The eve of St Ignatius’ Feast Day (31 July) is World Friendship Day (30 July). For many people the joining of these two days will seem strange. St Ignatius is often presented as a driven man, like a military general in his gift for organisation and strategy, a formidable foe to heretics and rebels, and a demander of strict discipline in his followers. A man associated with loyalty, esprit de corps and comradeship, certainly, but not – at least at first sight – with the softer gift of friendship.
And yet in a divided and fractious world, friendship that is strong enough to be undisturbed by differences of gender, race, nationality, politics, religion, wealth and allegiance to football teams is never more threatened and needed. In this context reflection on the place of friendship in Ignatius’ life may be illuminating.
In any society we put pressure on friendship when we cross boundaries. It is hard to develop a romance when we live in different countries. If we have little access to the internet, it is even more difficult. If our nations are at war, that adds yet another level of difficulty. When we are separated we need to work at friendship.
Ignatius’ life was full of crossing boundaries and of parting with friends. We know little about his early life as page, courtier and soldier, but we do know that he dreamed of a noble romance. None of the friendships of that time, however, seem to have survived his break with family and his remaking of himself after his wound, his conversion and his solitary life at Manresa. As he went as a solitary preacher through Spain and travelled to the Holy Land, he seemed to have related easily, especially to women, but not to have made lasting friendships. His attention was wholly on winning people to conversion to Christ. This was true also of his first attempt to form people together in a group to do God’s work. The people he chose drifted away.
It was only when he studied at the University of Paris that he made friends among students, who came from different regions and kingdoms. He was some years older than his companions, a significant factor in the quality of their friendship. It was defined by his opening to them the Spiritual Exercises, by shared commitment to prayer, and shared service of the poor. Their friendship was deepened as the group came together to share meals and to talk together.
When the companions decided to go together to the Holy Land, and later to offer themselves as to the Pope as a group of Religious available for different missions, they saw themselves as friends in the Lord, whose friendship would not be broken by difference of nationality, distance and circumstance.
Ignatius’ friendship with Francis Xavier was certainly deep. Francis kept the autographs of his early companions with him when he went to India and to the edge of China. The tears he shed when a letter that had been posted a year before arrived, testifies to the depth of the friendship and also to the pressures that availability for missions at such a distance put on it.
In his early letters to his companions Ignatius referred to them as friends in the Lord. As he led a fast growing and diverse religious order his letters necessarily became more formal and focused on the call of Christ who had brought them together. Even so, those who met him spoke of the invitation to friendship that shone in even a brief encounter. He also showed unfailing generosity and concern to his companions who grew difficult with age. Among his friends were many women.
Ignatius was a man of the modern world in having to hold together friendship and public commitments to a life of service. The phrase ‘friends in the Lord’ stressed the priority that the call to follow Jesus wherever they were called to go had over the ordinary conditions that are necessary for friendship to flourish. But to friends that was a challenge to be overcome. As for so many generous people it still is.