It’s been over ten years since the award-winning actor Andrew Garfield trained as a Jesuit priest. Well, more accurately, since he trained to play a Jesuit priest, Father Sebastiao Rodrigues, in Martin Scorsese’s film “Silence.” The film, based on Shūsaku Endō’s novel, tells the harrowing story of Jesuit missionaries facing persecution and temptations of apostasy in 17th-century Japan. To prepare for this role, Garfield worked with James Martin, S.J., for the better part of a year.
Although Garfield was not raised in a religious home, he says of his upbringing: “It did leave a tremendous curiosity in me and a longing in me to fill that void or to search within that endless chasm of what it is to live a life of faith […] and to be a spiritual seeker.” And he took his spiritual discipleship seriously, practicing The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Examen. He engaged in regular spiritual direction with Father Martin. And Garfield didn’t just walk through the motions or observe the tradition from a distance; Father Martin says Garfield “gave himself generously to the Exercises,” journaling, meditating on the life of Christ. He put to practice what is espoused in Ignatian spirituality and, frankly, everything Father Martin encourages weekly on our podcast.
And the Jesuit master-training took. How do we know that? The proof is in the pudding, as they say. This week, Andrew Garfield joined Father Martin on “The Spiritual Life,” sharing the fruits of studying Ignatian spirituality and what has remained with him in the years since “Silence.” For starters, Garfield tries to remember to pray the Examen nightly. While he’s made the practice his own, with a few tweaks, Garfield was able to recall some of the central steps or movements of the Examen: becoming aware of God’s presence, reviewing the day with gratitude, lingering in the moments you felt most close to God and noting where you may have drifted from God, and looking with God toward the day ahead.
Cognizant of the realities and demands of daily life, St. Ignatius designed the Spiritual Exercises with great adaptability. One can pray with them over the course of a 30-day retreat, which is what Jesuits do, or over several months in what’s often called the 19th annotation.
Garfield practiced the latter format, meeting with Father Martin over an extended period of time to reflect on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and to notice the ways he was encountering Jesus in his own prayer. Out of that experience there was one meditation that left a lasting impression on Garfield: the hidden life of Christ. This “hidden life” consists of the period from Jesus’ childhood, through his teenage years and into early adulthood, but notably before his public ministry begins. These are deeply formative, albeit mysterious years of Jesus’ life, and it was the ordinariness of these years that moved Garfield. From his meditations on these hidden years, Garfield experienced a “beautiful grace” to “not have to be anything but what we are.” He was able to experience the love of Christ exactly as he is, in all his ordinariness.
It may seem ironic that a big screen actor like Andrew Garfield would crave acceptance for his own ordinariness. But at the spiritual core, he is articulating an experience and a longing that is fundamentally human, no matter our job, social status or success: the desire to be accepted for who we are. Perhaps it is because Garfield bears the mantle of cinematic superstar that he can see the perennial challenge so clearly.
“The idea that we feel that we have to be more than we are, it’s heartbreaking,” he tells Father Martin, “whether you’re an actor or not, with social media and with just kind of the mask or the persona that we give to the world,[…] it’s a prison that I long to free myself of.”
We all adopt masks to try to fit in and find acceptance. Some of those masks come with social media filters and curated versions of ourselves. Other times we are “playing a part” in our family systems and friend circles.
Once Garfield saw the humanity of Christ, he saw Christ in his own humanity. Through tears of gratitude, Garfield shared that this insight revealed his own holy longing to “free myself into my ordinariness, free myself into my ability to just be a very flawed, a very beautiful,” he laughs, “very complicated human being.” “And to have that human experience can start to feel like a very rich gift when accepting that aspect of the self.”
This encounter with Christ through The Spiritual Exercises has given Andrew Garfield love, acceptance, but perhaps most of all, interior freedom. In some ways this is a hard-won insight because it requires the individual to give themselves generously to the practice of prayer, meditation and journaling. And through that regimen, Andrew Garfield became, perhaps unwittingly, a poster child for Ignatian spirituality. But ultimately, this encounter with the love of Christ that frees is a gift from the most generous giver. It reminds me of one of my favorite poems from the 13th-century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, translated by Daniel Ladinsky in his anthology, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West.
“Love Does That”
All day long a little burro labors, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about things that bother only
burros.
And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labor.
Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,
he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears
and for a few seconds the burro is free
and even seems to laugh,
because love does
that.
Love frees.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts