There have been rumblings about director Martin Scorsese making a film of Shusaku Endo’s magnificent historical novel Silence, about Japanese martyrs of the 17th century.  Now it seems that the rumor may become a reality, according to Spero Forum.

In a preface to Endo’s book, Scorsese writes perceptively about faith:

How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? … Shusaku Endo understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience.  The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture…That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical.  Yet I believe that they go hand in hand.  One nourishes the other.  Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion.  It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

I, for one, can’t wait to see the film.

Church historian Pat McNamara writes about how the Jesuits at St. John’s College (later Fordham University) befriended Edgar Allen Poe in the last years of his life.  The poet, grief-stricken and depressed after the death of his wife, found companionship with the Jesuits.

One of them remembered Poe as a “familiar figure at the college . . . It seemed to soothe his mind to wander at will about the lawn and the beautiful grounds back of the college buildings.” Another wrote: “It was one of Poe’s greatest gifts that he could make friends wherever he went. To know him was to love him… It was a pleasure to see him and still more to listen to him.”

For his part, Poe liked the company of Jesuits.  He told a friend they were “highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars, they smoked and they drank and they played cards, and they never said a word about religion.”

Luis Espinal, SJ, is a Jesuit hero I hadn’t heard about.  He was a Spanish Jesuit who worked for social justice in Bolivia.  He was murdered in 1980.  He wrote this.

Losing one’s life means working for others, even though they don’t pay us back. It means doing a favor without it being returned. Losing one’s life means jumping in even when failure is the likely outcome – and doing it without being overly prudent. It means burning bridges for the sake of our neighbor.

Losing one’s life should not be accompanied by pompous or dramatic gestures. Life is to be given simply, without fanfare – like a waterfall, like a mother nursing her child, like the humble sweat of the sower of seed.

Train us, Lord, and send us out to do the impossible, because behind the impossible is your grace and your presence; we cannot fall into the abyss.

In 1534, Ignatius and his companions went to the church of Sainte Pierre in the village of Montmartre north of Paris, and  took vows to work together as a company.  It was an important moment because this band of brothers soon became the first Jesuits.  When my wife and I went to Paris a couple of weeks ago to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary, I was eager to visit this spot.

On the day we visited, Sainte Pierre didn’t look much like the church in the painting by Maurice Utrillo above.  Trucks and cars were parked in front and the small courtyard was filled with booths for a street fair.  We were stunned when we walked inside.  An experimental video with some disturbing imagery was playing on a screen in front of the altar, accompanied by a loud and harsh sound track.  The video was part of an arts festival.  Either the pastor or a friend of his had created it; our French wasn’t good enough to fully understand the explanation from a somewhat chagrined church secretary.

This wasn’t what I was expecting.  I was disappointed and a little angry. But then Ignatius and his companions didn’t get what they were expecting either when they made their vows.  They thought that God would send them to serve in the Holy Land.  They implemented Plan B — putting themselves at the disposal of the pope — when travel to the Holy Land proved impossible.

Things change.  Montmartre was a quiet village on a hill overlooking Paris when the companions made their vows in 1534.  No doubt they wanted a quiet place to pray and reflect.  Today Montmartre is a lively, noisy place with throngs of Parisians and tourists enjoying the restaurants, cafes, and art galleries.  It’s a place well-suited to the Ignatian spirit.

We went back to Sainte Pierre a few days later when the arts festival was over.  The video was gone.  The church was quiet.  The light was soft. (At the left is stained glass window depicting St. Ignatius.)  It was a good time to thank God for what happened here in 1534.

Jesuits arrived in Canada in 1611, and went on to shape significant parts of that nation’s history as missionaries, explorers, and educators.  To mark the 400th anniversary, Canada’s Catholic Register of Canada has published a 36-page supplement about the Jesuits and their history.  It’s fascinating reading.

I especially liked St. John de Brébeuf’s advice to his fellow Jesuits about getting along with the native Hurons.  Much of it is good advice today.

To conciliate the Huron, you must be careful never to make them wait for you in embarking.

Tuck up your gowns so that they will not get wet and so that you will not carry either water or sand into the canoe.

Be careful not to annoy anyone in the canoe with your hat; it would be better to take your night cap.

You must provide yourself with a tinder box or with a burning mirror, or with both, to furnish them fire in the daytime to light their pipes, and in the evening when they have to encamp; these little services win their hearts.

