St. Ignatius Day.... (part the first)

“live Maine Lobsters… I have never had an account like that before”

These were the words of the Kitchen manager here at Georgetown to me about her preparations for the annual feast which follows mass on the feast of St. Ignatius. Live. Maine. Lobsters. Now as a New Englander by birth, I have to admit, live Maine lobsters evoke a ton of memories. Memories of being kids and having lobsters race across the kitchen counter, memories of steaming them on the beach, and of course all of the memories of Ignatius Days past. (all 4 of ‘em) As a Jesuit, there’s a part of me which has some moment of trepidation, because while live Maine lobsters are a little pricey at home, they seem extravagant here in the land of the soft shell crab from Chesapeake bay. This of course brings me to the point of real tension which is of course with the vow of poverty, but that’s another discussion for another time because while Live Maine Lobsters evoke something extravagant, they also point to another reality, the reality of the importance of celebration.
We mark extraordinary moments in our lives with extraordinary gestures. We have feasts for weddings, ordinations, baptisms, first communions, and then the more common occasions of Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. Food serves as a symbolic medium of what is most important, the closeness of people who are important in our lives to mark the important days and moments together. For Jesuits, St. Ignatius day, as the feast of our founder, has an especially significant meaning. In celebrating Ignatius we celebrate the saint of course, but we also celebrate the society of which we are a part, and I think we celebrate being Jesuits, and just what that is. For some of us it is a celebration of having survived the year, for others it is a moment of profound gratitude and joy.
Our lives aren’t perfect, and even though we strive to be the companions of Jesus, we find ourselves so often like the disciples running away on Good Friday. We can grow faithless when the road grows dark like anyone else. We can be stupid, confused, and broken. There is some reassurance in that though, because as surely as we can be the disciples running away on good Friday, there is still I think in us a bit of the rabble that feasted with Christ in Matthew’s house. That rabble, which could hear, could see, and leave all behind to follow Christ who sought them out first at a feast.
I often hear (and hate) the phrase “the poor you will always have with you” quoted as a reason why someone shouldn’t do the kind of work for justice I do. Taking Christ so horribly out of context repulses me. In context there was a certain admonition that the extravagant things which sometimes happen in life (and should probably only happen sometimes) mark the more important reality which lies underneath. The feast of Ignatius is not about those live Maine lobsters, and I have been without them on Ignatius day before, but that extravagant moment reminds us of the specialness of the occasion which is born out of the joy of our brotherhood, the grace of our vocation, and the beauty of the world in which we are called to act as companions of Christ.