Lent reflection
Every week through Lent, a writer will reflect on how a time of challenge brought unexpected grace
I love being a Jesuit. And I’m never sure where to start when I
describe the reasons why. Certainly my life as a priest, my ministry as a
writer and Jesuit spirituality are all things for which I will never be
able to thank God adequately. But the most surprising blessings of
Jesuit life have been my Jesuit brothers. The Society of Jesus can’t
promise this in its vocational literature, but I had no idea that
religious life would mean knowing so many people I consider not only
friends but as close to brothers as I can imagine.
Life in a
religious order, however, is not perfect – and members of those orders
will be the first to tell you that. Yet even that lack of perfection has
turned out to be the source of grace for me.
Many years ago, I
lived in a Jesuit community (which no longer exists) where someone
disliked me. Of course people in religious orders are like everyone
else: they like some people but not others. And I’m not perfect by a
long shot, so I don’t expect everyone to cotton to me. But this was on a
different level. Perhaps a better way to put it would be to say that he
despised me. For several years, he refused to speak to me, answering
only when I directly put a question to him; he would sigh heavily and
roll his eyes whenever I spoke in community; he would often leave the
dining room table when I sat down to eat; and he occasionally muttered
curses when passing me in the hall.
I apologise if this is disheartening about religious life, but most people have had these experiences at least once in their life. Religious orders are not immune from human frailty and even sin, as we should know by now.
Through the years, I tried everything I could to rectify or even ameliorate the situation. I struggled to remember what I had done to anger him. (I couldn’t recall anything.) I attempted to reconcile with him. (He threw me out of his room.) I spoke to my superiors, who were both sympathetic and solicitous. (They spoke to him, but nothing changed.) Eventually I learned to live with it, pray for him and, as one wise and elderly Jesuit counselled, simply be “cordial” to him. It was, however, a great penance.
A few years into this situation, I went on my annual eight-day retreat and confessed to my retreat director how difficult this was. In response, she suggested what I thought was an odd passage to pray with: the Rejection at Nazareth in the Gospel of Luke (4:14-30). In that passage, as I’m sure you know, Jesus stands up in the synagogue in his home town and, in so many words, proclaims that he is the Messiah. Initially, the townspeople praise what he says, but then, after he suggests that they will probably demand a miracle, they turn on him. While some modern-day preachers soften what happens next, we should be clear: they try to kill Jesus. “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” But Jesus escapes, “passing through their midst”.
When preachers or commentators dilate on this passage, they often
offer this insight: the townspeople couldn’t see God, even when God was
right in front of them. The spiritual takeaway is usually a question:
where do we overlook God in our lives because God is too familiar? Or:
what familiar person, place or thing is a carrier of God’s grace that we
might be ignoring? All good questions.
But in my prayer,
something different happened, a shift in perspective. At the time I was
writing a book on Jesus, and so I knew that Nazareth was a minuscule
town of only 200 to 400 people. So when I imagined Jesus standing up in
the modest synagogue (which, many scholars surmise, was not a building
but an outdoor gathering place), I imagined him speaking to a small
group of people who not only knew him, but whom he knew as well.
Suddenly
it dawned on me: Jesus had to speak this truth before people he knew.
Thus, he must have known, or have been able to intuit, what their
reaction was going to be. It was a shock to have the story turned around
that way: from the perspective of the crowd to the perspective of
Jesus.
In my prayer, I imagined speaking to Jesus and asking: “How were you able to do this?”
And in my prayer, I heard him say to me: “Must everyone like you?”
It
was a shock, not only in the clarity with which those words came to me
(not aurally but felt) and their import. At the time, I felt like
saying: “Yes, they do!” After a few more prayer periods, it dawned on me
that Jesus was inviting me to be free of the need to be loved, liked or
approved of.
That helped immeasurably in my relationship with
this other Jesuit. And so, I thought, that insight was given in prayer
for that reason. But God wasn’t finished.
Five years later, in 2017, I published a book called Building a
Bridge, about the Church’s relationship with LGBT Catholics. Though
people laugh when I say this, I didn’t expect the book would be a big
deal. The first edition was physically very small, just 140 pages, and
didn’t challenge any Church teaching. Mainly, the book encouraged the
institutional Church to treat LGBT Catholics with the “respect,
compassion and sensitivity” called for by the Catechism and the love,
mercy and compassion called for by Jesus.
Within a few weeks, it
evoked astonishingly strong reactions. First came intensely emotional
responses in parish lectures, where I was stunned to witness standing
ovations, receive tearful hugs and see long lines of people waiting to
thank me. In time I realised that simply having the conversation made
people grateful.
But then came the negative backlash, which I
had anticipated, but not to this degree: endless personal attacks and
hateful comments, including name-calling, from even supposedly
reputable Catholic commentators, websites and magazines. It went beyond
disagreement into hatred.
At times it was hard to keep up. I
was called (you can look it up) “heretic”, “apostate”, “sodomite”,
“homosexualist”, “false priest”, “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, as well as
“pansy”, “fairy” and every homophobic slur you can imagine. The
far-right website Church Militant directed their followers to “spam” my
social media accounts, which led to thousands of hate-filled messages.
Talks were cancelled after online campaigns. In my office at America
Media, I received not only obscenity-laden phone calls but what I came
to think of as Catholic death threats: none threatening outright murder
but notes saying: “I hope you die soon.” Some attacks came even from a
few clergy and members of the hierarchy, who often revealed their lack
of knowledge of what I had written, preferring to get their intelligence
from the web. One US bishop condemned the book in his weekly column but
admitted halfway through his essay that he hadn’t actually read it.
Fortunately, I had the support of my Jesuit superiors and, a few
months later, came the pushback to the pushback, with invitations from
cardinals and archbishops to speak in their dioceses, a surprise
invitation to speak at the Vatican’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin
in 2018 and, finally, a 30-minute audience with Pope Francis in the
Apostolic Palace in September 2019, in which we discussed LGBT ministry
in the Catholic Church, and after which I felt I was walking on air.
But
in those intervening weeks, the personal attacks brought me back to the
question that I heard in prayer: “Must everyone like you?” The answer
is, “No”. Not everyone liked Jesus, so why should everyone like me? The
freedom from the need to be loved, liked and approved of was a great
gift, as Thomas Merton used to say, “in the order of grace”.
At
this point, you might expect an “inclusio” of sorts, in which I tell you
that in the end that Jesuit who detested me finally reconciled with me.
That’s not what happened, however. Instead, he simply moved out of the
community. But the grace that he left behind was the freedom to try to
be like Jesus. To be free of the need for approval, to place myself on
the side of those who find themselves on the margins, and, when
attacked, to be able to say, with Jesus: “Who cares?”
James Martin SJ is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America and author of the new book Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone (William Collins, £16.99; Tablet price £15.29).
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