by Fr. Jack Bentz, SJ

Jesuits almost always live with other Jesuits. We don’t live in monasteries, priories, convents or hermitages; we live in Jesuit communities. By calling these collections of men ‘communities’ we can make explicit that which is implicit in the way most people live. Families are communities, as are groups of friends, roommates, housemates and members of communes. Jesuit communities are not families and this word- “community” reminds that we are not bound by blood but also, we are not just a group of individuals living alone together. We have not chosen to live with a particular community but rather, God has given us our brothers for reasons known only to God.

While there is a very real practical components to living together, the richer reason, or I should say opportunity, lies in the day to day experience of living with other people. Other people who are on mission with Christ but who are both ‘other’ and ‘people.’ Here lies the rub and the richness.

All humans live with the constant temptation to see other people not as other humans but as objects. We are always on the verge of forgetting that the other person is a person at all. Our private experience of the world and of God can be so vivid that we don’t allow other people to have an equally vivid and mysterious experience. Other people become objects and then quickly become obstacles to what we desire. Other people become problems and often the best we can hope for is learning ways to cope with them. This is not the building of the kingdom through relationship with each other. This is not what God had in mind when he made more than one of us.

When we are able to be in relation with other people the way Christ was, then they remain whole humans with mysterious complex lives, motives hidden to us and desires that might run counter to our own but are valid none the less. When we see others as human then we can relate to them with our full humanity and so the promise of life giving human- to- human relationship is possible. This is why we bother to live with each other rather than live alone. Jesuits are on mission together, together with Christ and with other Jesuits and with all our lay partners. In this we can become living models of communities that can change the world