The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [173]
One of the most powerful stories I’ve heard on this topic comes from Jim, a kind-hearted Jesuit brother from Kentucky, who taught social work at Loyola University in Chicago. Jim once told me the story of Carol, whom he met at a social-service center he founded at a parish in Los Angeles.
Carol, a former model who had fallen on hard times, visited the center one morning and met Jim. When she asked for a pair of jeans, he brought her to another volunteer, who led Carol into the clothes distribution room. A few minutes later, Jim heard a commotion. Carol was drunkenly running through the building, half-naked, with her pants falling off, complaining about her jeans and screaming expletives at the staff.
Jim took Carol outside and calmly explained that she was welcome but that she needed to remain sober. He offered her a cup of coffee and asked if she understood their “deal.” She stared at him and said, “The coffee is cold. And you’re mean!”
During Jim’s three years at the center, Carol visited at least thirty times, sometimes drunk, sometimes angry, sometimes sober. When she was lucid, said Jim, her former beauty (both inner and outer) would shine forth, and she was full of humor and good insights. Over time he got to know Carol well: the two talked about her family, her background, her battle with alcoholism, and her soured career dreams.
Once, Jim got a call from her sister, asking if Jim had seen Carol lately. He hadn’t. “You know, she considers your center her home, don’t you?” she said.
After three years, Jim’s work at the center came to a close. By way of wrapping things up, he tried to say good-bye to as many of the guests of the center as possible. On his last day, he walked to the post office to mail a package.
On his way, he saw Carol. She was with her “friend,” a man who had physically abused her in the past.Jim said he “froze in his tracks.” He thought about crossing the street to say good-bye but just stood there. Carol finally motioned to Jim with a slight wave and kept walking with her companion.
Jim recounted the end of the story for me recently in a letter. “I wanted to leave the parish on a ‘high,’ knowing that I had done good things and tried to help people in need. As Carol turned the corner and walked out of sight, my concern for her turned into tears streaming down my face. I was sad because I had hoped she would be on the path to a healthier and more whole life, and I was disappointed and frustrated because she was in the company of a man with whom she swore she wouldn’t meet again, and I was angry at him for luring her back.”
All Jim could do when he returned to the rectory was silently whisper good-bye to Carol. “As I sat on the rectory steps, I felt the only thing I could offer her were prayers for her happiness and well-being.”
No matter how hard we work, there are some things we are powerless to change, and failure does not lie in laziness or foolishness or poor planning. Work can sometimes be a well of great suffering.
Men and women who are laid off suddenly, whose businesses collapse, who face failures in the workplace know this. The mystery of suffering invades the working world, and this insight must be an essential part of a spirituality of work: in some aspects we are powerless, and our efforts seem fruitless. Here the mystery of suffering comes to the fore.
But even work that seems fruitless on the surface can still be directed to God. In his novel Exiles, about the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ron Hansen includes a lovely passage from one of Hopkins’s actual retreat journals. It is a prayer offering his work to God, though the writing itself might seem fruitless: “Also in some meditations today I earnestly asked our Lord to watch over my compositions that they might do me no harm through the enmity or imprudence of any man or my own; that He would have them as His own and