10. Common discernment and responsibility for the mission

It is easy to disclaim personal responsibility for community life under the pretexts that we have a mission to accomplish and that a comfortable common life is not in itself one of the aims of the Society's spirituality. In that perspective, every minute spent on community is a minute wasted: the mission comes first! We can make apostolic work a priority over against community life; that poses a risk every bit as serious as favouring community life to the point of hurting apostolic work. No prayerful community turned in on itself to the detriment of the mission given by the Lord at La Storta can claim Ignatian spirituality; neither can an apostolic work cut off from its source – the Lord who gives the increase to the services he asks from this apostolic body.

The "dispersion" means first of all our availability to go anywhere and join any community (NC 315). Then, it can compel us to live on our own while attached to some local community (NC 317). And the dispersion encompasses a tremendous range of works and activities. But though we do not all do the same kind of work, every one of us is called to be a colleague working on the Society's mission. This is Christ's mission, which every General Congregation tries to embody at the level of the universal apostolic body of the Society, and which each local community has been called to embody at the level of the concrete here-and-now. Even when one of us works on his own in one of the vast array of apostolates that Master Ignatius hoped to open to the greater glory of God, he is still not committing himself to an individual apostolate. It does not matter, as long as his work is characterized by the apostolic priorities that the Thirty-Fourth General Congregation established in response to the Pontiff's call for a New Evangelization: mission and culture, mission and justice, mission and dialogue. And it is in community (which is itself mission) that we get a feel for these apostolic priorities and that we make a discernment about a work – deciding to take it on or modify it, carry it through or drop it – in light of Christ's mission (NC 315). Some others of the community are assigned the mission of praying for the Church and the Society. They beg God to bless the labors of the whole worldwide body – which in fidelity to our mission is doing everything it can to plant and water – with a great harvest.

If we act even unconsciously as though we were the owners of our apostolic works, or if we protect an apostolate or an institution as though it were the last safe preserve for our self-fulfillment, we are no longer servants of Christ's mission. That mission is always received and always held as belonging to the community, meaning both the universal Society and the local community. This is how we make ourselves responsible in real life for our mission before the Lord. Into this mission, we can integrate community spirit, the ongoing formation that every work needs, necessary relaxation, and community prayer. Particularly in community prayer, each one pulls back a little from his personal activity, and shows for himself that his apostolic task makes sense only insofar as he accepts is as a mission of the whole body of the Society of Jesus, and that it will bear fruit only on condition that he engage in it as freely as he engages in community life – as both are gifts from God.