I wasn’t expecting St. Ignatius to turn up in Dorothy Day’s diary, but there he was. Throughout her long decades of journalism, activism and living in community with the poor at the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day was a constant reader, frequently recording words that inspired her, sometimes in passing, sometimes at length. In the summer of 1962, Dorothy wrote about St. Ignatius’ intimate care for his friends, as expressed in a letter to St. Francis Xavier.
“Tell me every detail,” Ignatius wrote, “down to the number of fleas that bite you at night.” Dorothy was impressed by his care and concern for every detail of the lives of those he loved. She wrote, “If your interest in people — all the people you encounter — is personal, you like to know everything about them.” And the same is true for all of us.
I don’t ever make it through a day without a text or email to a friend or family member, asking: How did the meeting go? What did the doctor say? How much is the carburetor repair going to set you back? These are the details, the fleas, upon which true intimacy is built, the intimacy that sustains us through the turbulence of our lives.
When Ignatius set out on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he turned down offers of accompaniment and went alone. He wanted his consolation and the provision of his needs to come only from God, not from others. But over the years, Ignatius learned that sometimes the surest refuge God sends us is precisely the care of another person. “Ar scáth a cheile a mhaireann na daoine,” the Irish proverb goes. “It is in the shelter of other people that we live.”
The order that Ignatius founded rested on the bedrock of intimate friendship with six close friends he met at the University of Paris. They called themselves Compañía de Jesús. There was probably a military connotation there from Ignatius’ days as a soldier, but also one of deep partnership. They were companions, ones who, the etymology suggests, broke bread with each other.
When their missions took them to far-flung places, they kept up with a truly voluminous correspondence, such an impressive collection that one Jesuit scholar has suggested that correspondence itself was the liturgy that the early Jesuits celebrated. I love that idea: a liturgy, literally the communal work of the people, being celebrated across space and time, scratched across paper with ink, built out of fleas, the details of lives carried out far apart, but joined in spirit. Suddenly all the text threads I carry around with me on my phone in my pocket seem a bit more holy, or at least more freighted with sacred meaning.
My favorite detail is this: St. Francis Xavier loved his companions so much that he cut their signatures out of their letters and wore them around his neck, a 16th-century proto version of the locket, or perhaps those ubiquitous “best friends” necklaces we all wore in grade school. I have just such a necklace pair with my dearest friend who lives a thousand miles away from me. It’s shaped like a little envelope, and it opens to reveal a tiny piece of stamped metal that reads “anam cara,” another beautiful Irish phrase. It means “soul friend.”
I believe that’s what Ignatius’ friends were to each other. It’s what Dorothy Day’s friends were to her. And it’s what my friends are to me. Next time your phone pings or you sit down to type up an email or even pick up a pen for a good old-fashioned letter, remember that what you are building is not just an everyday exchange of information, but a holy bridge upon which two people can meet, lighting each other’s candles for a long-distance liturgy.
Cameron Bellm is a Seattle-based writer and retreat leader. After completing her Ph.D. in Russian literature at UC Berkeley, she traded the academic life for the contemplative life, combining her love of language with a deeply-rooted spirituality. Her poems, prayers and prose can be found at the intersection of mysticism and activism, linking our modern lives with our ancient faith.
Cameron’s work has been featured in America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, Geez Magazine, Red Letter Christians and Catholic Women Preach. She writes regularly for the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States and is the author of “A Consoling Embrace: Prayers for a Time of Pandemic” and “No Unlikely Saints: A Mental Health Pilgrimage with Sacred Company.”
