Martin Luther King Jr. in Jail
Today is the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, Jesuits. St. Ignatius has always been one of my favorite saints, probably due to 13 years of Jesuit education and my study of what is known as Ignatian Spirituality.
A corner stone of Ignatian Spirituality is the Spiritual Exercises, a “set of Christian meditations, prayers and mental exercises, divided into four thematic ‘weeks’ of variable length”, to be a retreat.
Although I had made the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ for various lengths, three days, thirty days and eight days, it was some years before I really understood the prayer of St. Ignatius in the second week (SE #98) where he prays to God to be like Jesus and says he “desires to be with you in receiving all wrongs, all rejections and all poverty..” Now I do not ‘desire’ to be rejected and wronged but I do understand that at the heart of all nonviolence is the acceptance of insults and false allegations. Martin Luther King Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham jail, Gandhi in all his writings on nonviolence and Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement all made this Gospel message very clear: we must accept insults, injuries, marginalization, and false allegations when we believe in our conscience that we are “doing the right thing”.
This teaching has been a comfort to me recently when administrators at Marquette University had made all kinds of false allegations against me: I was endangering the lives of students, forcing my way into private meetings, disrupting teaching and not respecting security officers. These attacks on my character coming from a Catholic Jesuit University are hard to take but through my training and education in Ignatian Spirituality I now know what St. Ignatius was talking about and what many a follower of the way of Jesus has suffered and not reacted. In a strange way my training in the spirituality of St. Ignatius has prepared me for attacks by a Jesuit university.
This seems like a strange paradox: a Jesuit university attacking someone because he is trying to do and practice what they taught him. It was my years of Jesuit education that guided me in “loving your enemies” and doing good to those who harm you. Now my teachers, Jesuit institutions, have turned on me.
St. Ignatius at the beginning of journey to be a companion of Jesus surrendered his sword at a shrine to Mary and traded his royal clothes with that of a beggar. In fact for awhile he became a beggar on the streets of a city in Spain.
Today when I was entering a grocery store a young man called out to me and ask for money so his grandfather could have a decent burial. We talked for awhile, mostly about his grandfather, I gave him some money, we shook hands and I entered the store. Maybe this young beggar was St. Ignatius today calling me to share in the work of mercy, to bury the dead. The insults and rejections of Marquette University officials seem small compared to the grace and blessing this young man bestowed on me.
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