by James Martin
Sometimes it seems as if we can no longer stand to be alone or “out of touch.” But without some inner silence, it becomes harder to listen to those desires that we spoke of. It is difficult to listen to the “still small” sound, as the First Book of Kings (9:12) describes God’s voice. If your eyes are glued to your BlackBerry and your ears stopped up by your iPod, it’s hard to hear what might be going on inside you. Cutting back on these gadgets and not answering every single e-mail and phone call right away may lead to a measure of calm.
“Deep calls to deep,” says Psalm 42 (v. 7). But what if you can’t hear the deep?
Solitude and silence also enable us to connect on a deeper level with others, for we are put in touch with the deepest part of ourselves—God. And in coming to know God, we are better able to find God in others and are freed of our loneliness. So sometimes you have to disconnect to connect.
Likewise, if you’re completely absorbed in the electronic world, obsessively checking e-mail and constantly returning phone calls, it becomes impossible to experience the quirky surprises in the world around us. The examen allows us to not only grow more aware of God in the past, but also, as we practice this discipline, in the present. But if you’re always connecting with friends, you might miss out.
The other day I was walking through a park in New York City. Racing across Union Square to an appointment, I stumbled on a pair of grungy young men; one was playing an accordion, the other a violin. Their music was a sprightly, lively, intricate, intoxicating type of Eastern European folk music. Mesmerized, I stopped to listen to the furious melodies and rising and falling rhythms. A little crowd gathered around, and I noticed that we were in the middle of the weekly open-air farmers’ market, with vendors carefully laying out fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowering plants for all to see.
As I listened to these two skinny guys, one with long dreadlocks, the other with a scraggly beard, I smelled something unusual—fresh peaches—from behind me. What a glorious moment: the music, the sunshine, the crowd, the shoppers at the market, and the smell of ripe peaches.
Just then someone cut through the rest of the crowd: a woman punching her BlackBerry and listening to her iPod. She knifed through us and rushed away. She had missed the entire experience, since she was entirely absorbed in her own world.
Ignatius on “Overloading”
In 1547 a group of young Jesuits at a school in Coimbra, Portugal, were trying to outdo one another in over-the-top religious practices. Ignatius cautions against doing too much, by use of some homey metaphors: “Let your service be a reasonable service,” he calmly counsels the Jesuits.
First . . . God is not really served in the long run, as the horse worn out in the first days does not as a rule finish the journey. . . . Second, gains that are made with this excessive eagerness are not usually kept. . . . Third, there is the danger of being careless about overloading the vessel. There is danger, of course, in sailing it empty, as it can then be tossed about. . . . But there is also danger of so overloading it as to cause it to sink.
Solitude also includes caring for one’s physical health. Giving yourself the gift of solitude may mean allowing yourself time for rest and exercise, necessary ingredients for a healthy life. This may include, as we mentioned in our discussion of “poverty of spirit,” saying no to things that you cannot do. Saying no to some nonessentials and avoiding the constant rush that sometimes characterizes our lives (including my own) is a way of saying yes to a more balanced way of living.
In his Constitutions, Ignatius places a surprising emphasis on the need to attend to a “proper concern with the preservation of one’s health.” In a section called The Preservation of the Body, he shows an understanding of the need for a balance among work, prayer, and rest, based on his own early experience, when he favored extreme penances that damaged his health. Ultimately, he recognized the need for moderation. “With a healthy body, you will be able to do much,” he wrote to his friend Teresa Rejadell.
For Ignatius, the requirements for a healthy life for Jesuits include maintaining a “regular” schedule, and caring for “food, clothing, living quarters, and other bodily needs.” He recognized the need for exercise, even for sedentary Jesuits:
Just as it is unwise to assign so much physical labor that the spirit should be oppressed and the body be harmed, so too some bodily exercise to help both the body and the spirit is ordinarily expedient for all, even for those who must apply themselves to mental labors.
These ways of self-care are to be “exercised by all.” It is a warning against overwork.
In his perfectly named book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap, the psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell notes that pathological overwork may not simply reflect the real demands on our time, but may mask underlying problems. Overbusyness, he suggests, acts as a kind of high and also serves as a status symbol. We may also fear being left out if we slow down; and we avoid dealing with some of the realities of life—poverty, death, global warming—by frantically running from task to task. And, he suggests, we may not know how not to be busy.
Having regular times for prayer and solitude, and a mixture of work and rest, even in the midst of a busy life, is an important step on the way to becoming a contemplative in action. This does not mean that you have to be lazy. Far from it. But the possibility for contemplation grows slimmer if you are always stressed out, frazzled, or ready to collapse from fatigue.
Working (and Living) Ethically
When I studied business ethics as an undergraduate at the Wharton School, most of the textbook cases were of the black-and-white variety, with simple answers. Would you give a bribe to someone who demanded one? (No.) Would you pollute the environment with nasty chemicals? (No.) Would you discriminate on the basis of race or sex? (No.)
