The Grace of (Old) Friends in the Lord

A couple of hours ago, I returned from a pizza dinner with an old Jesuit friend who is also a delegate of his Province at the General Congregation. Fourteen years ago,in 1994, Hans Zollner and I lived in the British Province Novitiate in Birmingham, England. We were the only two foreigners in the community. I was a young priest in the middle of doctoral studies, poring daily over early 19th century manuscripts in the John Henry Newman archives in Birmingham. Hans was a German scholastic, a year away from ordination, learning English. When I visited Munich that summer of 1994, Hans, who had returned home, met me there and brought me to lunch with his parents (who spoke not a word of English) in the nearby city of Regensburg.

Today, Hans, with a graduate degree in psychotherapy from the Gregorian and a doctorate in theology from Innsbruck, teaches and practices psychotherapy at the Institute of Psychology of the Gregorian University here in Rome.

We decided to go out for a bit of fresh air, after a day of very intense work: many meetings for me, and a full day of rewriting a draft document for Hans. Interestingly, Hans worked the whole day with one other member of the General Congregation, an Irish Jesuit named Jim Corkery, who is also a delegate for his Province.

I say "interestingly" because Jim and I lived in the same small Jesuit community in Washington, D.C. (called Carroll House) for about three years in the late '80's and early '90's. We were both doing graduate studies in theology at the Catholic University of America. Looking back, it is possible that I learned more philosophy and theology from our intense lunchtime discussions with Jim and one or two other members of the community than from the lectures at the University. (That may be something of an overstatement, but not much.)

Today, Jim is Superior of a community in Ireland and a professor of theology at Milltown Institute in Dublin. He did his doctoral dissertation in the early nineties on a German theologian named Joseph Ratzinger. Today, Jim is obviously a "hot item," being one of the world's experts on the theology of Pope Benedict XVI.

A year after Jim (having finished his doctorate) left Carroll House, his place in our community was taken over by a young Korean Jesuit named Joon Ho Chae, who was doing his doctorate in pastoral counseling at the nearby Columbia campus of Loyola College Baltimore. I particularly welcomed Joon Ho, also known as Matthias, because his Korean friends regularly supplied him with large cartons of Korean noodles, which I helped myself liberally to, often without Matthias' prior permission! Today, Matthias Chae is the Provincial of the Korean Province, and is here too at GC 35.

In fact, there are five of us from that small community here at GC 35. Geoff King, former director of EAPI in Manila, an Australian canon lawyer, lived there in the late '70's. Tom Krettek, who had left the year I arrived in Carroll House, is now Provincial of Wisconsin. As Jim Corkery, referring to our beloved Carroll House, put it so well: "Who would have thought that so much good would have come out of that hotbed of neuroses?"

What is the point of these rambling recollections? In this Congregation, I have felt so at home, surrounded, not only by these brother Jesuits I have lived with in the past, but by so many others with whom I have shared community and mission in the past few years: in two long meetings in Loyola, Spain, in 2003 and 2005; in the several weeks of "charm school" in Rome for new Provincials in 2004; in the nearly two months of work together in the Preparatory Commission for this Congregation. And in the past month and half here in Rome, I have met many other wonderful Jesuits.

Thus, tonight, I give thanks again for my Jesuit vocation. I marvel at how God's providence leads us in the Society of Jesus, from so many diverse cultures and nations, to each other, then away from each other, then makes paths cross again. I thank God, that in a world of Kosovo's and Kenya's, where race and tribe murderously divide, in the Society, it is possible for men of different cultures to become and remain, through many years and despite great distances, real friends in the Lord.

This is particularly important for me to remember as the Congregation comes to its last few weeks. Our diversity can be so real and so palpable, at times even disconcerting. In our aula discussions, we try (and generally succeed) to be respectful and open, but more than one Jesuit has come to me over the past month and a half, disturbed by how sometimes, our perspectives, our sense of priorities, even our theologies differ so. In a sense, there is no help for this. Where we come from, what challenges we face day by day, whether we are from Africa or from Eastern Europe, all these profoundly shape our ideas and convictions. One day, after listening to an impassioned intervention from one Jesuit, I could not resist taking him aside in private to remind him (hopefully in a kind way), that the reality of the world is not simply reality of his continent.

Hans and I talked about this diversity tonight. And he reminded me of one of the most important documents of our Jesuit heritage, the Deliberation of the First Fathers. This is the record of the discernment of Ignatius and his first companions, as they asked themselves whether it was God's will that they start a new religious order or not. Their conclusion remains deeply relevant and comforting to me in these final weeks of the Congregation: the companions decide to begin a new Order, because, although they are "weak men," and "from such diverse cultures and natures," in the end, it is "God who has brought us together."