Walk In Love

WALK IN LOVE

A Jesuit for Fifty Years

Walter Burghardt, SJ

How do you measure 50 years? Especially when those 50 years move from the sidewalks of New York to Osorno in Chile, from Santiago to Samoa, from D.C. to Richmond and Charlotte and back again. When those 50 years embrace classroom and parish, shelter and soup kitchen, counseling and Cursillo, word processor and pulpit, Epiphany and Nova and Pax. Yes, a nine iron, a racquet, and a ski.

Fortunately for me, our jubilarian has summed up his Jesuit half century in two words: walking together. With apologies to him, let me put my own spin on that expression. For I see him walking together in three ways: (1) walking with God, (2) walking with Jesuits, and (3) walking with you.

For these 50 years Joseph Michael McCloskey has been walking with God. I am not about to paint a rose garden. Joe will be among the first to testify that walking with God is not one wondrous waltz; it’s more like a Polish polka. It’s an awesome experience, if only because he experiences God’s presence and God’s absence, God’s face open and God’s face hidden.

God’s presence. I have long sensed that our dear friend can say with the Jesuits’ founder, Ignatius Loyola,

I had a direct encounter with God. I am not going to talk of visions, symbols, voices, the gift of tears. All I say is I knew God, nameless and unfathomable, silent and yet near, bestowing Himself upon me in His Trinity. I knew God beyond all concrete imaginings. I knew Him clearly in such nearness and grace as is impossible to confound or mistake. I experienced God Himself, not human words describing Him. This experience is grace indeed, and basically there is no one to whom it is refused.¹

It is what Ignatius expected of each of his sons, then and now and always. On the other hand, there is what has been called “the dark night of the soul,” when God allows even Jesuits to experience God’s absence. Or, if not His absence, the cross of Christ. It reminds me of St. Teresa of Avila addressing God during a particularly crucifying time: “Why do you treat me like this?” God’s answer: “I treat all my friends like that.” Teresa’s retort: “No wonder you have so few.”

Walking with God is rarely, if ever, a ceaseless Eden, “the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze” (Gen 3:8). That is why St. Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises speaks of spiritual desolation, “such as darkness of soul, turmoil of spirit, attraction to what is base and worldly, and restlessness caused by many disturbances and temptations, all of which can lead to lack of faith, hope, and love. {You] may find [yourself] completely apathetic, lukewarm, and unhappy, as if separated from God.²

To borrow Joe’s rhetoric, Jesus “dogs” his life, hounds him day and night. Hounded him through two heart attacks and a pacemaker. Hounded him until in what he humorously calls his “retirement” he discovered that work and fun, labor and pleasure, Christ and people, altar and putting green are not in competition, are not two separate lives, are linked splendidly together in his basic Jesuit commitment‑ “Take, 0 Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my whole will, all I have and all I possess. You gave them to me‑, to you, Lord, I return it all.” The birdie and the bogey.

Joe’s walk with God reminds me of Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven,” a God who pursues us relentlessly, hears us confess:

... though I knew His love who followed,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest having Him, I must have naught beside.³

All which I took from thee I did but take,
   Not for they harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
   All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home.
   Rise, clasp My hand, and come!⁴

A second walk: Joe walks together with fellow Jesuits. It’s not a minor part of these 50 years, like joining a club, with dues and periodic “blasts.” This Society of Jesus is precisely that‑ a society, a community, a fellowship. Individuals indeed; for we are not fashioned in a factory, on an assembly line. But for all our differences, for all our multicolored ministries, for all our eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, we are a family, one big, sprawling, arguing and loving, bewildering and caring, manic and depressive, obnoxious and lovable family.

Strangely, Joe came to appreciate his Jesuit family by being distanced from it. Distanced for years at a time. Picture him in Western Samoa, with the nearest Jesuit 2000 sea miles away. Picture him driving a truck in Santiago, as lonely for family as an immigrant cab driver in Washington. Picture him in a Virginia retreat house, living pretty much alone with God for ten years. You who are his family by blood or love can appreciate the loneliness of this distance runner.

In our Gonzaga family Joe has recaptured community. With us who share his commitment and respect it, Joe is free to be himself; doesn’t have to prove anything, is accepted for what he is and who he is, is assured that his ministries are worth while. He can spar with us, give as well as take, let his flaws hang out, charm us with a McCloskey smile. He can literally read our lips, respond slyly to what he has not actually heard. His joy is our joy, we delight in his gifts, his compassion, his love for people, his care for the McKenna downtrodden, even his desperate efforts to outdrive Tiger Woods.

