WHO WAS the most important person in your religious formation?
Fr. David Donovan, SJ, the assistant novice director during our novitiate training. He was also my first spiritual director and the person who taught me how to pray. Fr. Donovan taught me Ignatian contemplation – the spiritual exercises that Jesuits practice in which you imagine yourself in a particular scene from the Bible. David also taught me about reviewing the day to see where God is in my life, and he taught me the most important thing about the spiritual life, which is that God desires to have a relationship with you.
What led you to the Jesuits?
I believe it was Providence. I had been working in corporate America for six years, feeling very unhappy. One day I stumbled upon the writings of Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk, and by a peculiar set of circumstances I asked my local parish priest about becoming a priest. He suggested, in addition to looking at the local diocesan seminary, that I also check out the Jesuits, who ran Fairfield University, which was only 10 miles away from where I lived.
Now, the Jesuits really seemed to fit me, and I often say that if it weren’t for that priest’s stray comment I might well have become a Franciscan or a Benedictine!
You were ordained in 1999. In these 14 years as a priest, have you ever thought you had chosen the wrong path?
No; there are of course difficulties and challenges with being a priest or a member of a religious order. The most difficult times for me were the early years of the sex abuse crisis in the United States; however, I feel sure that God called me into this particular vocation, and that God will continue to give me the strength and the grace to go on. We Jesuits place a lot of emphasis on ‘the call’, and for that reason I particularly like the stories of Jesus calling the first disciples.
How would you define God to a non-believer?
With non-believers I like to start off with questions like: “Why is there something rather than nothing at all? Where did creation come from?” Usually that gets them thinking about God as the source and ground of all Being.
With believers, on the other hand, the challenge is to help them create a picture of God. With this type of people I point to the figure of Jesus, and I say, “If you have trouble imagining what God is like, just look at the Gospels.” People often think of God as an unforgiving judge or a harsh task master, but Jesus’ parables show a God who is kind, loving and compassionate.
For myself, I pray mainly to Jesus – the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
When one is in love, one wants to have an intense relationship with the person he or she loves. How do you cultivate your relationship with God?
In the same way you would cultivate a relationship with a friend or someone you love: by spending one-on-one time with that person. With God this means that we must pray.
Also, one of the most important thing in any relationship is honesty. If you only say the things that you think you ‘should’ say to your friend, the relationship will soon grow cold and distant. Likewise, if in prayer we only say the things we think we ‘should’ say, then our relationship with God will begin to grow cold.
It is also important to be aware of where God is in your daily life, and finally it is important to listen carefully to what God is trying to tell you – listening is another hallmark of any good friendship.
When ‘relating’ with God have you ever felt that there was a breakdown in communication; that there was no one ‘on the other end’?
It sometimes does feel that God is distant, that prayer is dry, and that our daily lives are devoid of God’s presence. And I feel that sometimes as well – it’s natural to feel these things. But we have to remember that our friends do not always call us every day, even though they love us. God is always there, but we are not attentive enough at times to hear Him. A friend of mine says, “If you feel that God is absent, it’s not God that has moved, but you.”
Prayer is the way of communicating with God; why is prayer so difficult?
Simply because we are human beings. We cannot always be as attentive as we should; sometimes we are too focused on ourselves; sometimes we are impatient, and do not give God enough time to act.
Also, we have to remind ourselves that we are not in charge, and that prayer is, after all, a gift: it is God who is doing the praying within us, so the idea that we should be able to snap our fingers and instantly hear God is like the delusional belief that we are wholly in charge of our lives. God is in charge.
Any relationship we may cultivate – be it with a friend, spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend – is not always going to be rich and rewarding. On many occasions we will simply need to wait patiently for those times when we are more open to hearing God’s Word – prayer is something that even the saints struggled with.
Have there ever been moments of intense suffering in your life?
Indeed there have. An extremely difficult moment was when my father died from lung cancer in 2001. Others were when I lost friends to illnesses and accidents. I worked for two years with refugees who suffered in East Africa, and I also lived through the terrorist attacks of 9/11 here in New York, and I was also working in a Catholic magazine covering the sex abuse crisis. No one’s life is free of suffering, including Jesus’. Suffering is part of the Christian life.
In those dark moments, did you feel that God was close to you, or did you feel alone?
I feel God closer to me precisely in times of suffering. The reason for this, I believe, is that when we are suffering, we are more open and vulnerable, so God can reach us more easily in those times. That’s why you hear so much about people experiencing God in times of pain and struggle – it’s not that God is closer to us in those moments, we are simply more open to Him.
