The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by Rev. James Martin, SJ

Need an example of a great priest? Rev. James Martin, SJ.

Father Martin is everything I expected the ideal Jesuit to be: worldly and yet focused, intellectual and sensitive. I've always had a romanticized conception of the Jesuit order (beginning with my father's experiences as a student at Holy Cross, where he played football against Jim Brown and trudged through cracked snow to 6 am mass, to my own readings of the controversial Malachi Martin--no relation!).

This past summer I bought Father Martin's newest book, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, with intentions of reading it during my long train rides from Dover to Newark. It was early July, and I was teaching a course at Rutgers University: The Literature of Sport. We read Don DeLillo's End Zone and Leonard Gardner's Fat City; we watched LeBron James leave the Cavs and marvelled at how NFL Films marriaged the classical with the violent.

Yet all of our classroom conversations, inevitably, returned to the corporeal. The body as object, as artifice, as resource. Athletes understand mortality better than most: bodies wear down, break, and pass away. And I've always thought the Jesuits to be the most "athletic" of orders, and the credit goes to St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, a regiment of prayer and life that forms the backbone of the order's sense of practical faith. I was thinking sport but, as usual, I was really thinking God, and how our bodies are gifts (even at their worst moments), and how faith is mental and emotional but so very physical. These bodies are what we have and what we own, and what we do to them matters.

I finished Father Martin's book during a ride and a half--it's so lucidly written, so smartly structured that I recommend it to those who normally hesitate to touch the literary (or equally so, the religious). I taught the course MTWTh, 8:15 to 10, but had Martin's words in the back of my mind. Body + Sport = Spiritual Exercises, it seemed. The summer is a good time for faith: between maniacal amounts of basketball and volleyball, I can attend morning or afternoon masses, 10 to 15 of us in the church, connected by (and sometimes without) words.

Martin's book, like the best sermons, like the best religious treatises, does not exist merely as a text, but informs and inspires. Martin's book, in a curious way, better allowed me to feel and be Catholic. It gave the connections of my faith form, and reminded me, in a way, that such belief was acceptable in the larger world. Perhaps that was what finalized my childhood conception of Jesuits: here were priests who were also teachers, lawyers, doctors, writers, counselors, psychologists, artists, and more. Priests who lived in and out of the parish, who could communicate as easily with a theologian as they could with a couple needing advice or comfort.

Father Martin is certainly visible. He's the culture editor of America and the "resident chaplain" on The Colbert Report. He writes, and writes, and writes, and gives the impression that he lives to not only spread the Word, but to give it the flesh of language and the applicability of experience. This book puts those words into motion. It begins with, appropriately enough, St. Ignatius, but elucidates why Ignatius was so essential and genius. Ignatian Spirituality, for Martin, is "finding God in all things." How simple, and yet how perfect? Martin often uses the word "freeing" in this book, and such a philosophy does wonders.

Martin was not always a priest, of course. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, had a successful corporate career at GE, and yet, with all that, needed another way to be "freed." Martin speaks of "detachment" in this book, and yet this sense of being detached doesn't mean locking yourself in a room: it means lifting away the inessential. Pausing. Reflecting. Here's Martin's complete list of the essentials of Ignatian Spirituality, distilled and focused:

1. Finding God in all things.
2. Becoming a contemplative in action.
3. Looking at the world in an incarnational way.
4. Seeking freedom and detachment.

I connect this collective sense of freedom with the fourth chapter of the book. Martin offers practical means toward "noticing" God within our daily existences. I want to laugh at how many people long for signs and wonders (I don't laugh, though, since I often want the same) as evidence of God's appearance within their lives. Mountains moved, seas parted. The Jesuit way--through the Examen--is to alter the externally-prescribed pace of your life and take ownership of your day. Beautifully simple, the examen contains 4 steps:

1. Gratitude.
2. Grace to know one's sins.
3. Recasting of the day--moment by moment.
4. A request for grace and forgiveness.
5. Resolution to change, and then the Our Father.

The safety in structure of the Examen and other exercises returns quite clearly in chapter twelve, where Martin explains a sort-of Ignatian step-by-step for decision making. It's one of my favorite sections of the book because it feels like Father Martin is talking to me. So often priests are seen as being distant theologians (and sometimes authoritarians). I've never experienced either possibility. I've encountered priests who, like Father Martin, are genuinely concerned with people. Spiritual psychologists, as it were, who have the grace and example of Christ as the ultimate sample. Read Martin's book for moments like this: profound advice and clarity of guidance.

Martin's later discussion of vocations is what brings me back yet again to the book. There are so many possible vocations of Catholics--both as religious and lay persons. Martin's a big fan of the Merton tendency toward self-discovery and revelation: I think I'm quoting Merton correctly in "what we have to be is what we are." Again, it's both freeing and empowering. It has me thinking about my own vocations. Teacher? Writer?

Will I become a deacon?

Maybe. We'll have to see. And wait (I'm only 29).

Tomorrow: I'm so thankful to share an interview with Father Martin!