The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (9 page)

But in the springtime the little meadow exploded with life. On those days, I felt as if I were biking through one of the science experiments we did in school. Fat grasshoppers jumped among the daisies and black-eyed Susans. Crickets hid in the grasses and among old leaves. Bees hummed above the Queen Anne’s lace and the tall purple and pink snapdragons. Cardinals and robins darted from branch to branch. The air was fresh, and the field was alive with creation.

One spring morning, when I was ten or eleven, I stopped to catch my breath in the middle of the field. The bike’s metal basket, packed with my schoolbooks, swung violently to one side, and I almost lost my homework to the grasshoppers. Standing astride my bike, I could see so much going on around me—so much color, so much activity, so much
life
.

Looking toward the school on the brow of the hill, I felt an overwhelming happiness. I felt so happy to be alive. And I felt a fantastic longing: to both possess and be a part of what was around me. I can still see myself standing in this meadow, surrounded by creation, more clearly than almost any other memory from childhood.

In such uncommon longings, hidden in plain sight in our lives, does God call us.

Exaltation

Similar to these longings are times that might be best described not as ineffable desires or strong connections, but times when one is lifted up or feels a sense of exaltation or happiness. Different from longing to know what it’s all about, here you are feeling that you are very close to, or about to meet, the object of your desire.

Here you feel the warm satisfaction of being near God. You are in the middle of a prayer, or are in the middle of a worship service, or are listening to a piece of music, and suddenly you feel overwhelmed by feelings of beauty or clarity. You are lifted up and desire more.

One evening, the English poet W. H. Auden gathered together with his fellow teachers at the Downs School, when something unexpected happened to him. He describes it in the introduction to a book edited by Anne Fremantle called
The Protestant Mystics:

Auden seems almost to have met the desire of his heart, almost to have found exactly what he was looking for, but when he arrived at the place, he was just as quickly taken away from it. Such powerful experiences increase our appetite for a relationship with God in the future, even if we never again experience God’s presence in quite so clear a way.

Beauty as a passage to God is a similar experience, and it crops up in fiction almost as often as it does in real life. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel
Brideshead Revisited,
about a Catholic family in England in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the characters, Sebastian Flyte, a young aristocrat, confesses that he is drawn to the beautiful stories in the Gospels. His friend Charles Ryder, an agnostic, protests. One can’t, Charles says, believe in something simply because it’s lovely.

“But I do,” Sebastian says. “That’s how I believe.”

Clarity

There is a
New Yorker
cartoon that features a wizened, monkish-looking man hunched over a large book. He looks up and says to himself, “By God, for a minute there it suddenly all made sense!”

Sometimes we feel that we are tantalizingly close to understanding exactly what this world is about. On the day of my ordination, at a church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I entered the back of the church a few hours before the Mass was to begin. The choir was rehearsing, and as I stood in the empty church, which would soon be filled with friends and family, I thought,
This is right where I should be
.

Feelings of clarity may be similar to feelings of exaltation. Indeed, many of the feelings we’re looking at may overlap. In some of the cases described in this chapter, we might also experience what Ignatius calls in the
Spiritual Exercises
“consolation without prior cause,” a sense of God’s communicating with us directly and giving us encouragement. “When the consolation is without a preceding cause there is no deception in it,” he writes, “since it is coming only from God our Lord.”

Isak Dinesen spoke of such clarity in her book
Out of Africa
. She writes about the “transporting pleasure” of being taken up in an airplane by her friend Denys Finch-Hatton. “You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel toward them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.” Moviegoers will remember this scene from the 1985 film of the same name, in which Meryl Streep speaks lines from the following passage. Dinesen writes:

Desires to Follow

Desires to follow God are more explicit. It is not a desire for “I know not what” but for “I know exactly what.” And you may be able to identify it as the desire for God.

In the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, spiritual directors often invite you to meditate on the gifts that God has given you, and then, as Ignatius suggests, on your own sinfulness. This is not as formulaic as it sounds. After spending time thinking about blessings in their lives, people often feel, in a sense, unworthy of what they have received. Not that they’re bad people. Rather, they ask,
What have I done to deserve all this?

At this point in the Exercises your faults may come to the fore. As Bill Creed, a Jesuit spiritual director, once told me, “In the bright sunshine of God’s love, your shadows begin to emerge.”

This can lead to the realization that you are, as Jesuits say, a “loved sinner,” imperfect but loved by God. Typically this prompts gratitude, which leads to a desire to respond. You may feel so overwhelmed by God’s love for you, even in your “imperfect” state, that you want to say “Thank you! What can I do in return?”

