The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [88]
It’s also an inaccurate critique. A vow of poverty means living very simply on a limited budget. Our monthly stipend for personal needs and expenses, which we call our personalia, is modest (in my novitiate it was $35). No Jesuit owns a car or house. All income—salaries, donations, gifts, royalties on books—is given to the community.
We must request permission for long trips, as well as money needed for expensive items like eyeglasses, a new suit, or a new coat, which are not covered by our personalia. That permission is sometimes not given. After working in Nairobi for a year, some lay friends asked if I could join them on a week’s vacation on the coast of the Indian Ocean, in a student hostel, which would cost $100. The Jesuit superior told me it was out of the question. When I tried to convince him otherwise, he chuckled. “It’s not a question of whether or not I think it’s a good idea, Jim,” he said. “We simply can’t afford it.”
Compared to some—affluent Americans—we live extremely simply. Compared to many—the destitute around the world—we do not live so simply. Still, every Jesuit priest and brother desires to be as free of possessions, to love poverty, and to live as simply as he can, as Ignatius intended. As one of my spiritual directors told me, “The vows allow you to live simply. How simply is up to you.”
Fortunately, besides Ignatius, I have had many role models in this regard—“living rules,” as I mentioned in the first chapter, men whose lives serve as models for their brother Jesuits. Many of them are revered specifically for their simplicity.
For several years I lived with an older Jesuit named John. Wise, clever, and compassionate, he was a living rule if there ever was one. In the style of his own training, which had taken place in the 1940s and 1950s, he used to call me “Mister.” “Good morning, Mister!” he would say over breakfast. The week after my ordination he greeted me with, “Good morning, Father!”
One day, while still a “Mister,” I knocked on John’s door to ask him to hear my confession. His room was simplicity itself: a threadbare carpet, nothing on his walls but a few framed photos, a crucifix nailed above a rickety wooden kneeler, ancient plastic-covered chairs, and low-wattage lightbulbs.
Then I spied his bed, a single. Without any headboard, it was nothing but a box spring and a mattress perched atop a rickety metal frame. But what caught my eye was the yellow bedspread. An inexpensive polyester spread barely covering the mattress, it looked ancient, thin nearly to the point of transparency, faded in color; it was the most meager bedspread I could imagine.
“Father,” I said, “I think it’s time for a new bedspread.”
“Mister,” he said with a laugh, “that is the new bedspread!”
Guiltily, I remembered that just the week before I had asked for money for a new bedspread (which I really didn’t need). My visit reminded me that for Jesuits, there is little that we really need in terms of material goods.
Voluntary poverty can also be a goad to help the truly poor. As the early Christians used to say, the extra coat hanging in your closet does not belong to you; it belongs to a poor person.
Jesuits who work directly with the poor—here and abroad— often seem more able to embrace a poverty that is closer to what Ignatius probably intended for his men. Part of this is because of the limited resources in those countries. But part of it has to do with the experience of living with the materially poor themselves, from whom Jesuits learn more about real poverty than they can even from the Spiritual Exercises. Closeness to the poor offers insights into why Ignatius called poverty something “which should be loved as a mother.” This is something I learned when I worked in East Africa.
GAUDDY, AGUSTINO, AND LOYCE
Midway through my Jesuit training, my provincial superior sent me to Nairobi, Kenya, to work with the Jesuit Refugee Service, an organization founded in 1980 by Pedro Arrupe, then the Order’s superior general.
The Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) is part of