Entering the Jesuits

 August 15th 2013

47 years ago yesterday Elen, Julie and John drove me to Shadowbrook in Lenox Massachusetts, and I began my Jesuit odyssey. Neither my mother nor my father came with us because they were adamantly opposed to my becoming a Jesuit. I was very determined, some of it, as far as I can tell, was conviction based on a genuine religious experience, and some of it was driven by a deeply ingrained rebellious streak. So today, even after more than 35 years living outside the promises of religious life, I find myself contemplating my noviceship while very aware of the dangers of steering while staring in the rearview mirror.

While I was at Dartmouth, I had worked with some of the people who went on to become real luminaries in the field of religious studies: Jacob Neusner, often celebrated as perhaps the most published author in history, having written or edited more than 950 books and articles. In 1964-6, he had just finished his book on Yohanan ben Zaccai (Hebrew: יוחנן בן זכאי‎, c. 30 - 90 CE); Hans Penner had been mentored by Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago; Jonathan Z. Smith looked at me and said, “If I lived in a culture that fostered a vibrant cult of Socrates, I’d be a follower,” I was too stunned to object or really understand what he saying. I have continued to follow Robin Scroggs’s work on the letters of Paul and homosexuality. (just found this on the internet: "I sat amazed as I heard the Bible being invoked in ways that were wholly inappropriate to any canons of biblical scholarship. Perhaps something snapped in me...for better or worse I decided somebody needed to provide resources that would give both clarity and honesty.") I consider myself one lucky guy. I talked about the Jesuits with three of these men and they encouraged me. Penner told me that western religious practice was a bit tame in comparison to that of India but most westerners shouldn’t venture too far afield. I tend to agree with the 1st part of the statement.

In the noviceship, I focused on exploring the genius of Ignatius and his religious practice. That’s what we did. Jumping every fifteen minutes when the fire alarm shook the halls was also good practice though at the time I thought that I was learning some kind of discipline that had always escaped me. When I slept till noon on the first day at Weston, I realized that I was destined to be a failure at “early to bed, early to rise.”.

I didn’t have too many ideas about what I would do as a Jesuit, figuring that would come in time. My superiors also seemed fairly content to allow me to follow my own lights. And I did, through anti-Vietnam war activism, community organizing, art and architecture. If it hadn’t been for the celibacy requirement, I might still be a Jesuit. Most of my superiors and mentors were thoughtful, devoted, men. They were also in the grips of a massive sea change the scope of which no one really grasped. That is the nature of those kinds of events. I’ve come to learn that the prevalent open attitude in New England was not held with equal fervor throughout the Arrupe years by all Jesuits, so I was again extremely blessed.

Though I suppose that I’m technically a cradle catholic--I was baptized at St. Charles in Bridgeport and spent three years at Fairfield Prep--dad was an agnostic, New England free-thinker and my mother came from an extremely anti-clerical old Irish family. I never fully embraced or even understood the cultural underpinnings of the American Jesuit enterprise. I could get into the European roots, but then it was mostly through French scholarship and Dutch liberalism. I loved the religious drama of Claudel, Dutch worker priests and Charles de Foucauld’s Little Brothers of Jesus. An odd mix. But I imagined that I might carve out a career as a priest architect. Or something.

Then, in the early 70’s along came coming out and my discovery of Buddhist meditation. There weren’t a lot of manuals to guide a young man through the entrance in the culture of same sex affection. So I dove into psychotherapy, again with the blessing of my superiors. And when it came to dealing with the anti-sex attitudes of the church establishment, I discovered lots of gay men practicing Buddhism where, at least on the American shores, admonitions about gay sex were rarely heard. 

Then there was a long slow process of watching old connections, opinions, beliefs, memories, ties fade away. This is, I suppose, where some of the objections to what we call (inaccurately) no-mind meditation come from: I discovered that most of the positions that I felt most strongly attached to just disappeared over time. I had several experiences of knowing without a doubt that Jesus meant exactly what he said, and understanding that that understanding did not depend one iota on any assertion that he was, or was not god. Over time, I think I came to see that even asking those kinds of questions were really a kind of diversion from real practice. Or maybe a better expression of the dilemma might be that it’s a waste of time to argue that the sun is shining at noon when the more immediate question might be something like where did I put the sunscreen?