The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [107]
Beware of condemning any man’s action. Consider your neighbor’s intention, which is often honest and innocent, even though his act seems bad in outward appearance.
—St. Ignatius Loyola
In other words, we say to ourselves, My intention was good. Why don’t they see this? But when it comes to other people, we often fail to give them the benefit of the doubt. We say, “Look what they did!”
The Presupposition helps us remember the other person’s intention, which helps ground relationships in openness. You approach every interaction with an open mind and heart by presuming—even when it’s hard to do so—that the other person is doing his or her best and isn’t out to get you.
The Presupposition also helps to release you from grudges and resentments. It makes it less likely that you will approach a thorny relationship in terms of a battle. Rather than steeling yourself for another confrontation with your enemy, which takes a great deal of energy, you can relax.
Sometimes the other person is out to get you—for example, in a contentious office environment. Few people are angeli. But that doesn’t mean human interactions should be approached as battles. Instead of preparing for war, you can set aside your armor. This may help the other person feel better able to deal with you—because most likely you are part of the problem. The Presupposition steers you away from anger and so provides the other person with the emotional space needed to meet you on more peaceful territory. It may even invite him or her to change.
My mother once told me that at her local supermarket worked a checkout clerk who had a “mean look and a grumpy disposition.” None of the other clerks liked her. My mother remembered something her own mother had told her, another version of the Presupposition: “Be kind to everyone, because you never know what problems they have at home.” So my mother decided to shower the grumpy clerk with kindness and made it a point to talk with her whenever she could. In time, the woman softened. “I discovered,” said my mother, “that her mother, whom she cared for, was ill and that she herself had neck problems after a car accident.” You never know what problems people might have.
The Presupposition also helps you stay open to change, growth, and forgiveness. Peter Favre, one of the first Jesuits, spent many years interacting with the new Christian denominations of his age. In that era Catholics and Protestants were intensely suspicious of one another. For many Protestants, Catholics were “papists,” Rome was “Babylon,” and the pope was the “Antichrist.” For Catholics, Protestants were simply heretics.
Favre adamantly refused to let those beliefs close his heart, which was extraordinary for the time. “Remember,” he wrote to a Jesuit asking for advice, “if we want to be of help to them, we must be careful to regard them with love, to love them in deed and in truth, and to banish from our souls anything that might lessen our love and esteem for them.” That is an astonishing comment in an era of bad feelings.
My favorite quote from Favre on the matter is even simpler: “Take care, take care never to shut your heart against anyone.”
Openness will not cure every relationship, but it can provide an opening for change, and it certainly won’t make things any worse. The Presupposition can make healthy relationships healthier and unhealthy relationships less unhealthy.
IGNATIUS AND HIS FRIENDS
With his prodigious talent for friendship, Ignatius enjoyed close relations with a large circle of friends. (That is one reason for his enthusiasm for writing letters.) Indeed, the earliest way that Ignatius referred to the early Jesuits was not with phrases like “Defenders of the Faith” or “Soldiers of Christ,” but something simpler. He described his little band as “Friends in the Lord.”
Friendship was an essential part of his life. Two of his closest friends were his college roommates, Peter Favre, from the Savoy region of France, and Francisco de Javier, the Spaniard later known as St.