This younger brother I envy. Why? He pleasures as much in his nonalcoholic beer as I do in my vodka gimlet. More importantly, he is not afraid to die, because loving Jesus as he does, he is looking forward to a multimillion‑man reunion with the Society of Jesus in heaven.

A third walk: Joe walks together with you. Here is where I see his three vows coming into daily play‑vows that a profound Jesuit theologian, John Courtney Murray, saw as a radical risk‑ the risk of not becoming a man.⁵

By the vow of poverty, Father Murray argued, a religious risks declining responsibility for his livelihood, risks “an inert, parasitic life‑‑living off the collectivity,” risks remaining irresponsible. By the vow of chastity, he risks refusing to enter the world of Eve, risks a premature senility (sex is dead), thinking himself whole when he is not. He risks remaining the proverbial bachelor, “crotchety, emotionally unstable, petulant, and self‑enclosed.” By the vow of obedience, he risks declining “the most bruising encounter of all,” the encounter with his own spirit and its power of choice. He risks being other‑directed, with his choices made for him, refusing ultimate responsibility for them. He risks “an end both to aspiration and conflict”, he can spare himself “the lonely agony of the desert struggle.”⁶

Your presence here suggests your answer to a question: Have the vows freed our jubilarian or enslaved him? Specifically, has the vow of poverty actually liberated him from a slavish attachment to things, to possessions, to what is “his” to clutch and to keep? Has the vow of chastity released him for warm human relations that draw you not only to him but to Christ, freed him from a confining absorption in any one person and from a “play the field” mentality? Has the vow of obedience delivered him from a damnable preoccupation with his own wants, his own good pleasure, his own satisfaction, rather than the will of God and the needs of God’s people‑your needs? Your presence here suggests strongly your enthusiastic answer.

You may have noticed that the word “priest” has not entered this homily. Only because all his ministry is priestly, as long as he is responding to what the Church is asking of him at this moment in her history. Not knowing‑as young Mary of Nazareth did not know‑all that God might ask; knowing only that it is God asking. All his ministry is a living‑out of his call to follow one only Master. His call, like Jesus’ call, not only to “offer gifts and sacrifices for sin” (Heb 5‑1) but to “deal gently” with all of us “since he himself is subject to weakness” (v. 2). This very Eucharist, “the living bread that came down from heaven” (Jn 6,51), is the heart and soul of Joe’s ministry. For very shortly he will utter the words of Jesus that sum up magnificently these precious 50 years, tell us why he walks together with God in the company of his Jesuit brothers: “This is my body [and it is] given for you.” For you.

A final word in summary. In the second reading that was proclaimed to you, a passage from the Pauline Letter to the Christians of Ephesus, there is a concise command that fits beautifully with all I have struggled to express. The command? “Walk in love” (Eph 5:2 ).⁷ To remember Joseph McCloskey is to remember that command. For this has been his life. He has walked in love with God, has walked in love with his companions in Christ, has walked in love with you. What then? Another command, a command of Jesus to each and all of us: “Go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37).

1. Karl Rahner has put these words on the lips of Ignatius Loyola from his profound understanding of Ignatius; see his striking essay “Ignatius Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit,” the first section of his Ignatius of Loyola, with an Historical Introduction by Paul Imhof, S.J. (Freiburg. in B.: Herder, 1978) 11‑13.

2. Spiritual Exercises, no. 317; tr. Elisabeth Meier Tetlow, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (2nd rev. ed.; New Orleans: Loyola Press, 1996) 118.

3. Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven,” in Francis Thompson, Poems and Essays, ed. Wilfred Meynell (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1949) 107.

4. 1 bid. 112. 5.See John Courtney Murray, S.J., “The Danger of the Vows,” Woodstock Letters 96 (1967) 421‑27.

The text of this famous conference, given to the Woodstock College (Md.) Jesuit community, was reconstructed after his death (1967) from two of Fr. Murray’s personal copies, one with his own handwritten emendations, together with a number of slightly varying mimeographed copies. Fr. Murray was reluctant to publish the conference without updating it in the spirit of Vatican 11; he never found the opportunity.