The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [177]
After we got the results, I grew discouraged. Was I going to be an inadequate Jesuit because I wasn’t an introvert? Not at all, said David. The Society of Jesus needs extroverts also.
It’s always difficult to avoid comparison with others and to think not only that they have it easier, but that they are somehow holier than you are. So you need to maintain a healthy tension between acceptance and desire. On the one hand, you honor the person God made—with your background, personality, talents, skills, and strengths. On the other, you allow God to move you in new directions, to change, to grow, and to discover who you are meant to be. God has created something wonderful in you, but God is still creating.
Much of my own journey to self-acceptance involved letting go of the need to be somebody else. Nobody in particular, just a feeling that I needed to be different. Early in the novitiate, I thought that being holy meant a suppressing of my personality, rather than building on it. Eradicating my natural desires and inclinations, rather than asking God to sanctify them. I knew that I wasn’t a holy person, so therefore being holy must mean being a different person. Strange as it sounds, I thought that being myself meant being someone else.
It is dangerous to make everyone go forward by the same road, and worse to measure others by yourself.
—St. Ignatius Loyola
David kept reminding me that I didn’t need to be like anyone else except me. “You do not have to change for God to love you,” as Anthony de Mello said. It took a while for that to sink in. Besides a lingering sense that I wasn’t worthy of being a Jesuit, there was envy involved. At various times in my life, especially when things were not going so well, I have been envious of other people. At heart, the envy boiled down to this: everyone else has it easier than I do. And so they are obviously happier than I am.
This is false. And dangerous, too. One tends to compare one’s own life, which is always an obvious mixture of good and bad, with what one falsely perceives as the perfect life of the other. In this way, we minimize our own gifts and graces and maximize the other person’s.
Ironically, we sometimes do the opposite with problems, shortcomings, and struggles: we maximize our own and minimize the other person’s. Others seem more clever, more attractive, more popular, more relaxed, more athletic, more whatever, than we are, and so therefore (it seems) they lead charmed lives. Likewise, other people, we surmise, face no real problems in their lives. Or if they do face problems, we think, their problems are not as bad as ours.
But no one leads a charmed life. Everyone’s life is a full measure of graces and blessings—as well as struggles and challenges. “Every house has its problems,” as my mother would say when we would drive through wealthy neighborhoods and envy the lives of the rich. And if we consistently compare our own complicated reality with the supposed perfection of another’s life, is it any wonder that we wish we were other than who we are?
Compare and despair, as a Jesuit friend likes to say.
How do you move toward becoming who you are? Here are a few important steps, with some Ignatian highlights, for this lifelong journey of discovery.
BECOMING YOURSELF
First, remember that God loves you. As David liked to say, paraphrasing the psalms, “God takes delight in you!” Or as the theologian James Alison suggests, God likes you. If you doubt this, a quick examen of the things for which you’re grateful may help you see the way that God has blessed you, and loves you. Reading the first few verses of Psalm 139—“You knit me together in my mother’s womb”—often helps as well.
Second, realize that God loves you as an individual, not simply in the abstract. God cares about you personally, much as a close friend would. Remember how God speaks to you in personal, intimate ways, in your daily life and in prayer, which only you can appreciate. This is a sign of God’s personal love for you.
Third, accept your desires, skills, and talents as things