The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [130]
A few years after theology studies ended, my family got the disastrous news that my father had cancer. As I mentioned earlier, he had fallen in a parking lot, which alerted his doctors to a problem. Tests showed that lung cancer had traveled to his brain, and he would have to begin chemotherapy and radiation treatments immediately.
When I heard the news, I froze. How could I do what it seemed God was now asking—help my mother in Philadelphia, accompany my father in what might be his last months, and continue my regular day-to-day work?
Besides these new responsibilities, I was dealing with something else: a sadness beyond anything I had ever experienced. My father had moved from job to job in the previous few years, never finding happiness at work. And that image of him collapsed in a parking lot in the dark, in the rain, seemed infinitely sad. It seemed certain that his future would be even sadder.
At one point I confessed to Janice my fear of facing all of this. “I know that I have to step on this path,” I told her, “but I don’t know if I can.”
Janice said, “Can you surrender to the future that God has in store for you?”
Those words helped me to understand obedience in daily life. It was the acceptance of what life put in front of me, the “reality of the situation,” as Ciszek said. For most people, obedience is not being sent away to work in a foreign land. It is stepping onto the path of daily life and continuing on it.
Everything Is Precious
Those who have abandoned themselves to God always lead mysterious lives and receive from God exceptional and miraculous gifts by means of the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences in which there appears to be nothing unusual. The simplest sermon, the most banal conversations, the least erudite books become the source of knowledge and wisdom to these souls by virtue of God’s purpose. This is why they carefully pick up the crumbs which clever minds tread underfoot, for to them everything is precious and a source of enrichment.
—Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (1675–1751),
The Sacrament of the Present Moment
There is a choice involved: instead of acceptance, you can avoid plunging into the “reality of the situation.” You can hold it at arm’s length and see it as a distraction from life, rather than life itself. You tiptoe on the path, walk gingerly along its edges, or avoid it completely.
Janice’s advice enabled me to step onto the path on which God was inviting me to walk. This is something of what Walter Ciszek realized: obedience came in accepting what was presented to him at that moment. The eighteenth-century French Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote two entire books on that topic: The Sacrament of the Present Moment and Abandonment to Divine Providence. “Once we grasp that each moment contains some sign of the will of God,” he said, “we shall find in it all we can possibly desire.”
My father died in a hospital bed nine months later, losing his battle with brain and lung cancer. A few days before his death Janice took a six-hour train ride all the way from Boston, stayed overnight in a nearby convent, and spent two hours talking with my father as he lay in his hospital bed—an unforgettable act of charity and love.
My father’s death opened up a bottomless well of sadness in me. Yet I was able to preside at his funeral Mass and preach about his life, which was a very human one, full of joy and sorrow. In the end, I was grateful that I was able to help my mother, accompany him, and even continue my daily work as a Jesuit. And I couldn’t have done any of that if I had resisted stepping on that path.
FINDING GOD IN THE MIDST OF SUFFERING
This raises an essential question in the spiritual life: How do you find God in suffering? But that in turn raises another difficult question: Why do we suffer? This