Here Paul Andrews SJ talks about making contact – with people and with God.
When my mother died, she went to her thirty-second home. I remember counting them at the funeral, and identifying the Lord’s house as the thirty-second. She never owned any of them; we never lived in a house we owned. I never did till I entered the Jesuits. We were always travelling, always in rented houses. In a sense we were travelling people and that geographical instability left its mark.
As a child I would come to a neighbourhood and school where everyone did things a certain way – ‘the right, obvious way’ – all the time. Having survived many different houses, schools and companions, I grew used to the differences of people, and it was a good preparation for the Jesuits – I’ve lived in about eighty houses in different countries. After leaving one Benedictine school I felt strongly that stability, that precious feature of monastic life, was not for me. God was not in one place (I’m always uneasy when people refer to us as Roman Catholics), though there are holy places.
Providence
You remember Seymour’s remark in one of J.D. Salinger’s stories: ‘All we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of holy ground to the next.’ My faith, like Abraham’s and my mother’s, is a sense of God’s providential care as we move through strange places to a city founded, designed and built by God. In fact I quibble at St. Paul’s word city. I’d like to think of heaven as country, with mountains, rivers and lakes, free from crowds and traffic.
For the last twenty years, since I re-trained in my fifties, most of my days are spent in what you might call therapy, mostly with young people and families. It complements the priesthood in a subtle way. I have to decide every day what I am going to wear. If I am going to give a retreat, or say Mass in a parish, I’ll wear a Roman collar because – at least for the last hundred years or so – that is the sartorial language that people expect.
If I am sitting with a young person, who is quite probably distant from the Church, I don’t wear the collar. They know me as a priest, but the clerical dress is a visible prompt to a certain unhelpful sort of reaction, as though they were going to Confession and were going to be looked at in a moral way. As a therapist, I have to be a methodological atheist. I do not take it for granted that anybody believes in God. He gave us our heart. If you can get back to the healthy centre of it, you can trust it.
Labels
Upright Catholics sometimes protest if I write something which does not stress the God factor. I trust the God factor in an experience with people if I can help them to their inner health and freedom. Freud offered an elegant definition of mental health: the ability to love and to work. If I can help people to love again (and to work again if they are of such an age), if I can help the love to flow again in a family, the Lord is there. You do not need to label him and put up a picture of the Sacred Heart. God is there.
One scriptural phrase that stays with me is that the love of God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given to us. I see that in a tangible way when confronted by people with serious problems, people often weeping on the phone, in enormous emotional tension, but under their distress are still driven by love.
Speech and silence
We were talking recently in our house about community prayer. We Jesuits are verbal people. Jesuit schools were heavily influenced by Quintillian’s notion of the aim of education, to produce vir bonus dicendi peritus, which in an updated and gender-wise corrected form means: good people who can communicate well. We aimed to give them a big supply of words, a copia verborurn – and how we succeeded! The result is that Jesuits talk a lot.
When we were discussing community prayer I realized that what I wanted was silent prayer, without words. I find great help in praying silently in the same room as other people who are praying silently; it makes a difference. As time goes on, I am not addressing God, but God is touching me.
Sacred space
In the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius writes: ‘I will stand for the space of an Our Father, a step or two before the place where I am to meditate or contemplate, and with my mind raised on high, consider that God our Lord beholds me. Then I will make an act of reverence or humility.’
This is a beautiful and simple way of entering sacred space. I am not alone with my thoughts and feelings; God is here with me. So I can say to him, ‘Here I am, Lord’. Let me repeat this inwardly several times. Here I am, Lord. Here I am, in this place, for this day. Here I am, Lord, as I am, just as I am, not as I feel I ought to be. No, here I am, just as I am, with all my real thoughts, real feelings, real worries and concerns, and also my deeper wishes and desires. I come before you Lord just as I am.
But let’s face it, if we have the place and the leisure to pray quietly, we are the lucky ones. Most of the time God touches us, not by subliminal messages, but by a wordless touch which can be painful. The Africans have a more realistic perspective when they say: The Gospels are attractive stories, but the part that matters is the Passion of Jesus. That is what serves us, because most of our life is like that, meaningless suffering. The Gospels are a passion story with a long introduction. This article first appeared in The Messenger (August 2007), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
