Now that I have reached the ripe age of eighty, an event I celebrated this past July, people sometimes ask me when I plan to retire.  My usual answer goes something like this: “People retire in order to be free to do whatever they enjoy doing, and, since I thoroughly enjoy what I am presently doing what would it mean for me to retire?  Besides, we Jesuits rarely actually retire”.

So what am I doing that I find so satisfying? 

My main ministry is to be part of the team of spiritual directors here at Loyola House of Ignatius Jesuit Centre of Guelph. Thanks to our wonderful and dedicated staff we work extremely well together towards the accomplishment of our mission of creating a place of peace within our retreat and training centre, ecology centre and farming enterprises.

Accompanying people in their journey of faith continues to be for me a humbling privilege and a deep consolation, especially during the Forty-day Institute on the Spiritual Exercise.

This year as usual the Institute brought together priests, religious brothers and sisters, pastors from other Christian traditions, and numerous lay people both married and single. 

They came not only from across North America but from Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Korea, Guam and Great Britain, including an Irish Sister who has been many years serving in Nazareth. 

It was wonderful to witness how deeply bonded they became through the first thirty-five days of almost complete silence. 

The Holy Land was well represented since on our team we were privileged to have Kathy Baroody, who was completing a training program here.  Kathy was on loan to us from her l’Arche community in Bethlehem, where she has been living and working for many years.

I also continue my over forty- year commitment to l’Arche, the revolutionary community started in France by Jean Vanier in 1964, which is now a federation of over 130 communities in some 33 countries on 5 continents. 

I first connected with l’Arche in 1968 while doing my final year of Jesuit formation, Tertianship, and then beginning graduate studies in Christian spirituality at the Institut Catholique in Paris.  I have remained deeply committed ever since. 

It was a joy to reconnect with many l’Arche friends from communities around the world at the International Federation gathering that took place last May in Atlanta, Georgia.

Since I did not get to make my annual visit to l’Arche in France this September, I am looking forward to going there near the end of April to help lead a retreat at la Ferme, their retreat centre in Trosly.

When I entered the Jesuits in 1956 immediately after graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering, it was a very different world and a very different Church.  The unimaginable changes that have taken place during this more than half a century have been for me exciting, scary, liberating and

challenging.

Nowadays I believe it takes a much deeper faith and more radical commitment to be a Catholic and to be a Jesuit.  A century ago the unquestioned stability of these institutions made it much easier to simply trust in the structures and be carried by the strong, steady current.  Now the currents are extremely turbulent with what seems like gale- force winds swirling in all directions. 

I can’t say for sure if my faith in God and the person of Jesus is deeper than it was years ago but my desperate need for this faith is stronger than ever and my reliance on my fellow Jesuits more essential, and for this I am very grateful.

I am also grateful for the sustaining gift of living and working on this magnificent 600- acre property with its farmland, woods, marsh lands and numerous splendid walking trails. 

I came here in 1980 to be part of the Ignatius Farm Community (IFC), founded several years earlier by Fr. Doug McCarthy, SJ   and which that year had expanded into a second home and the management of the entire farm with its herd of beef cattle and other live stock, apple orchard, vegetable gardens and over 300 acres of pastures, grain and hay fields. 

The goal of the community was to be a place of welcome, healing and growth for vulnerable men and women coming from prison, psychiatric hospitals or other difficult circumstances and people with learning disabilities, along with one or two formed Jesuits and others in formation and lay volunteers.

I personally experienced this welcome, healing and growth thanks to the goodness and variety of people with whom I lived and worked, (particularly with the ex-prisoner with whom I gratefully and sometimes turbulently shared a small room in the Farm House for over ten years), as well as from the land itself and the experience of farming on it.  Unfortunately, we were asked by the Jesuit provincial leadership to close this community in 2001.

Nevertheless, while now being a part of the Jesuit household here on the property, I continue to live in the comfortable solitude of the six and a half by five metre one room Little House, a workshop that we winterized as an extra bedroom for the Farm House sometime in the late 80s.  And I continue to keep in touch with former members of IFC; a number of us gather several times a year for various events and parties.

One of the great lessons I am learning from these various experiences and from the aging process itself is the importance of welcoming vulnerability and risking  tenderness, especially my own as well as that of others. 

Patrick Mathias, the extraordinary psychiatrist who served the l’Arche community in France for over twenty years, speaks poetically to this matter in a piece he once wrote and from which I now quote a few lines:

  “Tenderness as a social bond is often hidden, its expression often taboo

It causes us to offer too much of our gentleness and sensitivity

No more protective shell!

Tenderness is on the inside of things, at the opposite pole of violence

It means compassion – that capacity to suffer with the other in the context of

a shared destiny.

Suffering is inseparable from happiness

What is it to be an adult?  To be tender, to be fragile.

To be like everyone else.”

In conclusion I can say that I feel blessed in my priestly ministry at the heart of which is announcing the tenderness of God.

And over the years I am realizing more and more that to be a Jesuit and to be a priest is simply to try my best to be a good, adult human being.