As I finish my first year as Provincial, I keep returning to these words and thinking of those I have come to know who incarnate the Jesuit “way of proceeding” by the manner of their life and death. It has been a year of great grace, and at the center of that grace have been these Jesuits I have been called to serve. In the last few weeks, two men have reminded me again of that grace and of how lucky I am to receive it.

Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J. — “Schonie” to just about everyone who knew him for more than ten minutes — walked his pilgrimage with Christ as an historian and a story teller. He was a passionate and innovative teacher, a hellion behind the wheel, a researcher without peer, and an activist in matters of justice. But what became more and more evident in the last days of his life — when one by one those other things passed away—was that he was first and foremost a Jesuit and a priest. I saw Schonie shortly before his death, in the infirmary at Gonzaga. Much of the fire had turned to embers, but in his eyes burned still the “ceaseless desire” that had so moved his life and motivated his work. Since coming to the Regis Community, his health had prevented him from doing much work. Manuscripts and revisions sat unattended around his room, while he lay across the street in the infirmary. But still the passion was there—the desire to bring the message of God to others, to show them the love of Jesus at the center of the world.

Sitting and listening to Schonie, I heard, in a voice now considerably softer than it had once been, how his heart still responded to what God had done for him in the Society. And as I stood beside his grave a few weeks later, with his family, Bishop Skylstad, and his brother Jesuits all around, I imagined Schonie surrounded by the Jesuits whose lives he had remembered, now at last getting the full story.

At the other end of the pilgrimage of Jesuit life, is John “Jes” Sauer, S.J. I first met Jes when I was still Superior at Seattle Preparatory School. Jes was a first-year novice and even then I saw the passion and the desire that led him, this year, to the profession of first vows. Unlike Schonie, for Jes there is no quieting fire, but a new flame that has just begun to burn. Sitting with Jes this summer, as he prepared for vows, I listened to his questions and could understand the challenges he faces in coming to understand what it might mean for him to “bring men and women to the Father’s reconciliation and the Spirit’s love.” At nearly 50 years old, Jes is hardly a traditional novice or “young” scholastic, but as he knelt on the steps before the altar of St. Ignatius Church and professed his desire to “enter that same Society and live my life in it forever,” he — like the two companions beside him — had in his eyes the same look I had seen in the eyes of Wilfred Schoenberg, the same look I have seen in so many eyes this year. It is a look of those preparing for a journey, preparing to answer the invitation of Christ to “Come and see.”