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What is more for God’s glory establishes a standard that transcends any individual here, and any one institution represented here. Bravo to the organizers of this conference that the deliberation sessions have been organized by geography and by apostolate, and never by individual institution. Incredibly, and unlike any for-profit corporation in the world, an Ignatian mindset, as I understand it from the Exercises, would call upon those of you from Georgetown—or Holy Trinity parish or Scranton Prep—to be free enough to walk away from those institutions if ‘God’s greater glory’ could be better served elsewhere. Don’t worry, no one is going to ask you to do so this week (at least that I’m aware of!).

But the Jesuit spirit of indifference—of detachment, of freedom to do what is for God’s greater glory—is both a wonderful strength and a complicated challenge for an Ignatian team in the twenty-first century. Many lay partners, with families to support, don’t have the practical freedom to radically change their lives to pursue other opportunities. And let’s be frank, nor do all Jesuits in an age when Provincials may no longer have the practical authority to assign/insert Jesuits into educational institutions managed by independent boards of schools characterized by a tenure system.

But I don’t see how these sometimes uncomfortable realities can absolve any group that calls itself Ignatian from the real detachment intended by the Spiritual Exercises. Magis that does not transcend the walls of a particular school or apostolate is not Ignatian-style magis. Ignatian-style leaders are free enough—call it ingenious enough, our second characteristic way of working—to keep thinking outside the box of a particular institution’s four walls. Early Jesuits quite consciously opened apostolates in small urban clusters—schools, parishes, social centers-- that inevitably leveraged each other; more striking still, early missioners in China and scholars in developed Europe leveraged each other by exchanging, for example, intelligence on astronomy and natural history. If legal concepts like separate incorporation and an increasingly secular world prevent you from figuring out ingenious ways to coordinate efforts, then to my mind at least, you’re failing the ingenious legacy of those who built this holy franchise we all inherit. Even within your respective institutions, a leader needs constantly to be thinking of fresh approaches to bringing the magis to life.

The greatest Jesuit success story is arguably the move into education, and it’s instructive that this move involved a radical departure from their initial apostolic instincts. The greatest Jesuit failure, on the other hand, is arguably that eighteenth century Jesuits couldn’t out-maneuver the impending suppression of their company. I find it striking that a Jesuit historian living through that debacle diagnosed the catastrophe this way: “I believed that to handle misfortunes of an uncommon nature uncommon means should be employed...I was convinced that exceptional daring was essential.” The daring he spoke of was not in evidence, with the result that their company had to fold its tent.

Now, ‘daring strategy’ brings its own set of problems. My daring proposal for the future may strike you as utter lunacy, or threaten your job, or head us in a direction I consider wrong-headed for the Church. The reality that I work not alone but in teams can be stimulating but inevitably complicates the business of trying to be ingenious and daring in approaching work.

Fortunately, the Ignatian tradition provides resources to ameliorate such complications. It’s surely no accident that when Ignatius crafted some 23 introductory observations to his program of Spiritual Exercises, the last two were set off with some prominence. The 22nd, the so-called presupposition, says this: “it is necessary to suppose that every good Christian is more ready to put a good interpretation on another’s statement than to condemn it as false….” This is a lesson for what Ms. Steinfels called bluebirds, and also for redbirds…and most particularly for those whom I would call mockingbirds. That presupposition is not merely an intellectual statement but a broad way of looking at and treating others. It’s grounded in the Biblical vision, so prominent at the end of the Exercises, that each of us has been ‘created in God’s image,’ is therefore uniquely dignified, worthy of respect—or, of love, thus the third characteristic way of working for an Ignatian team or individual. Accordingly, Ignatius in the Constitutions told Jesuit bosses to manage with “all the love and modesty and charity possible” so that teams could thrive in environments filled with “greater love than fear.” Those are the kinds of environments Ignatian leaders try to create, and that way of treating people is core to an Ignatian way of proceeding.

Everyone knows that children learn and perform more productively when they are raised, taught, and mentored by families and teachers and coaches who value them as important and dignified, who set high standards, who create environments of love rather than fear. Why have we somehow convinced ourselves that our adult needs are so different? The best teams I was on at JPMorgan thrived precisely where there was trust, mutual support, real respect for each other’s talents, real interest in helping others succeed, and a willingness to hold each other accountable to high standards so that each of us might realize our fullest personal and team potential.

The way we treat each other in corporate America and in much of American life is in many ways broken—highly politicized, sometimes Darwinian, occasionally fearful and suspicious. Many have pointed that out from pulpits, as pundits, or in classrooms, but they are telling us something that corporate America already knows. What would be new and extraordinarily powerful, at least to me, would be faculties, teams, and institutions that showed us in action different and effective ways of working, teams bound, for example, by the kind of love that I just spoke of. Could teams from Wheeling, Loyola, Scranton, Gonzaga, St. Aloysius, and St. Joe's pioneer radically different, love-based ways of ‘being faculty’ or ‘being parish’ and—importantly--demonstrate that they were more rather than less effective precisely on that account?

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