5. Inspiration and concrete acts

Thus, community life is born of a common call to become, deep in ourselves and in all things, companions of Jesus. It draws its inspiration from the Lord's journey to Jerusalem with his apostles, as well as from the first Church that was gathered in Jerusalem and given life by the Spirit. Jesus established communities around himself; in their turn, the Apostles were guided by the Holy Spirit and founded churches. In much the same way, the original ideal for our community life has its roots in the foundational experience of Master Ignatius and his companions. Their apostolic work addressed individuals whom they would bring to Christ, but their aim was to build Christian communities. This is what they did: they founded numerous confraternities; they established scholastic communities in the colleges; they renewed religious communities with the Spiritual Exercises. We allow ourselves to be guided by the same spirit today, working not only for the conversion of individuals, but also for building communities which, like the one in Jerusalem, live in Christ.

If community life has its profound spiritual source in the Spirit of Christ who gathers, it is nonetheless bound together by acts, concrete and even banal: a word of encouragement, a sign of understanding, a welcoming smile, time given to listening to what another has to say, a helping hand in the work required by every community, some time given to relaxation. It is bound together, too, by deliberately trusting ourselves to conversation that goes to the heart of things spiritually; to sharing our interior experiences and our failures; and to sharing above all our reasons for living as companions of Jesus in our here-and-now concrete mission and in the union of the universal apostolic body of the Society. It is born of grand ideals, but life in community depends on simple acts which we are tempted at times to despise. In the Exercises, Master Ignatius teaches us this alliance between vision and act, between the spirit and the letter, which enables us to make progress on the way to God. As Father Pedro Arrupe noted, we have no lack of grand desires, projects and ideas; we do lack sufficient humility to give them reality because we think the available means are too ordinary and paltry.