The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [38]
God can meet us anywhere. One of my closest Jesuit friends is a prison chaplain named George, who has recently started giving the Spiritual Exercises to inmates in a Boston jail. Not long ago, one inmate told George that he was about to punch a guy in the face, when he suddenly felt God was giving him “some time” to reconsider. He decided against violence. Here was God meeting an inmate in his prison cell.
Seek grace in the smallest things, and you will also find grace to accomplish, to believe in, and to hope for the greatest things.
—Blessed Peter Favre, S.J., one of the first Jesuits
God also meets you in ways that you can understand, in ways that are meaningful to you. Sometimes God meets you in ways like those I’ve just described, and sometimes in a manner that is so personal, so tailored to the unique circumstances of your life, that it is nearly impossible to explain to others.
One of my favorite instances of this in fiction comes from Gustave Flaubert’s luminous short story, “A Simple Heart,” written in 1877, which tells the tale of a poor servant named Félicité.
For many years Félicité, a goodhearted young woman, patiently bears up under her grim employer, the imperious Madame Aubain. At one point in the story, Madame Aubain gives her hardworking maid a brightly colored parrot named Loulou, really the only extraordinary thing that Félicité has ever owned. (This is the eponymous bird in Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes, the English author who “misses God.”)
Then disaster strikes: her beloved Loulou dies. In desperation, Félicité sends the bird to a taxidermist, who stuffs him. When it is returned, Félicité sets it atop a large wardrobe with other holy relics that she keeps. “Every morning,” writes Flaubert, “as she awoke she saw him by the first light of day, and then would recall the days gone by and the smallest details of unimportant events, without sorrow, quite serenely.”
After her mistress dies, Félicité grows old and retreats into a simple life of piety.
“Many years passed,” writes Flaubert.
Finally, at the moment of her own death, Félicité is given a strange and beautiful vision: “When she breathed her last breath she thought she saw, as the heavens opened, a gigantic parrot, hovering over her head.”
God comes to us in ways we can understand.
Let me give you an example of this from my own life: At one point during my Jesuit training I spent two years in Nairobi, Kenya, working with the Jesuit Refugee Service. There I helped East African refugees who had settled in the city start small businesses to support themselves. At the beginning of my stay, cut off from friends and family in the States, I felt a crushing loneliness. After a few months of hard work, I also came down with mononucleosis, which meant two whole months of recuperation. It was a trying time.
Happily, I worked with some generous people, including Uta, a German laywoman with extensive experience in refugee work in Southeast Asia. After I had recovered from my illness, our work flourished: over time Uta and I would help refugees set up some twenty businesses, including tailoring shops, several small restaurants, a bakery, and even a little chicken farm. Together we also founded a small shop that sold the refugee handicrafts, located in a sprawling slum in Nairobi.
It was a remarkable turnaround—from lying on my bed, exhausted, wondering why I had come there, anguished that I would have to return home, puzzled over what I could accomplish, to busily working with refugees from all over East Africa, managing a shop buzzing with activity, and realizing that this was the happiest and freest I had ever felt. Many days were difficult. But many days I thought, I can’t believe how much I love this work!
One day I was walking home from our little shop. The long brown path started at a nearby church, on the edge of the slum, which was perched on a hill that overlooked a broad valley. From there the bumpy path descended through a thicket of floppy-leaved banana trees, thick ficus trees, orange day lilies, tall cow grass, and corn