|
Confessions of a Lay Collaborator
Michael R. Carey
AMERICA Vol. 160, No. 20
Recently I was asked to talk about lay-Jesuit collaboration to the new faculty and staff of the Jesuit university at which I teach. I was asked because the other two speakers are Jesuits and I am a lay "collaborator," and because the topic of my doctoral dissertation was collaboration.
To focus
on lay-Jesuit
collaboration
actually
clouds
the 'bigger
picture'
of mission.
I had one minor problem with speaking to the group: I don't think I believe in "collaboration" anymore. To begin with, I do not like the term "lay collaborator." For me, it has the connotation of working with the enemy, as some did in assisting the Nazis during World War II. No, I don't believe that the Jesuits are the enemy; nor do I fear that after the "liberation" I may be dragged through the streets by an angry mob of lay people to have my head shaved and my body tarred and feathered. At least I don't think so.
Perhaps I feel uncomfortable with the term "lay collaborator" be cause I never hear the term "Jesuit collaborator" used. Whenever I am introduced by a Jesuit to another Jesuit it's always, "And I'd like you to meet Michael Carey, one of our lay collaborators." I wonder what the reaction would be if I introduced a Jesuit to a lay friend of mine by saying, "This is Father So-and-so, one of my Jesuit collaborators at the university." Somehow that just doesn't sound right.
I think that is because in the minds of most people at the university, the Jesuits own the place. It is the old Jesuit joke of the collaborations between the chicken and the pig in a breakfast of bacon and eggs: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. (Of course, I am not saying that the Jesuits are pigs, but then I'm no chicken either. Sometimes I do feel like the proverbial fox in the hen house, although I'm not sure whose hen house it is. )
Because I have gone through the Spiritual Exercises, a retreat experience designed by Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century and continued by successive generations of Jesuits and lay people; because I have read and studied the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, as well as the treatise on education developed from it, the Ratio Studiorum; because I have researched and written on the documents of recent Jesuit congregations and contemporary Jesuit writers; because of all this I am slightly more fluent in "Jesuit-ese" than are some of my lay colleagues, and thus I am slightly more able to move in Jesuit circles. (If I have dinner at a Jesuit residence when I am traveling, I am often asked by the Jesuit sitting next to me what province of the Society I am from; I usually respond that I am indeed a father, but of five children! )
Because I am married and have children, no one ever confuses my life style with that of a celibate. I make my own decisions about where to live and what to do. I worry about making car and mortgage payments and about whether I have enough money to pay for my children's Catholic education, for their music lessons and their orthodontia, not to mention food, clothing and heat. I experience all the pleasures of all married people and most single ones. No one can deny that I am a lay person.
Yet sometimes I feel as though both my Jesuit and my lay colleagues at the university treat me as some kind of mutant canonical life form. I view collaboration as a shared mission among lay people, Jesuits and other religious working together in Jesuit schools, similar to the shared mission that the earliest company of St. Ignatius had (a group whose majority were lay people). But when I share this vision, and the particular consequences I think it has for those working in Jesuit schools, some of my lay brethren look askance at me, as though I wanted everybody to become "mini-Jesuits" and some of my Jesuit "collaborators" look at me as if I were a former priest whose laicization process never quite took hold.
I have been told by more than a few Jesuits that my lay brothers and sisters and I can help them to understand "lay spirituality" a spirituality that they view as wrapped up in day-to-day living, "engagement" with the world, sanctifying it by finding God's presence in the ordinary events of each day. Does that mean that "Jesuit spirituality" is an attempt to find God in a closet? That Jesuits don't try to find God's presence in their work as teachers, administrators or staff? That they deal with God in a side chapel before breakfast and then go about the business of education without another thought of their relationship with God?
I think lay people and Jesuits obviously have different life styles, but I would argue that Jesuits and lay people working together in education have the exact same spirituality: that of being "contemplatives in action," to use the Ignation term. How we respond to God actively involved in the world is affected by our life styles as well as our personalities, our positions within the school, and a hundred and one other factors—of which lay or Jesuit status is merely one. To focus on lay-Jesuit collaboration actually clouds our ability to see the "bigger picture" of mission.
