SPIRIT WOW 004: ON THE JESUIT TERM "DEAD TO US"

Ceramic Dogs, Notes in the Night, and the Fear of Particular Friendships

SPIRIT WOW

Maybe a week after I went on leave I got a phone call from a Jesuit friend who doesn’t live in New York. “Hey…,” he said, with a certain cautious hesitation. “I’m coming to New York in about a month….Would you want to get together?”

Before I could respond, he added, “It’s totally okay if you don’t want to. I totally understand.”

My answer was, Of course we can get together. And we did and had a great time.

But that moment of him asking has stayed with me. There’s a lot going on in those moments of hesitation, a whole history, really, of how leaves and departures have been treated in the Jesuits, and maybe intimacy, too.

So that’s what you’re in for today, me trying to do cultural anthropology around Jesuit ideas on leaving and intimacy. I don’t have any agenda beyond trying to see what I might learn.

I can tell you this: Many Jesuits would tell you that this history is more than a little weird. But also, it seems to me that it still continues to influence a lot of us.