When I entered the business world, I was surprised to learn how much subtler most ethical dilemmas are and how rarely they are framed in black-and-white terms.
This is not to say that the black-and-white dilemmas never arise. A good friend of mine, an accountant, was once asked by a manager to falsify some figures on a report. He refused politely, and the manager saw that he was wrong and apologized.
Subtler problems are more common. How, for example, do you respond when you discover that you work in a corporation where moral values are not always paramount? During my time in human resources, I was asked to confront a manager who was planning to fire a longtime employee. That employee had just received an incentive award for outstanding performance. Finding it bizarre that we would suddenly fire one of our top-performing employees, I told the manager it was a bad idea.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I want him out. I don’t like him.”
I reminded him that this middle-aged employee had been with the company for twenty years and had always done a good job and, also, that disliking someone was not a valid reason for dismissal. None of that mattered, I was told. Finally, I said in desperation, “Have some compassion. The guy’s got a family.” The executive’s answer was short and memorable. “To hell with compassion!” he said. (He used even stronger language.) Fortunately, his boss overruled him, and the employee stayed, but the episode left me with a sour taste for the company.
So the third challenge for the working person is: how can you stay true to your moral, ethical, or religious values?
For many people, this means consciously searching for a company whose values are congruent with their values. A friend who manages investments for a multinational corporation told me that he was glad the values he prized—integrity, honesty, rectitude— were precisely what was valued in his world of long-term investing. “If you’re dishonest, your reputation and therefore effectiveness will suffer,” he explained.
But what happens when you work in an environment where, say, compassion is not valued or, worse, is ignored? Finding work in a new company or a different position in your current workplace may not be feasible or even possible.
Part of the solutio
n may lie in maintaining Ignatian detachment from the unhealthy values of the workplace. If you work in an environment that prizes aggressive or downright mean behavior, you need not be aggressive or mean. (Religious institutions are not entirely immune to these sorts of behaviors.) Often a superior level of work can overcome the perceived need to participate in activities that go against your moral grain. Talent can sometimes trump aggression and meanness.
You might also act, as mentioned above, as a leaven of change in an unethical environment, doing your part and hoping that your leaven may help to encourage change. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,“ wrote the anthropologist Margaret Mead. ”Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”
Likewise, you might be entirely unable to change anything yet still able to help others in their struggles. To take an extreme example, St. Peter Claver, the Jesuit who ministered to the slaves in seventeenth-century Cartagena, did not end the slave trade. But he was able to care for those who were trapped in that sinful system by distributing food and counseling to slaves on board the ships that had arrived in the center of the African slave trade in the New World.
In other words, one of the simplest ways we can find meaning in work is by being kind to those who are struggling—the mother working two minimum-wage jobs; the secretary beleaguered by her tyrannical boss; the underappreciated janitor. To put it in Ignatian language, can you see yourself as someone who could “help souls” at work?
Or you might consider it your duty to act prophetically by standing up against the injustice around you. Are there times when you need to gather up your courage to do the right thing? Here the believer remembers the duty to care for all of God’s creatures, no matter where they are on the corporate ladder. The Christian remembers the call of Jesus to care for the “least of these” our brothers and sisters. The Catholic remembers the social encyclicals of the church that ask us to stand for the rights of the poor and marginalized. And the follower of the way of Ignatius remembers Third Degree of Humility, where you choose to stand with those who are persecuted.
You may need to sacrifice some upward mobility in exchange for a clear conscience, since most workplaces rarely reward the prophet. One lawyer friend put it bluntly, “I don’t expect to make partner, because I don’t play the games that others play, but I don’t really want that; it’s not good for me.” If you are working in a corporation that prizes selfishness, you might have to choose between advancement and values. If you are more fortunate, you will be able to find a company whose values match your own.
Discerning your response to ethical questions can be aided by some Ignatian questions from the last chapter: What would you recommend to someone in a similar situation? What would you have wanted to do, from the vantage point of your deathbed? What would your “best self” do?
The Ignatian triad of “riches to honors to pride” can also shed some light here. Salary and wealth are the ultimate measures of value in our culture. That is one reason why salary is a taboo topic in most social gatherings. Once revealed, it brutally places people in a social hierarchy with one another.
So you have to be careful that the riches (a high salary) that lead to honors (the esteem of colleagues) do not lead to pride (the belief that you are better than others simply because your paycheck is bigger).
Remembering the Poor
Step into any airport bookstore today, and you’ll see a section marked Business filled with books on how to get ahead. These books betoken a lively conversation among former CEOs, successful entrepreneurs, and business writers on how to be more successful, how to trounce your competitors, and how to stay on top, with the goal of more and more wealth.
But in those discussions one group is missing: the poor. For at least two reasons: First, their presence is a reminder of the inability of the capitalist system to provide for all, and so they represent a silent reproach to the capitalist “way of proceeding.” Second, the material needs of the poor remind us of our responsibility to care for them. For both reasons, the poor appear, in the words of Pope John Paul II, as “a burden, as irksome intruders trying to consume what others have produced.”
