The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [178]
Fourth, avoid the temptation to compare yourself to others and denigrate or undervalue yourself. Remember: compare and despair.
Fifth, move away from actions that are sinful or that keep you from being compassionate, loving, and free. And move toward actions that make you more compassionate, loving, and free. Think of the meditation on the Two Standards from the Exercises to help you with this.
Sixth, trust that God will help you because God desires for you to become who you are meant to be. And pray for God’s help.
Seventh, recognize that the process of becoming the person you are meant to be is a longprocess and can take time.
IT WILL TAKE SOME time before you are able to integrate your insights fully, and longer before they translate into action, and still longer before you find that you have changed inside and outside.
Remember the story of Ignatius if you doubt this.
Five years after I entered the Jesuits, I returned to Campion Center, in Weston, Massachusetts, where I had made my very first retreat. My director that year was a light-hearted Jesuit named Harry, who had lived with us as a spiritual father in the novitiate. It was almost impossible to be sad around him: he was consistently joyful and funny. When one of the three original members in our novitiate class decided to leave, leaving only two behind, he instantly coined a motto for our little class, taken from a Greek phrase: Oupolla, allapollou. Not many, but much.
During that summertime retreat, I lamented to Harry that I didn’t seem to be changing quickly enough. I knew the kind of person I wanted to be: free, open, relaxed, loose, compassionate, patient, mature, generous. But my imperfections held me back. How would God change me? When would I change? Why wasn’t it happening faster?
The Slow Work of God
Patience is an important companion on the path to discovering your own vocation, to becoming the person you would like to become, and, in fact, to any change. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist, who knew about the slow working of time, wrote this in a letter to a friend, on patience:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Harry smiled and looked out the window to the grounds of the retreat house. “You see that tree over there?” he said.
I glanced at a large maple tree on a knoll, which I passed frequently as I wandered through the woods. “It’s green now, but in a few months it will become a beautiful red.” Then he paused. “And no one will see it change,” he said.
THE SALT DOLL
Ultimately we find our identity and our vocation in God. Our desires come from God and lead to God.
To wrap up our discussion about vocation, let’s end with one of my favorite stories from Anthony de Mello, which beautifully illustrates this concept. It’s called “The Salt Doll,” and is about, well, a doll made of salt.
A salt doll journeyed for thousands of miles over land, until it finally came to the sea.
It was fascinated by this strange moving mass, quite unlike anything it had ever seen before.
“Who are you?” said the salt doll to the sea.
The sea smilingly replied, “Come in and see.”
So the doll