The Arrival of Unexpected Joy

I climbed into a car at 5 a.m. with my Jesuit superior and a classmate, and all I knew was that we would be visiting a Mexican rancho. After heading two hours south from Guadalajara, the early morning light started to spotlight the growing mountains and wide plains around us, letting us know we were very much in the middle of nowhere.

Eventually, we hit the end of the pavement. We continued up a narrow dirt road until mucky conditions forced us to ditch the car. After walking for a few hours, crossing springy suspension bridges and cutting through sugarcane fields, we reached Mesa Blanca, a tiny farming community of 20 families nestled in immense, pristine, emerald-green hills. We went there to bring the Good News because no one else would.

I did not necessarily enter the Society of Jesus to journey to such far-flung places. I became a Jesuit because I sensed I could be a priest and have a career. Before I entered the novitiate, I worked as an economist in a management training program at a national bank. But my interest in the business world reached back long before that, to my childhood. I even requested shares of stock for my 11th birthday.

Yet I also always had desires of the priesthood, saying as much in my fifth-grade yearbook in response to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” While I had discerned the diocesan seminary, I sensed I had more to offer the Church and the world than being a local pastor. Even though I attended a Franciscan parish and would pop into the Jesuit parish two blocks from my office for holy days, I never thought about religious orders as an option.

But then I stumbled onto a handful of Jesuits on Twitter. Their posts got me reading America and The Jesuit Post. Eventually, I read Jesus: A Pilgrimage by Fr.

IN ALL MY MISSIONS, FROM THE HILLS OF MESA BLANCA TO THE CLASSROOM, THOUGH, I FIND CONSOLATION AND JOY BECAUSE I KNOW THAT JESUS INVITED ME THERE.

James Martin, SJ, and I was struck by his former corporate career. One Sunday evening, while mentally preparing for another week in my little cubicle on the 23rd floor, I asked myself, “Why have I never considered the Jesuits?”

Still being somewhat unfamiliar with the Society, I googled what a Jesuit was. I still vividly remember reading the Wikipedia page for the Society of Jesus and thinking “Oh boy, I am in trouble.” And here I am today—precisely because I read that Jesuits are priests that can also have fascinating “careers.”

When I discerned my Jesuit vocation, I imagined I would be doing things like teaching high school economics and theology, as I did during my novitiate long experiment at Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland. But I did not necessarily foresee working in pastoral ministry at an Indigenous parish in Guadalajara, or tutoring second graders in math in Minnesota. In all my missions, from the hills of Mesa Blanca to the classroom, though, I find consolation and joy because I know that Jesus invited me there—whether I had envisioned it as part of my Jesuit career or not.