And increasingly they are obscured—by gated communities that shut out the nonwealthy, television shows that focus on celebrities, and slick ads for all manner of expensive consumer goods. Where are the poor? As Dick Meyer says in his book on American culture, Why We Hate Us, “We have used our affluence and abundance to build screens and false idols that obscure what matters most, what is authentic, what is unmediated.” That authenticity includes the poor.
Thus, the final challenge: how to remember the need to care for the poor.
One of my friends, a corporate lawyer, told me he found three things that help: first, being grateful for what you have; second, helping out in a church community; and third, really stretching yourself when you give charitably.
Another goal might be to spend time with the poor. To get to know the poor one-on-one, rather than as objects of charity. And it is not only the poor who benefit; it is the more affluent, too, who discover one of the secrets of the kingdom of God: the poor are able to invite the wealthy to think about God in new ways, as the refugees did for me in Africa. As Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit who teaches theology in El Salvador, wrote in The True Church and the Poor: “The poor are accepted as constituting the primary recipients of the Good News and, therefore, as having an inherent capacity of understanding it better than anyone else.”
THOSE ARE A FEW suggestions on living a spiritual life in the working world based on the way of Ignatius. Overall, it requires carving out time for both prayer and solitude, finding God around you, practicing a degree of detachment from some corporate values, and remembering the need for solidarity with God’s poor.
HOW TO BRING YOUR BEST SELF TO WORK
There’s an old Jesuit joke that says that the clearest sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in the Society of Jesus is that, despite all the craziness and confusion, we’re still here. Only God could do that!
That’s a humble way of looking at our successes, and it reminds us that we are ultimately dependent on God for our future.
Willingness to trust in God’s providence is what Pedro Arrupe had in mind when a journalist innocently asked him the question, “Where will the Society of Jesus be in twenty years?” Arrupe laughed and said, “I have no idea!” Like the church, the Society may be managed by human beings, but we believe that God ultimately guides us. And who knows where God will lead us in the future?
Still, there may be a few concrete reasons that can be adduced for the success of many of our ventures: Jesuits have a common mission; we try to work hard; we are available for many kinds of work; and we are inspired by the example of Jesus, as all Christians are, to accept whatever sacrifices are needed in pursuit of the common good.
Today you could add to that list of reasons another important one: Jesuits work with talented lay colleagues who share in the Ignatian vision. What’s more, Jesuits often work for those lay colleagues who share our vision.
But there may be more specific aspects of “our way of proceeding” that have helped the Society of Jesus endure for over 450 years, ideas that may be useful to those in the business world. Chris Lowney’s book Heroic Leadership has as its subtitle Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World. His book examines the characteristics of “our way of proceeding” that have helped the Compañia de Jesús flourish, and then he proposes some of those ideas as models of “best practices” for workers, managers, and corporations.
A former-Jesuit-turned-investment-manager, Lowney boiled down the list of the “Jesuit leadership secrets” to what he calls the “four pillars.” They are self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism.
Let’s look at Lowney’s four pillars, add a few more, and think about how they might be applied in the working world.
The first pillar is self-awareness. “Leaders thrive by understand
ing who they are and what they value,” writes Lowney, “by becoming aware of unhealthy blind spots or weaknesses that can derail them, and by cultivating the habit of continuous self-reflection and learning.”
By now this should be a familiar part of Jesuit spirituality. The way of Ignatius is designed to help us not only grow closer to God, but also understand ourselves—our strengths and our weaknesses— and whatever it is that keeps us from freedom. The examen, for example, continually invites us to reflect on what we’ve done, what we are doing, and what we will do. Part of Ignatian spirituality is that constant process of reflection, action, reflection.
This spiritual practice is applicable to the professional life. Good workers or leaders will be familiar with weaknesses and stumbling blocks that may derail them, can address those problems and also reflect on what motivates them to excellence.
Second, ingenuity. “Leaders make themselves and others comfortable in a changing world,” writes Lowney. “They eagerly explore new ideas, approaches, and cultures rather than shrink defensively from what lurks around life’s next corner. Anchored by nonnegotiable principles and values, they cultivate the ‘indifference’ that allows them to adapt confidently.”
This is clearly seen in the life of Ignatius, who determined that the times demanded that his men should not be cloistered monks but rather “in the world.” His indifference enabled him always to be adaptable and not overly concerned with incidentals.
That kind of ingenuity also finds expression in the lives of the great Jesuit missionaries. St. Francis Xavier, for example, used any possible means to spread the Gospel, including ringing a bell to attract attention and singing songs in native tongues.
Perhaps the most notable example of this ingenuity comes from Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit who immersed himself in the study of Chinese and donned the robes of the Mandarin scholar, as ways of presenting himself as a man of deep learning to the Chinese nobility. He wrote to his superiors: