The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [118]
This is when you are often called not to do but to be. To remember that you are not all-powerful. Shortly after I entered the novitiate, for example, two friends of mine had an explosive argument and stopped talking with each other. I confessed to David, my spiritual director, how frustrated I felt that I wasn’t able to get them to reconcile. Consequently, I felt like a failure. And a bad Jesuit. It was driving me crazy.
“Shouldn’t a Jesuit be able to do all this?” I asked.
“Where did you get that idea from?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “that’s whatJesus would do.Jesus would help them to reconcile. Jesus would get them to talk to each other. Jesus would work until there was peace between them, right?”
“That’s true,” David said. “Jesus would probably be able to do all of that. But I have news for you, Jim. You’re not Jesus!”
We both laughed. Not because it was silly, but because it was true. In some of the most painful moments in the lives of friends and families—illness, divorce, death, worries about their children, financial problems—we usually cannot work miracles. Sometimes our efforts do effect change, but sometimes they do not.
Paradoxically, admitting your own powerlessness can free you from the need to fix everything and allow us to be truly present to the other person, and to listen. A cartoon in the New Yorker had one woman saying testily to her friend, “There’s no point in our being friends if you won’t let me fix you.”
Humility doesn’t apply just to the way you relate to your friends, but to you. Besides not being able to solve all of your friends’ problems (and recognizing that your friends won’t be able to solve yours), admitting your own shortcomings is critical if you want to nurture healthy relationships. In other words, you need to both apologize and forgive.
Over the years I’ve done many thoughtless things to people. I’ve gossiped about them, suspected the worst about them, and tried to manipulate them into doing what I wanted them to do. On these occasions I’ve found it necessary to seek forgiveness, something that is at the heart of the Christian message. Just as often, they have come to me to ask for forgiveness.
Sinfulness exists within any human setting, Jesuit communities included. So in any human setting, apology and forgiveness are always needed. Seeking forgiveness is difficult and, since it goes against our ego-driven desires to be right all the time, is always an exercise in humility.
Almost always people have forgiven me and the friendship has grown stronger. But on one or two occasions, the person has not. Here I find it helpful to pray for the person and always be open to reconciliation, but also remember, once again, that just as I cannot force another person to love or even like me, I cannot force another person’s forgiveness.
HEALTHY FRIENDSHIPS
Let’s return to some of Father Shelton’s tips for healthy friendships and see if you can find insights for your own relationships with friends and family.
Without honesty, he says, a friendship will wither and die. William Barry provided a concise description of how this happens. “It’s difficult to be honest,” he told me recently, “but when something painful happens—for example, the other person is sick or dying, of if you’re angry for some reason—if you can’t talk about it you become more and more distant. And if there’s something that you’re holding onto, then eventually you can’t talk about anything. And pretty soon, you haven’t got a friend.”
Being open to challenge, Shelton notes, is not just something that we expect to do for our friends; it is something to expect from our friends. Can you accept the occasional challenge from your friends— that you have acted selfishly and may need to apologize from time to time?
“There are two difficulties in being honest,” my friend Chris said. “One is when you know your friend doesn’t want to hear something. The other is