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Posted: January 3
(St. Louis, Missouri) The new year of 2006 found me in an “old” place—in the sense of well-known and familiar. I first came to St. Louis in 1964 to enter the Society of Jesus, and stayed for the first six years of my formation. Then a second stay lasted nine years when I worked on the province staff. This was just a brief visit of a week, to help give a communication workshop to scholastics from three provinces: Missouri, Wisconsin and Upper Canada, some 56 young Jesuits in all.
I found it very encouraging just to be in the presence of so many enthusiastic men preparing to serve the Church. Of course, it occurred to me that we had about as many novices just for one province when I entered as this gathering of men from three provinces in all the formation stages from novitiate to theology. Given the extremely low number of young Jesuits in Europe, however, I was more than content with their number, and even more so with their spirit.
They were very happy to see each other, which was the primary point of the three-day meeting. Community is a key element of the novitiate and first-studies programs, then the scholastics move out into working communities that tend to be full of much older men. Peer support drops, so the annual gathering of scholastics after Christmas is a prime opportunity to swap stories and catch up with friends. The scholastics also want content for the meeting and the planners struck a nice balance between a structure loose enough for informal, face-to-face communication and more formal presentations on the Ignatian roots of our approach to communication and practical considerations about preaching.
My role was to bring in a world-wide perspective of the wide variety of communication apostolates that the Society of Jesus engages. I used a Power Point presentation with lots of photographs and some sound to show the historical roots of our communication apostolate and then connect those roots to current activity. After five years of traveling the globe I have compiled a pretty good first-hand knowledge of our works, which the scholastics found interesting and challenging. They also liked the new A.M.D.G. – A World Is Not Enough movie that we made for the Jubilee 2006 celebrations.
Scholastics can be a very tough audience, as I well remember from my own experience. These guys seem much nicer than I remember myself and my peers. But memory is not always trustworthy. We met at White House Retreat on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. I had not spent a night there since the month-long novitiate experiment when we came to White House to wait table and wash dishes. It did not really test much except our humility, and cannot hold a candle to the pilgrimages that novices take today. My memories are fuzzy on who I was with and what we did in our free time, except for exploring a cave near the train tracks at the foot of the bluffs. When a passing train shook the narrow passing into which we were squeezing, I discovered I was claustrophobic. Mountains and precipices are fine, but not narrow spaces. I learned the joy of companionship as well, a lesson that has only increased with the passing years. And I rejoice to see others learning the same lessons as they grow to treasure the mission of the Jesuits.
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