This Ignatian Life

Kuskokwim River, Bethel, AK

Originally uploaded by jjoiv

Last week I went to Bethel, Alaska to visit my daughter Erin. She moved up there 18 months ago to do a year of service with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and decided to stick around another year, maybe two. I had a lot of frequent flyer miles, so off I went.

Bethel is far away in more ways than one. Situated 400 miles west of Anchorage in “Bush” Alaska, there are no roads in or out. The only way to get to Bethel is by plane (year round) and by boat up the Kuskokwim River in the summer. It takes a long time to get there, almost as long as it takes to get the Europe. But, Bethel also feels like another country. Whenever I got out my wallet, I felt surprised that they took dollars. It’s also really cold, at least in the winter. One day the wind chill dipped to -67 Fahrenheit. That was pretty nasty. Undeterred, the Bethelites bundled up and went out on the frozen river to watch the finish of the annual dog sled race, the Kuskokwim 300. Mushers are local heros.

The Jesuits (and the Jesuit Volunteers) minister in Western Alaska in service to the native Yup’ik population. The Yup’ik are a soft-spoken and very interesting people, many of whom still live a quasi-subsistence lifestyle heavily dependent upon hunting and fishing. However, their communities also suffer from the same social ills that plague other native groups in the lower 48. So, the ministries there resemble the Jesuit/Ignatian ministries in South Dakota on the Rosebud reservation. It’s good work and consistent with the Ignatian commitment to the work of social justice.

Perhaps the most salient feature of my time in Bethel, though, was a powerful sense of community. This must surely be one of the reasons every year some of the Jesuit Volunteers, like my daughter, decide to stay even after their year of service is completed and even in this harsh climate. My daughter has no television, the town only has one radio station, my cell phone did not work, and for internet access I had to walk across the frozen tundra to the local community center, which I did once a day. So, I had a lot of down time, and I was suddenly and blessedly free from the relentless barrage of information that constantly invades my life. Stepping out of the plane into Bethel is like stepping back in time to a slower paced and more humane form of life. Community happens naturally there in a way that is perhaps impossible even in a moderate-sized city like Omaha where calendars and schedules rule. Bethel is a time machine or an artifact or both.

On Friday night — before it got really cold – the town turned out on the ice road/Kuskokwim River to send off the mushers. We watched the dogs pull the sleds into the darkness, then went in for tea, warming our toes by the heater, the noise of modernity inaudible and nearly forgotten.

For the next four months our family is living in San Salvador while my husband is on sabbatical and writing a book on Rutilio Grande, the first Jesuit killed here during the civil war of the 70’s and 80’s. We were eager to expose our kids to not only another culture, but also the realities of the developing world. We are inspired to work and pray on the same hallowed ground as the Jesuit and Church women martyrs. And we are so blessed to have the time as a family away from the busyness of life in the States, to reflect upon how we live this Ignatian life.I was asked yesterday what I missed the most? What’s the hardest part of trying to live and raise a family in a way that doesn’t exactly fit the American norm? My mind shot to the laundry list of items we had sent down from US grocery stores—chocolate chips, candy corns, books in English just to name a few. But living without the comforts of home really isn’t that challenging to the soul. How about facing daily the dangers of life in the developing world like blatantly unsafe conditions, vicious crime, or the constant threat of disease? In all honesty, those really don’t affect me that much. I have the ability with my credit card to be freed of many of the hazards of life that so many around me suffer daily. In truth, living abroad, even in a developing country, is very do-able these days. But in reflecting upon the question, I realized the most difficult part of living this Ignatian Life, of being as they say “ruined” by God, was the same here as in the States, as in Africa, as it would be anywhere on Earth; The hardest part is trying to find or build the community of others who ‘get it.’

Being “ruined” tends to mean we no longer fit in fully anywhere. We don’t fit in with the elite of the country with whom our children attend school, some of whom have an open disdain for the poor. We don’t fully fit in with the campesinos who show us so much hospitality even though we in no way share the daily grind of their lives on dirt floors under tin roofs working for $6 a day. So we long for a community of our own which shares our spirituality, helps us to find the face of God in the suffering, and inspires us to live the faith that does justice. Trying to do that on your own is like constantly swimming upstream against the current of materialism, fear, and self-interest.

While I know Ignatian spirituality is designed to discern individual calling, I also know that Ignatius and his companions relied on each other for the strength to live that unique calling. By far, the greatest gift of our experience in El Salvador has been the open companionship of the Jesuits and others from the Jesuit world with whom we find ourselves traveling this road. To be so far from home and yet instantly have a bond with another person you have never met before, not because they speak your verbal language but your spiritual language, to meet that person is to come home to a place you’ve never been before. Our Jesuit companions both at home and here have welcomed and supported us with open arms. As a lay woman I have such consolation to feel so “included” in this network that spans the Earth. But, at the same time, we are not fully a part of the Jesuit community either. They have their own residences and support systems and do not face the same struggles in raising children or sustaining marriage that we do.

And so what I came to realize in discerning what is the hardest part of living this faith as a lay family here (or anywhere) is ….finding you. You reading this blog. You who seeks with me to understand and live this Ignatian life. You, whom I’ve most likely never met, but know we together are called to live differently in this world. Finding you, knowing you are out there, being connected to and sustained by your faith and acts of justice, that is the greatest challenge of this Ignatian life for me.

So to whomever you are reading this blog, taking the time to once in a while reflect and discern what it means to know Jesus in this way, know this: I need you. I miss you! Life without you on this Earth would be pure desolation. But just knowing you are out there walking the walk too, empowers me to walk it as well. I just need to know there are others who live in this tension with me and that there is “somewhere” that I truly fit in. I know it is not a physical place we share, but in knowing itself.

Photo: “Group Hug” by snarlenarle from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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)