This Ignatian Life

As I live more, I am more aware of human sinfulness.  Just last week, I was confronted with three situations where people have acted harmfully.

 Agripina, a little old lady from our parish, passed away last Monday after years of living in extreme poverty and ill health.  Her condition was so precarious that at one point her little shack literally fell to the ground.  When she fell for the last time on her way to the shared bathroom across the alleway on Monday night, the church and her neighbors immediately started making all the arrangements for her wake and funeral, because these people who had known her well for years were convinced that she had no family.  We were surprised when two complete strangers showed up and took her documents from the police doctor who had officialized her death.  They turned out to be her nephews, and they explained that they had enough money and connections to take care of the burial without our help.  As the Jesuit pastor later explained to me, this is a typical occurrence in the neighborhood:  people leave their aging family members completely abandoned, and then promptly show up after their death to claim their inheritance (in this case, the little wooden house that the parish had built Agripina after her shack had crumbled down).  Why didn’t they use some of their money and connections to help her live her last years with a little more dignity?  Why had they never even visited their aunt?

 In the middle of the week, three women approached me at work to claim that one of my co-workers had swindled them by charging them money for a free service that we provide.  Two of us interviewed them separately and it quickly became apparent that they were lying.  The three stories didn’t match up on several key details.  Had we not realized this, the slander could have cost my co-worker her job and reputation.

 Friday, I ran into a friend, and he told me how the other day he had called his uncle’s cell phone, and the stranger who picked up said “Oh, so-and-so?  We just killed him.”  His uncle had indeed been shot three times in the head.  The uncle had recently won a legal case against some powerful people who had stolen money from him, and this was revenge.  Since the people who orchestrated the murder are so powerful, everybody is scared to talk, even though everybody knows who it was. 

 The fact that we hurt each other by what we fail to do, what we say, and what we do is nothing new.  The twist for me has been the coincidence that I happen to be in the middle of a great time of consolation, and I am learning to contemplate our sinfulness lovingly.

 Facing these moments while being in such consolation, I’ve been surprised at how the sinful acts themselves don’t shock me out of it — rather, they’re put in a larger context and become relative to a greater fact of love.  At Agripina’s death, I noticed the negligent and greedy nephews, but also how the entire neighborhood snapped into action to prepare the wake:  the women dressing her body and getting the coffee going, the men moving furniture around and rigging light bulbs by the benches they had placed outside her shack.  When we confronted the slander case at work, I noticed the evil intentions of the three women, but also the respectful way one of my co-workers dealt with them while I was too angry to speak responsibly.  When my friend told me about his uncle’s death, I faced the cold reality of premeditated murder and impunity, but I also felt the power in being able to share that moment of grief with a friend.

 At an even deeper level, being able to contemplate sin with God’s love in my heart changes what I see in the hurtful acts themselves.  I see their roots and connections to a broken world:  to histories of violence and exclusion that go so far back, I am starting to understand something about original sin; to insecurities that run so deep that I can understand why we are tempted to hold on to false gods of money, self-image and power.  From this perspective, sin is still real, but rather than wanting to judge people for it, I am moved to want to liberate people from it.  And then I am consoled even more, because we have Good News.

The Gospel message, as I see it, is that we are loved without us having to earn or deserve it, and that this makes us free to love in the same way.  And community life is, for me, a great school for learning to love this way.

For one thing, it’s easy to love my neighbor gratuitously from 9 to 5 at work, but it’s a lot harder to exercise patience and generosity with those little-things-that-drive-you-crazy before having my two cups of coffee in the morning (my cup of justice, and then my cup of mercy), or when I get home exhausted at night.  The fact of living in the same house, with shared kitchen, bathrooms, cats and guests, means that there is always an opportunity to choose between (a) getting annoyed and (b) getting annoyed and then accepting the other as-is, warts and all.

