The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [119]
Friends also wish the good of the other. That goes for members of the same family who want to love one another. Ignatius gave Francis Xavier the freedom to be the person he was called to be, even if it was half a world away from Ignatius. It also means celebrating the times when the other person does well or succeeds.
Jesuits can sometimes be competitive. In many instances this is a good thing: natural competitiveness spurs us to greater achievement. St. Ignatius Loyola, in effect, was being “competitive” with St. Francis and St. Dominic when he lay on his sick bed and thought, “What if I should do this which Saint Francis did and this which Saint Dominic did?” Without a healthy sense of competition in Ignatius, there would be no Society of Jesus. But as Ignatius grew older, he gave up the darker side of ambition and even wrote rules into the Jesuit Constitutions designed to limit and moderate unhealthy ambitions and competition among Jesuits.
Competition is usually present among friends, siblings, neighbors, coworkers, or anywhere two or three are gathered, to borrow a line from the Gospels. During my philosophy and theology studies, some competitiveness was healthy. Whenever I saw my organized friend Dave, who always kept his notes neatly collated in pristine blue binders, start studying a few days before a test, I knew it was time for me to study. Dave’s industriousness prompted me to do a better job.
But too much competition is poisonous. The competitiveness that leads to wishing ill for the other is the beginning of the end of friendship.
Father Shelton lists one more aspect to a healthy friendship. You have to learn when to maintain a discreet silence. Sometimes our friends or family members don’t need our advice. Or at least not right at that moment.
My friend Steve, another president of a Jesuit high school, this one in New York City, agrees. Steve has many friends, thanks to his ebullient good humor and his preternatural ability to remember birthdays, names of spouses, and even names of pets. His friends know to expect comments like, “Isn’t today your mom’s birthday?”
Steve talked about discretion in friendships: “I’m very direct and like to get to the point,” he said, “and I like to have the kinds of conversations that get to the heart of things, especially in the middle of a busy life. But you also have to be discreet: learning when to bring something up, or file it away for a better time—a time when it would be good for the other to hear it, not necessarily for you to say it.”
To Shelton’s recommendations, I would add a few more. First, friends give one another freedom to change. The person that we knew a few years ago, in high school, college, at work, or in the novitiate, may have changed utterly. It’s important not to force the person to be who he or she was years ago—besides, it’s impossible. This is part of the freedom we can give to our friends. And to spouses, too. One married friend recently told me, “Probably the biggest killer of marriages is the lack of freedom to grow and change.”
Second, friendship is welcoming. It welcomes others and is not exclusive. That sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it? But for Jesuits “exclusive” is a loaded word.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, some Jesuit superiors inveighed against “particular friendships.” Too much “exclusivity” or “particularity” among young Jesuits was thought to lead to, or foster, overly close bonds and perhaps encourage gay men to break their vows of chastity. Jesuit superiors discouraged exclusive relationships by requiring that during recreation periods, when novices strolled the novitiate grounds, there should always be at least three men in any group. Numquam duo, semper tres, went the oft-quoted Latin saying: Never two, always three.
This attitude reflected the general misunderstanding about homosexuality (that is, the wrongheaded notion that gay men couldn’t live celibately