The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [170]
In the Constitutions, Ignatius emphasizes the overarching value of love during each stage of Jesuit training, beginning with the novitiate. And he includes it in the qualities required for a good superior general, to which he devotes several pages. (Many Jesuits at the time believed that Ignatius was unconsciously describing himself.) The superior general needs to be closely united with God, says Ignatius, from whom “charity toward all his neighbors should particularly shine forth . . . and in a special way toward the members of the Society; likewise a genuine humility which will make him highly beloved of God our Lord and of human beings.”
Look at the words from Ignatius that we’ve quoted just in the last few paragraphs: loving, love, charity, beloved. Ignatius intended the Society to be a loving and supportive place. Isn’t it obvious that a loving and supportive environment where everyone’s talents and skills are respected would be a good place to work? This goes for both religious orders and corporations.
Chris Lowney’s final characteristic is heroism. “Leaders imagine an inspiring future and strive to shape it rather than passively watching the future happen around them. Heroes extract gold from the opportunities at hand rather than waiting for golden opportunities to be handed to them,” he writes.
Lowney points to a letter to the Jesuit community in Ferrara, Italy, in which Ignatius counseled his superiors to “endeavor to conceive great resolves and elicit equally great desires.” Once again, Ignatius highlights the place of desire, this time as a way of encouraging people in their dreams.
And big dreams, too. One of the few important characteristics of Jesuit spirituality that we haven’t yet discussed is the elusive idea of the magis, from the Latin word for the “more” or the “greater.” This complex notion is probably best addressed at this point in this book, after having discussed humility and spiritual poverty. The magis means doing the more, the greater, for God. When you work, give your all. When you make plans, plan boldly. And when you dream, dream big. But, as David Fleming recently wrote to me, the magis is comparative. The more, not the most. The greater, not the greatest. “Ignatius never works with superlatives,” said Fleming. “When we want to do the best, we may get frozen. If we want to do what might be better, we are able to choose.”
The magis does not mean you act foolishly or unrealistically. Nor do you do these great things for yourself or even for the glory of the Society of Jesus. Rather, you strive to do great things for God. Thus the phrase used by Ignatius as a criterion for choosing, which has become an unofficial Jesuit motto: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. For the greater glory of God.
Built into the Ignatian way, then, is the desire for the magis. Ultimately, “eliciting great desires” and inviting people to think big is the seed for accomplishing great things for God.
One historical example of the magis in action served as the inspiration for the 1986 movie The Mission. Perhaps the most well-known film based on the Society of Jesus, The Mission starred Jeremy Irons, Robert De Niro, and Liam Neeson as priests and brothers working in the Jesuit Reductions of seventeenth-century South America. During that time, Jesuit priests and brothers began to gather the native peoples, often the target of ruthless slave traders, into organized villages. The term “reductions,” reducciones, comes from the desire to “reduce” the sprawl of the local settlements into a smaller area as a way to protect them from slave traders and more easily introduce them to Christianity.
“We have worked hard to arrange all this,” wrote the real-life Roque Gonzalez, S.J., in 1613, of his work with the Guaraní peoples, “but with even greater zest and energy—in fact with all