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FEATURE:
The Jesuits
November 24, 2000 Episode no. 413

November 7, 2008

Read an excerpt on Ignatius of Loyola and his most famous work, THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, from MY LIFE WITH THE SAINTS by James Martin, SJ (Loyola Press, 2006):

THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES begins, after some preliminary observations, with Ignatius's famous "Principle and Foundation," which lays out in broad strokes his religious worldview: "Human beings are created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save their souls." As such, we should make use of things on earth that enable us to do this, and free ourselves of anything that prevents us fro doing so.

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We should be, to use a favorite Ignatian expression, "indifferent to all created things."

Thanks in part to the word that he chose, indifference, as Ignatius uses it, is a commonly misunderstood concept. It does not mean that we should set aside things (or people) as worthless. Rather, we should not be so attached to any thing or person or state of life that it prevents us from loving God. The Exercises invite us to embrace a radical freedom: "On our part," Ignatius writes, "we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only that which is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created."

One young woman, after hearing those lines, said to me, "I'm not supposed to prefer health over sickness? That's insane!"

Of course no one wants to be sick. But in Ignatius's worldview, health should not be something clung to so tightly that the fear of illness prevents you from following God. As in "Well, I'm not going to visit my friend in the hospital, because I might get sick." Ignatius would say that in that case you might not be "indifferent" enough; health has become a sort of god, preventing you from doing good. The goal is not choosing sickness for its own sake, but moving toward the freedom of knowing that the highest good is not your own physical well-being. For most of us, this kind of complete freedom will remain a lifetime goal.

In my own life, indifference has proven to be a durable spiritual concept. Whenever I find myself overly attached to something -- my physical well-being, my plans for worldly success, my popularity among friends, and so on -- I remember the need for indifference.

When I was working with refugees in Kenya, for example, immediately before I was set to being theology studies, my provincial asked me to wait another year before moving on to this next stage of training. He didn't think I was ready yet for theology studies.

I was crushed. Most of my peers were on the same timetable, and now I was being asked to wait.

The more I thought about it, the more I became consumed with concerns for my reputation, for how things would appear. What would everyone else think? That I was a failure. A bad Jesuit. Damaged goods. I was angry with my provincial and told him so.

When I confessed these feelings to my spiritual director in Nairobi, he counseled not only patience byut a prayer for, as he called it, the grace of indifference. "Can you be indifferent to your need to have things happen on your own timetable?" he asked. "Are you more concerned with how things appear rather than what is really best for you? Might God's timetable be a better one than yours?"

His reminder about indifference helped me weather a short but intense spiritual storm. As it turned out, that extra year, spent working at AMERICA magazine, was a wonderful period in my life -- one that helped me dream about a new career as a writer -- and also helped to better prepare me for theology studies.

A few years later I said to my provincial, "You know, I finally realize that I did have to wait that extra year. You were right."

"I know I was!" he laughed.

But indifference can be a costly grace. Ignatius and the early Jesuits understood this well. In 1539, when a Jesuit whom Ignatius has hoped to send to the Portuguese colony in India fell ill, Ignatius's best friend, Francis Xavier, volunteered. Faced with the decision of keeping his friend at his side or sending him away "for the greater glory of God," Ignatius chose the latter.

It must have been a painful step, one he was able to take only with true indifference. It was this radical kind of freedom that enabled Ignatius to let his friend go, and it was the same freedom that enabled Xavier to become one of the world's greatest Christian missionaries. But the two men, best friends since their university days, would never again see each other. After spreading the message of the gospel in India and Japan, Francis Xavier died off the coast of China in 1552.

Before his departure for India, Francis wrote his best friends a letter from Lisbon, in 1541. To my mind, it is the most moving thing he ever wrote, as it captures both his love for Ignatius as well as his dedication to his new mission:

"There is nothing more to tell you except that we are about to embark. We close by asking Christ our Lord for the grace of seeing each other joined together in the next life; for I do not know if we shall ever see each other again in this, because of the great distance between Rome and India, and the great harvest to be found."

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