You must try to be, and to appear, always cheerful. You must so conduct yourself as not to be at all troublesome to even one of these Hurons.

Do not undertake anything unless you desire to continue it; for example, do not begin to paddle unless you are inclined to continue paddling.

Finally, understand that the Huron will retain the same opinion of you in their country that they will have formed on the way; and one who has passed for an irritable and troublesome person will have considerable difficulty afterwards in removing this opinion.

A group of lay people and Jesuits have set up a new pilgrimage route in Spain that should appeal to walkers and cyclists with an Ignatian bent.  It’s called the Camino Ignaciano (the Ignatian “way” or “road”). It’s the route St. Ignatius walked in 1522 after his conversion.  It begins at his family’s home in Loyola and ends in the town of Manresa, where he began to put together the book that would become the Spiritual Exercises.

The route is about 340 miles long.  The pilgrimage team (which includes my friend Chris Lowney) has mapped the route, divided it into 27 daily walking segments, and cataloged hostels and services along the way. All this information can be found in five languages at the website caminoignaciano.org.

Anyone who walks the route for five consecutive days in the next two years will be enrolled as a “pioneer” pilgrim.

Ten years ago I traveled this route by bus when I made an Ignatian pilgrimage.  The countryside in this part of Spain is gorgeous and diverse–mountains, fertile land, rivers, even a desert.  2022 will be the 500th anniversary of Ignatius’s trek.  By then the team expects the Camino Ignaciano to be well-established.

Church historian Pat McNamara has written a fascinating account of the life of Thomas Ewing Sherman, SJ, an American Jesuit in the late nineteenth century and the son of Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman.  Thomas Sherman entered the Jesuits despite his father’s bitter opposition.  He wrote:

People in love do strange things…. Having a vocation is like being in love, only more so, as there is no love more absorbing, so deep and so lasting as that of the creature for the Creator. What a grand thing it is to be, as it were, shooting straight at one’s mark, living every hour, performing every action in preparation for the great hereafter.

Thomas had an active ministry, fell on hard times, and was reconciled to the Jesuits before his death in 1933.  Read about him here.

Tuesday was the Feast of Blessed Peter Favre, SJ, sometimes called “the second Jesuit” because he was especially close to Ignatius when the order was getting started.  Peter was looking for direction in life when he ran into Ignatius.  He was overwhelmed with choices, like a young person today:

I was always very unsure of myself and blown about by many winds: sometimes wishing to be married, sometimes a doctor, sometimes a lawyer, sometimes a professor of theology, sometimes a cleric without a degree–at times wishing me to be a monk.

He found his purpose in life through the Spiritual Exercises, directed by Ignatius.

Fr. Jim Martin, SJ says that the relationship between Peter and Ignatius shows that friends need not be cut from the same cloth.  Favre was from a humble background and professed a simple faith:  “One friend had seen little of the world; the other much. One had always found religion a source of solace; the other had proceeded to God along a tortuous path.”

Let’s take a moment in IgnatiusFest to think about the men who first followed Ignatius.  We wouldn’t be here without Ignatius, but we wouldn’t be here without the first companions either.  They were a handful of students who met Ignatius at the University of Paris.  They made the bold decision to join their lives together in a radical fellowship.   It was a crucial moment.  As the narrator of this video says, “the first follower turns a lone nut into a leader.”

The video explains how movements get started.  Watch it with Ignatius’s first companions in mind.  (Click here to see the video on YouTube.)

“His holiness was unmistakable; he practiced self-mastery until there seemed to be no difference between God’s will and his own. “Eres en tu casa,” was his wide-armed greeting to anyone who visited him—“You are at home”—and all who talked with him left with the impression that he was kindliness itself: Michelangelo was so affected by Ignatius that he offered to build the Church of the Gesù for nothing.

“Ever a mystic, at times the saint was in the midst of an official transaction when his thoughts would lift up to God and hang there, and his witnesses would shyly shuffle their shoes until he got back to his papers again. But there were also stories of him surprising a melancholic with a jig in order to cheer him up, and his happiness was such that he said he could no longer apply his own rules for discernment of spirits because he was finding consolation in all things—he once said he saw the Holy Trinity in the leaf of an orange tree. Although children threw apples at him when he first preached in the streets of Rome—probably because of his horrid Italian—he soon was as genuinely beloved as the pope. In fact, he was so highly thought of by prelates that in the 1550 conclave at which Julius III was elected pontiff, Ignatius de Loyola received five votes.”

Ron Hansen
Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction