Jesuits and Partners: Community and Communion

Jesuits and their colleagues will continue developing a distinctive ignatian way of associating.

What this "men with others" actually means is still emerging. It surely means further formation for Jesuits, who were chided in the Rome Consultation for knowing all too well how to work alone and not knowing much at all about working on teams (Jesuits joined the chiding). "Men with others" probably also means that everyone get clearer about the Jesuit role in assuring the authenticity of the Exercises as the source of ignatian spirituality.

The Salesians declared about lay partnerships that the Salesians were the "heart of this experience and the faithful memory of the Salesian spirit." Are the Jesuits? Whose will be the "faithful memory of the ignatian spirit"? Look at the worldwide alumni/ae associations, the association of Jesuit business schools and others like it, the IJELP, the JRS, the Ignatian Associates, the Ignatian Apostolic Networks, the CLC - who's at the heart? Whose will be the long, long memory?

For many spiritualities, the with others is summed up in the word family. The Dominicans chose this language in their General Chapter in Mexico in 1992: "After some thirty years, this is a reality: the re-appearance and development of The Dominican Family." Probably a majority of the congregations use this "family" metaphor. So did the Synod of Bishops about religious life and so does the Code of Canon law [canon 677]. Ignatian collaborators have shied away from calling themselves "family." Yet it is a good metaphor, speaking worlds. What keeps the ignatian partners from using it?

Perhaps ignatian spirituality and its traditional language suggests a response. Through discerning prayer and love, partners come to think, value, see the world, and decide together in Christ. They act in Christ; they share Christ's mission in their own collaborating. Worldwide, it is clear, they become friends, going beyond the need in any time and place for belonging to a community. Worldwide, ignatian partners talk about themselves as Friends in the Lord. Not family, just friends.

Friends, however, in action. This kind of partnership is what Spiritual Exercises have produced from the beginning. Perhaps ignatian associations will develop communion rather than community. Communion - friends and associates preparing, fortifying, encouraging one another in a great and perhaps perilous enterprise. Communion is the relationship Fr Kolvenbach assigns to the one who gives and the one who makes the Exercises. Communion is what the participants in the Rome Consultation kept coming back to. Friends in a mission they have all helped identify as what God wants to do now, here, among these people.