The 25 years since I was ordained a priest are inextricably linked with my 29 years as a Jesuit. My life in the Society of Jesus and as a priest has been filled with paradoxes, surprises, and struggles.

1. Paradoxes: That in professing what seem to be very restrictive vows of perpetual poverty, chastity, obedience, and availability to the Holy Father for the universal mission of the Church, there has been an amazing amount of freedom, flexibility, mobility. In the Jesuit life, mobility for mission takes a priority over permanence in a particular place. As our Jesuit founders insisted, "our home is the road," wherever the call to ministry with Christ mandates. Although I have remained close to my New Orleans roots, certainly my life history -- as well as the supplemental pages glued into my passport -- testify that my ministry has been one on the move."


2. Surprises: That with God's help, I can participate in many more aspects of Christ's mission than I would have ever dreamed: ministries of the word, such as teaching, researching, writing, as well as preaching and sharing the gift of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola; sacramental ministries both at the altar and in administrative offices as well as on the streets of the city, from my tiny rural mission parish in the historic Paraguay Reductions, to months of deliberation about Jesuit life and ministry, locked up with 230 other Jesuits in a stuffy Roman hall right at the walls of the Vatican, from ministry inside parish prisons, to advocacy on Capitol Hill.


3. Struggles: That our calling to faith can never be separated from the struggle for that justice which the Gospel mandates. This has often moved me to places where I would not have wanted to go, frustrating and often ambiguous challenges to link together the basic needs of he many in our world with challenging the privileged few to let go and share their abundance and power for the sake of the marginalized in our world.

Perhaps the greatest paradox, surprise, struggle has been that God has called and graced me in this way, despite my failings and inadequacies. As the Jesuit poet Hopkins put it:

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ -- for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.