The real challenge, though, is allowing the others to accept me as I am, warts and all.  Jesuits are trained to be suspicious (in the discernment of the Second Week) and critical, even of what we like (no matter how good something is, we don’t settle for anything but the magis).  And anybody who knows Jesuits knows that we can be pretty competitive sometimes.  So sometimes we walk into breakfast a little defensive, ready to duck, dodge and counterattack with sly comments.  The safety zone is talking about other people or moving to what a friend calls “lowest common denominator” conversations, avoiding deep conversations about ourselves for fear of being caught:  “people at work might think you’re a holy superstar (a friend once referred to Jesuits as ‘Catholic ninjas’), but we know better, you are nothing but a regular human who struggles!”  We think we can love gratuitously, but that for us to be loved, we have to earn or deserve it.  It’s hard to trust the Gospel message.  The trap is that our fear of becoming vulnerable to the other leads us to become defensively aggressive or else banal and superficial, and the effect is that when we act that way, we confirm the others’ same fear that makes them act that way too, which in turn confirms our fear… it’s a vicious cycle.

How to break the cycle?  It goes back to the Gospel — what frees us to drop our guard is the message that we are loved and accepted a priori.  So, my challenge (made possible by accepting God’s a priori gratuitous love for me, i.e., grace) is to avoid adding to the fire when my community starts criticizing beyond what’s healthy, and to avoid those little verbal darts that can seem playful but that in our high-tension environment, can feel more like “friendly fire.”  Rather, I need to try more to make it a point to ask my Jesuit brothers how their day went, or how their projects are going.  At least, this way of proclaiming the Gospel message lets the other know that I can be a different sort of safety zone, and that opens the door to real one-on-one conversations (this is the point of the 22nd Annotation as “Presupposition”).  Insofar as we make an effort with these little-things-that-save-us, I can see beyond my brothers’ faults and see instead the beauty in the particular way each one is being called, and I can walk with each one in his struggle to be faithful to that call.  And I can let them do the same for me.

Community is a Gospel school, and so community is mission.  The world needs, maybe more than anything else we can offer, to know that it’s possible to live together more than superficially.  When our communities — made up of people from different backgrounds, and who didn’t necessarily choose to live together — are able to love one another, encourage one another, and see the best in one another, we become incarnate good news for the world.

Photo: “warts and all” by jenny downing from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

Years ago, I gave up playing the guitar and other hobbies, in part because I felt I had more important things to do with my time, like saving the world.  What I’ve realized little by little, and especially over this Christmas while resting, praying and sharing during vacation, is that if I want to help other people reclaim their human dignity, I have to start by living a fully human life myself, and this includes letting myself enjoy the less practical, less rational things in life.  I am the type of person who expresses my love mostly by action, but I now realize that I can’t let my work be its only expression, and I also need to allow for the time, space and expressions of God’s and other people’s love for me.  If I let myself turn into a one-dimensional rational work machine, I end up dehumanizing myself and therefore I become less able to love.  In a word, I need to follow the Holy Trinity’s example and let my love for the world become more incarnate — limited but also enacted by a body and its capacities, as messy and complex as the history and community in which it’s inserted, and complete in its multi-dimensional depth and fullness. 

So it looks like the next step in my own gradual incarnation is to pick up the guitar again.  Since feeling this spiritual movement after a vow renewal retreat last week, I’ve been seeing many confirmations of it as something from the good spirit.  On a symbolic level for me, spending time playing the guitar will mean accepting that my past radical zeal, while generous and concerned with the real world, was also dangerously divorced from my own humanization.  I think it will also help that process of humanization, or incarnation, in more concrete ways:  it will be good to have a hobby to accompany my solitude on those long evenings spent in an empty Jesuit house, when I’m not in the mood to go out and visit people (this is part of an incarnate vocation too).  And for those days, the guitar offers a form of re-creation that will let me “put stuff out” emotionally, as opposed to “taking stuff in” (like when I read, watch TV or listen to recorded music), which I need because in my work I’m always taking stuff in.  Finally, many liturgical songs really move me, put me in God’s presence and help me communicate with God, so I hope that a little guitar-playing with those songs will soon start to enrich my prayer life.

In all honesty, I’m not a natural musician and I suppose I’ll never be one.  When I used to play in high school, the best I could do was to memorize solo pieces, while my friends picked up songs from the radio and could improvise at jamm sessions.  But that’s not the point.  The magis here, in my case, is not about future apostolic impact as a performing artist; it’s about regaining a gratuitous dimension of myself — I hope that playing the guitar again will make me more able to love in the rest of what I do, even if it means I work a little less overtime.