By: Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J.
All of us know lawyers who seem unhappy, unfree, directionless,
and disintegrated, who seem to be following paths they haven't
consciously chosen, leading them to places they would never have
chosen to go, seemingly locked in lives they haven't freely chosen
to live. Some would characterize this reality as a manifestation of
a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning and value in the law,
rooted in the difficulty lawyers have integrating the practice of
the law into the whole of their lives. This paper, originally
presented as part of a series entitled “For All the Saints” at the
Fordham University School of Law, argues that the spirituality
flowing from the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the
Society of Jesus, offers resources for addressing the spiritual
crisis afflicting the contemporary legal profession. Ignatius shows
us how to pay attention to God calling us to freedom and wholeness
in the ordinary experience of our daily lives. The Ignatian
understanding of God as one who labors, who struggles with hard
work to bring all things to life, wholeness, freedom, and
integrity, may well resonate with people whose lives are given over
to the hard and rigorous work of practicing law. Ignatius
understands God as one not distant from our labors in the law.
Instead, we are working in the trenches alongside God who is always
already at work in our midst, giving a religious density to our
lives as lawyers, and the challenge for us is to try to discern
more clearly how God is at work in us and around us, so that we can
more fully align our labors with God's. If lawyers today experience
a spiritual crisis because there is a compartmentalizing wall
between their faith and their work, the Ignatian understanding of
God might spark the renewal this crisis calls for, by bringing a
new depth of meaning and integrity to our labors in the ordinary
practice of the law.