The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [1]
Every spirituality offers you a distinctive “passage” to God.
Many of the most well-known spiritualities in the Christian tradition flow from the religious orders: Benedictines, Franciscans, Carmelites, Cistercians. Each order has developed, over the centuries, its own spiritual traditions, some directly handed down by its founder, others that come by meditating on the life and practices of the founder. Today members of those religious orders live out what Father de Guibert calls a “family tradition.”
Spend time with a few Franciscans, for example, and you’ll quickly notice their love of the poor and the environment, a passion shared by their founder, St. Francis of Assisi. Live for a few days in a Benedictine community, and you will soon taste their expansive, welcoming spirit, passed down from St. Benedict—not a surprise for someone who said, “All guests should be welcomed as Christ.” Religious orders call this the “charism,” or founding spirit, passed on by the founder. (Charism comes from the Latin word for “gift.”)
Likewise, spend time with a Jesuit priest or brother, and you will begin to experience the distinctive spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuit Order, which we’ll soon describe. The sum total of the practices, methods, emphases, accents, and highlights of the Christian way of life that comes to us from Ignatius is known as “Ignatian spirituality.”
That spirituality has helped the Society of Jesus do some remarkable things in its colorful history. It’s impossible for me to talk about Jesuit accomplishments without sounding too proud (something we’re accused of daily), so I’ll let the English historian Jonathan Wright do so instead. This thumbnail sketch is from his marvelous book God’s Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, and Power—A History of the Jesuits:
They have been urbane courtiers in Paris, Peking, and Prague, telling kings when to marry, when and how to go to war, serving as astronomers to Chinese emperors or as chaplains to Japanese armies invading Korea. As might be expected, they have dispensed sacraments and homilies, and they have provided educations to men as various as Voltaire, Castro, Hitchcock, and Joyce. But they have also been sheep farmers in Quito, hacienda owners in Mexico, wine growers in Australia, and plantation owners in the antebellum United States. The Society would flourish in the worlds of letters, the arts, music, and science, theorizing about dance, disease, and the laws of electricity and optics. Jesuits would grapple with the challenges of Copernicus, Descartes, and Newton, and thirty-five craters on the surface of the moon would be named for Jesuit scientists.
In the United States, Jesuits are probably best known as educators, currently running twenty-eight colleges and universities (including Georgetown, Fordham, Boston College, and every college named Loyola) and dozens of high schools and, more recently, middle schools in the inner city.
Since Ignatius wanted his Jesuits to be practical men who could speak to people clearly, it’s not surprising that over the years Jesuits have boiled down their spirituality into a few easy-to-remember phrases. No single definition captures the richness of the tradition, but together the phrases provide an introduction to the way of Ignatius. So here are four simple ways of understanding Ignatian spirituality. Think of them as the arches under that bridge we talked about.
FOUR WAYS
There used to be a saying that Jesuit training was so regimented that if you asked five Jesuits from around the world the same question, you would get the same answer from all five. These days Jesuits are a more independent bunch, and you would probably get five different answers. Or six. The Italian