For Christians this often takes the form of a desire to follow Christ. The response to the urge comes in the Second Week in the Exercises: a series of meditations on the life of Christ. In the Second Week, the desire is more explicit than one for “I know not what.” It is for a particular way of life, that is, following Christ.

You don’t have to be in the middle of the Spiritual Exercises for this kind of desire to manifest itself. You may be reading something about religion or spirituality and think,
This is what I’ve always wanted, to follow this path
. You may be sitting in a church service, hear about Jesus, and think,
Why don’t I follow him?
You may remember the way you felt about God as a child and think,
What would happen if I returned to that path?
Your desires are more formed in this case. You are able to identify clearly your desire to follow a specific path, or to follow God. This is another way that God calls us.

Desires for Holiness

An attraction to examples of holiness is another sign of the desire for God. This can be triggered in at least two ways: first, learning about holy people in the past; and second, meeting holy people today.

In the first case, one famous example of this experience is that of Ignatius. There he was lying on his sick bed, reading about the lives of the saints, when he started to think, in essence,
Hey, I could do something like that
. His vanity was attracted to their great deeds, but a more authentic part of himself was attracted to their holiness.

This is one way that God can call you to holiness—through a heartfelt attraction to holy men and women and a real desire to emulate their lives.

But holiness resides not only in canonized saints like Ignatius but also in the holy ones who walk among us—that includes the holy father who takes care of his young children, the holy daughter who attends to her aging parents, and the holy mother who works hard for her family. Nor does holiness mean perfection: the saints were always flawed, limited, human. Holiness always makes its home in humanity.

So we can be attracted to models of holiness both past and present. Learning about past examples of holiness and meeting holy people today often makes us want to
be
like them. Holiness in other people is naturally attractive, since it is one way that God attracts us to himself. Experiencing the attractiveness of sanctity today also enables us to understand why Jesus of Nazareth attracted great crowds of people everywhere he went. Holiness in others calls out to the holy parts of ourselves. “Deep calls to deep,” as Psalm 42:7 says.

This is something of what Marilynne Robinson, author of the novel
Gilead,
had in mind when she wrote in an article, “What I might call personal holiness is in fact openness to the perception of the holy, in existence itself and above all in one another.”

Vulnerability

Here’s an often misunderstood and misinterpreted statement: many people feel drawn to God in times of suffering.

During a serious illness, a family crisis, the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one, many people will say they turn to God in new ways. More skeptical minds may chalk this up to desperation. The person, they say, has nowhere else to turn and so turns to God. God is seen in this light as a crutch for the foolish, a refuge for the superstitious.

But in general, we do not turn to God in suffering because we suddenly become irrational. Rather, God is able to reach
us
because our defenses are lowered. The barriers that we erected to keep out God—whether from pride or fear or lack of interest—are set aside, whether intentionally or unintentionally. We are not less rational. We are more open.

Remember my story of being on that operating table and realizing—with blinding clarity—my desire to be a priest? That is one reflection of this same phenomenon. The desire was always there, as was God’s call within that desire. But with my defenses lowered, it was much easier to see it.

When he was in his late fifties, my father lost a good job. After a long while, he found a new position but one that he found unsatisfying. As many people know, it is difficult to find work and start a new career later in life, at an age when many people are looking forward to retirement. It was hard for him and for my mother.

His job required an hour-long commute from our home in suburban Philadelphia. One dark night, in the parking lot of his office, far from home, my father had a dizzy spell, lost his balance, and fell. He ended up in the hospital. Tests showed what everyone feared: cancer. Cancer of the lungs had spread to his brain, which had caused the fall. (My father had been a heavy smoker for much of his life.)

During the next nine months, my father’s physical condition went steadily downhill, despite chemotherapy. Soon he was bedridden and began to rely on my mother to care for all of his physical needs at home. The last month of his life, when my mother could no longer help him out of bed, he said, “I think I should go to the hospital.” So we moved my father to a subacute care facility.

But while his physical condition declined, his spiritual condition seemed to improve.

Near the end of his life, my father started to talk more frequently about God. This was a complete surprise. While he had been raised Catholic and graduated from Catholic grammar school and high school, and while he attended Mass during important feast days, he had, as long as I had known him, never been overtly religious.

But as he neared death, he asked my Jesuit friends to pray for him, he treasured holy cards that people sent him, he mused about which family members he longed to see in heaven, he asked what I thought God would be like, and he made some suggestions about his funeral Mass. My dad also became more gentle, more forgiving, and more emotional.

I found these changes both consoling and confusing.

One of the last people to visit him was my friend Janice, a Catholic sister, who had been one of my professors during my theology studies. After his death, I remarked that my dad seemed to have become more open to God. In response, she said something that I had never heard but seemed to have already known.