decision when it is “coherent with” God’s desires for our happiness. Ignatius understood that God works through our deepest desires. When we are following that path to God, things seem right. Things feel in synch because they are in synch. Lonsdale’s explanation of consolation is superb. The main feature of
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the drop of water. For those going from bad to worse, the evil spirit feels like a drop of water falling on a sponge: soothing, calming, encouraging. Or as Ignatius says, “delicate, gentle, delightful.” But the good spirit in these cases is like the drop of water falling on a stone: startling, hard, even loud. “Violent, noisy, and disturbing,” says Ignatius. As my friend David would say, “Pay attention!” By the way, when we are going from bad to worse, the startling drop of water on a stone can come both interiorly and exteriorly: it can take the form of hardnosed advice from a friend, who
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drop of water
Another tip: “During a time of desolation one should never make a change,” says Ignatius. Why not? Because when you are feeling distant from God and experiencing desolation (gnawing anxiety, etc.), you are more inclined to be guided by the evil spirit. When feeling abandoned by God, you are more likely to say, “This is useless!” and change course. Or ask despairingly, “What’s the use?” and give up. Don’t do it. To allow yourself to be led by desolation, says Michael Ivens, is to be drawn into “downward momentum.”
“The devil never has greater success with us than when he works secretly and in the dark,” said Ignatius. Or, as members of Alcoholics Anonymous say, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”
Work without prayer becomes detached from God. Prayer without work becomes detached from human beings.
Overwork is a danger for Jesuits for the same reasons that it is for everyone. First, we grow distant from God, the foundation of our lives; second, we grow frustrated when things do not go as planned, since we can overlook our reliance on God; third, we spend less time with friends or families and begin feeling isolated; and fourth, we begin to believe that we are what we do, and so at the end of our lives when we have little “to do,” we feel worthless.
Vocation may have little to do with one’s actual work. For the deepest vocation is to become who you are, to become your “true self,” the person whom God created and calls you to be.
It is dangerous to make everyone go forward by the same road, and worse to measure others by yourself. —St. Ignatius Loyola
BECOMING YOURSELF First, remember that God loves you. As David liked to say, paraphrasing the psalms, “God takes delight in you!” Or as the theologian James Alison suggests, God likes you. If you doubt this, a quick examen of the things for which you’re grateful may help you see the way that God has blessed you, and loves you. Reading the first few verses of Psalm 139—“You knit me together in my mother’s womb”—often helps as well. Second, realize that God loves you as an individual, not simply in the abstract. God cares about you personally, much as a close friend would. Remember how God
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Good principles.
God is the goal. So is our offering of ourselves to God. That’s part of the friendship. In any real friendship, there is, as Ignatius says, an exchange of gifts. “Each shares with the other.” God offers himself (or herself) to us, and we offer ourselves to God.
