The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [111]
How many times have you wondered why your friends weren’t “better” friends? And how many times did being a “better” friend mean meeting your needs? How often have you wondered why your friends or family members don’t support you more? How often have you worried whether you were being a good friend? These are natural feelings. Most of us also know the heartache of seeing friends move away, or change, or grow less available to us.
So how were Ignatius, Francis, and Peter able to be such close friends and be free at the same time?
Often I’ve had to remind myself that my friends do not exist simply to support, comfort, or nourish me. A few years ago, one of my best friends told me he was being sent to work in a parish in Ghana, in West Africa.
Matt was well prepared for his work in West Africa. Twice during his Jesuit training he had spent time in Ghana, living in a remote village with poor fishermen and their families and helping out at a small parish, all the while learning the local languages. Later, during graduate studies in theology, when we lived in the same community, Matt tailored some of his courses for his work in West Africa.
Matt told me how excited he was to be returning to Ghana, now as a priest. Knowing how seriously he had prepared for this work, and how much he loved Ghana, I should have been happy for him. Instead, selfishly, I was sad for myself, knowing that I wouldn’t see him for a few years. Sadness is natural for anyone saying good-bye; I would have been a robot if I hadn’t felt disappointed.
Still, it was hard to move away from wanting Matt to remain behind—to meet my needs. It was the opposite of the freedom that Ignatius and Francis had shown, which valued the good of the other person. It was an example of the possessiveness that can sometimes characterize and, if left unchecked, damage relationships. Needed was Ignatian freedom and detachment.
William Barry, the Jesuit spiritual writer, is also a trained psychologist. Recently I asked him about this tendency to possessiveness in friendship. “You need close friends, but you don’t want to cling to them out of a desire to keep them around you,” he said. “But this would be true for anyone, not simply for Jesuits.” He, too, pointed to the early Jesuits as models. “Francis Xavier has such a deep love for his friends, and yet this doesn’t keep him from volunteering and never being seen again.”
Another story that illustrates this freedom comes from the seventeenth century, when Alphonsus Rodríguez, the doorkeeper at the Jesuit College in Majorca, Spain, became friends with another Jesuit, Peter Claver.
Alphonsus had come to the Society of Jesus by a circuitous route. Born in 1533, he was the second son of a prosperous cloth merchant in Segovia. When Peter Favre visited the city to preach, the Rodríguez family provided hospitality to the Jesuit. Favre, in fact, prepared the young Alphonsus for his First Communion, an important rite of passage in the church.
At twelve, Alphonsus was sent to the Jesuit college at Alcalá, but his father’s death put an end to his studies; he was forced to return home to take over the family business. At twenty-seven, Alphonsus married. He and his wife, Maria, had three children, but, tragically, his wife and children all died, one after the other. Heavy taxes and expenses led Alphonsus to the brink of financial ruin; many biographers depict him as feeling like a failure. In desperation he called on the Jesuits for guidance. The lonely widower prayed for many years to understand God’s desires for him.
Gradually Alphonsus found within himself the desire to become a Jesuit. At thirty-five, he was deemed too old to begin the long training required for the priesthood and was rejected for entrance. But his holiness was evident to the local provincial, who accepted Alphonsus into the novitiate as a brother two years later. The provincial is supposed to