As a second-year novice, Henry Shea spent his long experiment teaching at Scranton Preparatory School in Scranton, PA.
In the novitiate chapel there hangs an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus under which is inscribed the Latin words sic Deus amavit mundum (“for God so loved the world”). This particular combination of image and inscription expresses well, I have long thought, the very heart and center of my own Jesuit vocation. The Latin word sic, incidentally, may also be rendered “as.” Having been called by Christ, forgiven by Christ, redeemed by Christ — drawn near to His heart, above all, in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius — I am then sent out into the world to labor and love just as He loves me. To me it is both as simple and as deep as that.
In
the founding years of the Society of Jesus in sixteenth-century
Europe, Jesuit novices were unique among the many religious congregations
in that from the very first years of their formation they were integrated
into the apostolic body and works of the order. St.
Ignatius believed that the contemplative graces that a novice receives
in the Spiritual Exercises ought to bear fruit through various apostolic
experiments. Since
entering the Jesuits at our novitiate in Syracuse, I too was asked
to labor in a whole host of vineyards — an elderly care facility, a homeless
shelter and soup kitchen in Philadelphia, as a nurses’ aide at Calvary
Cancer Hospital in the Bronx, and as a teacher’s assistant at a local Catholic
high school. Such assignments have provided me
with a wealth of experience, exposing me to a remarkably broad
cross-section of peoples and cultures, affluence and poverty, suffering
and joy.
Before professing perpetual vows, every second-year novice is given a “long experiment,” that is, a five-month long assignment designed to test and confirm a man’s vocation to the Society. In my own case, my superior, Fr. Joe Lingan, SJ, decided to mission me last December to Scranton, Pennsylvania for the spring, where I would be teaching Old Testament, coaching mock trial, and assisting with retreats and campus ministry at our Prep School there. Before long I found myself before classrooms of high school freshmen trying to explain the concept of an ex nihilo creation and covenant theology, offering cross-examination pointers and fine-tuning closing statements in a local courtroom, being deeply moved by students’ faith and reflections on a Kairos retreat, and nearly collapsing of a heart attack in the freshman-faculty intramural basketball game. Aside from those final exasperating moments, perhaps, I may honestly say that I have enjoyed every minute of it. The whole experiment, like my vocation, has been, challenges notwithstanding, an immense gift for which I give thanks to God.
I
ought to add that the people of Scranton have themselves been a very large
part of why this area is such an enjoyable place to minister and work. Many
of them are as the salt of the earth, to use the Gospel expression — full
of generosity, kindness, warmth, faithfulness. The students are also remarkably
eager for interaction with Jesuits and desirous of knowing the living God. Every
Friday during Lent, for instance, due to a wildly successfully campaign
of Fr. Vince Conti, SJ, we had over 200 students attend daily Mass during
their lunch period! Every
Lenten Wednesday, after school, we had some forty students and faculty
turn out for Ignatian prayer sessions based on the Exercises and
guided by the Jesuits of the Prep; the meditations featured everything
from lectio
divina to imaginative prayer to the Examen.
Jesuit high school ministry is a full-time job and then some — from lesson plans to baseball games, track meets to the school play. It is a demanding apostolate, and I often find myself relying upon that characteristically Ignatian prayer for generosity. I am, moreover, regularly inspired by the tireless labors of my brothers in the apostolate. The President of the Prep, Fr. Herb Keller, SJ, is a nearly ubiquitous presence around the school and much beloved by student and faculty alike. Just a few years ago the school completed a major development and building campaign under his direction that produced the beautiful Xavier Student and Athletic Center and Bellarmine Theater, both state-of-the-art facilities. His presidential responsibilities notwithstanding, he is always there for the students, from the multitude of basketball games to the six play performances, the mock trial district final to the next retreat, not to mention teaching a section of Senior English and leading annual summer service trips. I am often reminded that as Jesuit novices, we, to use Isaac Newton’s celebrated expression, stand on the shoulders of giants.
In the classroom I have tried to employ methods similar to those
by which I was taught by a number of great Jesuits and professors at Georgetown
(albeit now at a high school level). 
Theirs
was a pedagogy of friendly Socratic engagement, marked by a relentless
commitment to reason and intellectual rigor, not without a certain delight
and sense of humor, and at the same time based in a profoundly ecclesial
faith, the desire for virtue, and a life of prayer. I want my students
to see the classroom not merely as a place to “download” and “play back”
information, as if they were no different than their iPods, but the site
at which to begin a lifelong and adventurous pursuit after what is real,
in all its goodness and beauty, and to interiorize their findings themselves.
With this in mind, I not only depend upon tests and quizzes, but
ask for regular reflection papers as well, which have been a true privilege
to read.
Given that I only teach three sections of freshman Old Testament, however, I also often do a lot of subbing. On many such an occasion, a student will simply spring a question—anything from “do you believe in miracles?” to the old “how did you decide to become a Jesuit?”— and the whole period fills up from there. These questions often become entryways for them to raise the harder issues that are also much on their minds, such as the embrace of a chaste and faithful personal life or those deeper queries of the human condition to which only faith provides a satisfying answer—matters of life and death, love and suffering, longing and eternity.
As
every high school teacher knows, teenagers are especially attuned to that
all too familiar phenomenon that Holden Caulfield famously coined “phoniness.” We
all want the real deal — the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They
are often particularly surprised and skeptical about the life of the vows: Poverty? Chastity? Obedience? How
does a person live such ideals, or even more perplexingly, why would someone
ever want to? And the answer, of course, is finally found only in
the person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. “Jesuits know
who they are,” wrote our recent 35th General Congregation,
“by looking at him.” I explain to them what I have learned on a daily
basis over the course of my novitiate: that the supernatural grace of God
received through prayer and the sacraments and a deep and personal loving
relationship with the Son are the very conditions of my own religious
life.
This living yet hidden stream transforms the vows from within and
makes them sources of the kind of true freedom that is finally found only
in the double commandment of love (Mark 12:29-34). The fulfillment
of “freedom[,] is not so much the power to choose,” the same Congregation
declared in its fourth decree, “as the power to order our choices towards
love.”
The harvest is rich, though the laborers are few. The other day I recalled for my students that well-known line from the opening of the Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” So, too, one of the central themes of Ignatian prayer is that of desire. “To ask for what I want and desire” Ignatius says time and again in the Spiritual Exercises, knowing that our deepest desire is in reality one with God’s own desire and will for us. If you will permit me, then, a parting word and recommendation: ask the Master of the harvest to show you what His heart has planned for you and ask for the grace to embrace it — whatever it may be — with all your being. “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, not the heart of man conceived what God has planned for those who love Him.”