Your latest book Between Heaven and Mirth has been enthusiastically received as an invitation to permit real joy to enter our lives through the vehicle that sustains us. Do you think that humour and laughter should play a greater role in the lives of Catholics?
Absolutely. Pope Francis has said that we cannot be true Christians unless we are joyful. Catholics for too long have though of Jesus mainly as the ‘Man of Sorrows’, but in my book I remind people that He was also a ‘Man of Joys’. That becomes clear if you look at various Gospel stories and also remember that He was fully human. Of course some of His life was filled with suffering, especially during the Passion, but a great part of His ministry was a ministry of joy – healing the sick, raising the dead, enjoying table fellowship with people on the margins, spending time with His friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Someone who told such clever parables and amusing stories as Jesus did must have had sense of humour.
We really need to get away from this idea that Jesus was glum, morose and sad all the time. And we need to recover a sense of Christian joy, for the ultimate message of our faith, that Christ has risen, is the most joyful message you can imagine. As the old saying goes, “If you believe in the Good News tell your face!”
In 2006 you wrote the book My Life with the Saints, and I was very pleased to see that Francis of Assisi played an important role in your life. But what about St Anthony of Padua, has he ever played any role in your life?
Among American Catholics I sometimes joke that the third most popular prayer after the Our Father and Hail Mary is St. Anthony St. Anthony, please come around, something is lost and cannot be found.
Before writing that book on the saints St. Anthony was for me mainly the founder of lost objects which, by the way, he is very good at! However, after writing that book I grew much more interested in St. Francis and his Order, and I eventually read one or two biographies on St. Anthony of Padua, read a serious biography of him and learned that he was a devout Christian with a fascinating life.
Francis, the first Jesuit Pope, has garnered great consensus from believers and non-believers alike. What do you think is the secret behind his popularity?
The first secret is that he is able to radiate Christian joy to the people around him. Pope Francis is also able to connect with people at a very basic level, through symbolic acts, like choosing not to move into the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, where the popes have traditionally resided, and instead choosing to remain in a simple two-room suite. Other symbolic acts of his are embracing a person with cerebral palsy at St. Peter’s Square, washing the feet of imprisoned youth on Holy Thursday, including women and Muslims, or embracing people after Mass with a big smile on his face. Francis is teaching us not only through his words, but through his actions as well.
My mother, who is of Italian origins, has told me that she liked all the popes, but that she loves this one.
Are you working on any new writing project?
I’m in the middle of writing a book about Jesus, and very much enjoying it. The book is a life of Christ based on a twenty or so events from Jesus’ life; it combines the narrative of a pilgrimage I made to the Holy Land two years ago, with the study of some Bible passages, and some spiritual lessons from those events from the life of Christ. Each chapter will take an incident, like the Nativity in Luke, for instance, and will look at what Bethlehem is like today, look carefully at the story of the birth of Christ, and will then draw some spiritual lessons for our own lives.
The book will be called Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and I’m having a great time writing it!
BORN ON 29 December 1960 in Plymouth Meeting, Pa, James Martin is a Jesuit priest, writer and Editor at Large of the Jesuit magazine America.
Martin graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1982, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Economics (B.S. Econ.) with a concentration in Finance. After working for six years in corporate finance with General Electric Co., he entered the Society of Jesus in 1988.
In 1995 Martin began graduate theology studies at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology (now Boston College School of Theology and Ministry), in Cambridge, Mass., where he received his master’s degree in Divinity (M.Div.) in 1998, and his master’s in Theology (Th.M.) in 1999. While in Cambridge, he worked as a chaplain at a Boston prison. After completing his Jesuit studies, he was ordained a Catholic priest in June 1999. On November 1, 2009, he pronounced his final vows as a ‘fully professed’ Jesuit.
Fr. Martin is the author of several award-winning book, My Life with the Saints (Loyola), A Jesuit Off-Broadway: Center Stage with Jesus, Judas and Life’s Big Questions (Loyola), The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life (HarperOne). His latest book is Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life (HarperOne). He has also authored a new e-book called Together on Retreat: Meeting Jesus in Prayer.
He is also the author of Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints (Paulist), Searching for God at Ground Zero (Sheed & Ward), In Good Company: The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity and Obedience (Sheed & Ward), and This Our Exile: A Spiritual Journey with the Refugees of East Africa (Orbis).
Updated on October 06 2016