Posted on: Saturday, August 21, 2004
EXPRESSIONS OF FAITH
Jesuits seek kinship with God
By The Rev. James Rude, S.J.
I am a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus, a religious order of men in the Roman Catholic Church. I laugh a little at the images that some people throw up against us: that we are the storm troopers of the pope, the most intellectual order in the church, and even the most vicious.
U.S. President John Adams remarked that we Jesuits should "merit eternal Perdition on Earth and in Hell,"Êand his successor, Thomas Jefferson, commenting on the fact that we had beenÊrestored after a few decades of being on "delete," said that our restoration "marks a retrograde step from light towards darkness."
We are a group like most other groups; we have our absolute geniuses and also men incredibly like your next-door neighbor, as simple and straightforward as a sentence without commas.
But our founder, Ignatius of Loyola — now he's a totally different piece of cloth.
He started out in the early 1500s as a soldier, idealistic and romantic, holding together with his dreams an outpost against the overwhelming Navarese army — at least until he caught a cannonball in his knee. That's when all his comrades in arms hauled out their white flags. While recuperating after his third knee operation, he got bored and started reading a life of Christ and a book of lives of the saints, the only two books his brother had in his castle. And then his romantic side took over. If THEY could be saints, he could be even more so. And he daydreamed of his holy exploits, finally realizing that his sexual daydreams frustrated him, but his saintly ones exhilarated him.
He followed this newfound sense, changed his goals in life, spent nine months in a cave at Manresa near Barcelona, with the help of a Benedictine priest working through the gifts and insights God was giving him, and ended up going back to grammar school to learn the Latin that he would need to study theology.
He got into trouble with the Spanish Inquisition who forbade his preaching until he finished his studies, which was not too inhuman of them when you think of it — they simply wouldn't let him "practice without a license." So he went to the University of Paris, which was more relaxed. There he studied, preached and attracted a band of brothers. A few years later they took private vows to bind themselves together to work for God's Kingdom, and the rest is history.
What Ignatius gave to the Christian Church, not just the Catholic Church, is what we call the spiritual exercises: a set of meditations and ways of prayer that will exercise the retreatant spiritually to help discern God's will and to deepen our personal relationship with God.
In a church renowned for such great mystics as Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Ignatius taught us that we simple people can be mystics, that God will communicate with us, if we are prayerful and open in humility not to do our own will, but God's.
The Rev. James Rude, S.J., is associate pastor of the Catholic Campus Ministry at the University of Hawai'i. He writes about Jesuits on www.newmanhawaii.org.