Once I was with a group of Jesuits and lay people talking about collaboration, and a Jesuit friend of mine mentioned that he believed that the fundamental difference between Jesuits and lay people working in the university is that the Jesuits are men who are "religiously obsessed" in the sense that everything they do or work at is connected to their ultimate religious values and goals; lay people, because of their lives "in the workplace" and the demands of providing for a family, necessarily have a secondary connection to the religious mission of the university. Therefore, my Jesuit friend implied, lay people and Jesuits collaborate fully in the realm of teaching, administration and other support services, but the Jesuits have more "ownership" (literally and figuratively) of the religious mission of the school.
I'm not always
successful,
but I do see
making the
connection
between what
I do and who
I am as a
spiritual
imperative.
In this view, lay people can in reality only share to a greater or lesser degree in that mission. It even would be inappropriate to ask all lay people to collaborate at the highest level in that mission, because for many their sacramental duty is to spouse and family. Bacon and eggs; pigs and chickens.
I was getting ready to disagree with my friend when many of the lay people in the room voiced their agreement with his assessment of the situation. That unsettled me slightly, because I relate everything I do, professionally and otherwise, to my relationship with God. I am not always successful (a better way of putting that is that I don't always fail), but I do see making the connection between what I do and who I am as a spiritual imperative. And I think that a great number of people think the same way that I do, although they may express it differently.
If it is true that only Jesuits can afford to be totally connected to the religious mission of the university, and that lay people don't have the time, perhaps not even the inclination, to see their work as "mission," then I say to everyone at every Jesuit school: "Refuse to collaborate! Don't give up the ship! Hire more Jesuits! Let lay people farm the land around the university!"
I don't think it's true. But I do think that the fact that we even have to talk about the "mission" in terms of collaboration shows our sinful state, for when we talk in terms of lay and cleric, Catholic and non-Catholic, man and woman, faculty and staff and all the other categories that fragment us, we prevent ourselves from becoming more perfect instruments of God's will in the world, which is as much a call to and a demand upon lay people as it is upon Jesuits—indeed, as it is upon every person who is a follower of the risen Christ. To say that lay-Jesuit collaboration is an important topic for the future of Jesuit schools is to reach short of the real issue facing Jesuit schools: What is the school's mission, and whose mission is it? Are we afraid to say to a lay person applying at a Jesuit school, "What is your relationship with Jesus, or God, or a 'Higher Power'?" because we think that only Jesuits can think of those things and still have time to be good teachers, scholars, administrators? Do we really expect even Jesuits to be supportive of the religious mission of the school other than by saying an occasional Mass in the student chapel?
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach S.J., the current head of the worldwide Society of Jesus, said in a recent address to the presidents and rectors of Jesuit universities: "We used to think of the institution as 'ours,' with some lay people helping us, even if their number was much greater than the number of Jesuits. Today, some Jesuits seem to think that the number of lay people has so increased and the control has been so radically transferred that the institution is no longer really Jesuit....I would insist that the school itself remains an apostolic instrument: not of the Jesuits alone, but of Jesuits and lay people working together"
The operative line for me is "The school remains an apostolic instrument: not of the Jesuits alone, but of the Jesuits and lay people working together." And you can not have a school be an apostolic instrument of lay people if the lay people are not as "religiously obsessed" as are the Jesuits. Jesuits and lay people working at Jesuit schools may have different life styles, but they have one spirituality, and that is how to make Christ present in the day-to-day workings of a school. That is "Ignatian" spirituality at its heart. That is Christian Spirituality
I suppose, then, that I am a "collaborator." I collaborate with my Jesuit colleagues, and I respect them as Jesuits. I collaborate with my married colleagues, and I respect them as married people. I collaborate with my single colleagues, and I respect their single life styles. I collaborate with religious priests and sisters and brothers, and I respect them as religiously professed men and women. I collaborate with my faith-filled non-Catholic and non-Christian colleagues, and all men and women of good will, and respect them and their beliefs and traditions. I think that we are all collaborators, equal in our ability to contribute to the mission of the school, different in our life experiences and life styles, yet one in being instruments of God in the lives of our students and fellow employees. We are all "collaborators" with God — and that's something I do believe in.
Michael R. Carey is assistant professor of professi onal studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington.
Article published in AMERICA, May 27, 1989, Vol. 160, No. 20
|
