A Reflection for the Feast of St. James, Apostle
Find today’s readings here.
Most of us do not like to dwell on experiences of adversity. Or if we do, we tell those stories in terms of how we overcame the adversity and triumphed over it.
In today’s first reading, Paul does something a bit different. His words are wonderfully comforting, but they do not describe a straightforward “This was hard and then I was able to do it” kind of narrative, the lens we very often want to put on a story of hardship in order to feel comfortable telling it.
Instead, Paul beautifully describes us as “afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” — but all those “but nots” are not our own triumph. They are not an overcoming of anything, at least not right away. Rather, they are our participation in Jesus’ death, “always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus,” that we might participate in his resurrection as well, “so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”
During my tertianship last year, I encountered a passage from a preface that Pedro Ribadiniera, one of the early Jesuits, wrote for the first edition of the Jesuit Constitutions. In it, he says that St. Ignatius’ Constitutions describe Jesuits as “men crucified to the world, and to whom the world itself is crucified.” He outlines how Jesuits, like St. Paul, “in labors, in watchings, in fastings, in knowledge, in long suffering” (and his list goes on) seek the kingdom, so that they “by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report, by good success finally and ill success press forward with great strides to their heavenly country.”
By good success finally and ill success. Not only by our victories, but also by our defeats.
I don’t like to tell, or even think about, the stories of where I have failed. I am thinking in particular of a time when I struggled in school, very uncharacteristically for me, and hid those struggles from people who cared about me. I am not ashamed anymore of the academic struggles, but I remain sorrowful about how I deceived others because I was not able to face them directly. And yet that all is part of my story, part of how I came to know myself, came to know those who love me, and came to know God’s mercy more deeply.
There are simplistic versions of Paul’s insights—and they are not always wrong—that say something like “God writes straight with crooked lines.” And indeed God sometimes does.
But God also writes crooked with crooked lines, and sometimes without any kind of obvious “plan” in place to make them straight, other than the plan of the Cross. God is willing to use “good success finally and ill success,” to bring us home to the heavenly country. Let us not constrain God’s mercy into making every story a story of “good success” only, so that we might appreciate the infinite depths of his mercy all the more.
