FROM G.E. TO S.J.

In Good Company
The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty,
Chastity, and Obedience
James Martin
Sheed & Ward, $15.95, 216 pp.

When my wife and I went in for the requisite premarital investigation, the pastor asked each of us if we realized that our impending marriage was dissoluble only upon death. Standard, canonical stuff, but the gravity of the question caught me unawares: Did I really understand what I was getting myself into? "Tomorrow," Bob Dylan sang, "is a long time." I soon answered, "Yes," but the question has continued to challenge me. Married only a short while, I already see how frightening and joyful our vocation to each other can be.

Vocation is a trendy, sometimes contentious word today. Noble and high-minded, it sounds much better than "job" or "career"; thus one sees such book titles as "Ornamental Horticulture as a Vocation." Among Catholics it raises issues of equality, authority, crisis, patriarchy. What's often left unasked and untold is what Christian vocation is.

James Martin, S.J., associate editor of America and the author of several books, has written an engaging account of his journey from successful corporate businessman to vowed Jesuit. In Good Company is, in outline, a straightforward vocation story: an ordinary, occasionally indifferent Catholic becomes dissatisfied with worldly success and seeks something more meaningful. Hearing a call from God to religious life, Martin initially resists it, but eventually enters the Jesuit novitiate which transforms his life.

God is literally in the details, however. Martin's passage from Wharton graduate and General Electric whiz to Jesuit novice is striking, and he writes with honesty and wit. Attending a benefit for a Jesuit middle school, he declines the advances of a drunk woman, and tells a student, "If you ever want to attract women, just buy a black shirt like this one." Upon visiting Philadelphia's stone-and-marble seminary, he writes, "The Church Triumphant. I bet they didn't hold hands during the Our Father here." He is scathing in his critique of corporate life: Speaking to trainees, one executive tells them, "G.E. doesn't owe you a damn thing"; another executive, attempting to fire an older, accomplished worker, says, "F-- compassion." Martin confesses that he cried from anxiety his first night in the novitiate and that, as part of his formation, cutting smelly, overgrown toenails in Jamaica sickened him. There is no pious airiness whatsoever in the book. Ultimately, we see Martin in the novitiate chapel on the night of his vows, filled with gratitude toward God and amazed that the formerly "rich, young (and depressed) man" is now inconceivably, unexpectedly happy.

Such humor and directness serve well his intended audience: younger adults searching for faith, and prospective priests and religious. Every Jesuit vocation director in America will buy this book by the gross (G.E. headquarters will not: Jack Welch, "America's best-ever chief executive," as Newsweek recently declared, will not be happy with its portrayal of his plutocratic ways). Martin is especially good at explaining unfamiliar terms and practices without being patronizing.

These virtues are also the book's vices. Martin's energetic style sometimes saps emotional depth, and so he remains content with somewhat cursory accounts of his spiritual and physical trials; his humorous asides, while invariably funny, occasionally seem designed more to keep the reader's interest than to advance the story. At other times, he tries too hard to show that he's just a regular guy, who enjoys the occasional pitcher of beer or toke of a joint. He seems unsure at times that his account is inherently attractive.

Martin's conversion story calls to mind Garry Wills's assertion, in Papal Sin, that the vocation crisis exists, in part, because the church's intellectual dishonesty--concerning, inter alia, the Holocaust, birth control, clerical celibacy, the role of women--deters many idealistic young men and women from considering priesthood or religious life. Trapped between their "high calling" and the church's "low standards" of truthfulness, such persons refuse to compromise their intellectual and moral integrity and so decline their possible vocations. "Why," as Wills asks, "would anyone want to adopt such an uncomfortable post if he could avoid it?"

Lacking neither intellect nor integrity, Martin offers an answer: God. Although ecclesial "structures of deceit" can and do hinder the hearing of God's call, In Good Company reminds us that every Christian vocation has its origin and sustenance in God, not humanity: "You did not choose me but I chose you." The great irony is that while Wills realizes that the church is, in the words of his hero, Saint Augustine, a corpus permixtum--a body shot through with sinners and saints--he nonetheless fails to see that vocations occur within that messiness as well. Part of any responsible, intelligent, mature commitment is acceptance of, not acquiescence to, the flaws of the object of commitment; any healthy marriage bears witness to that fact. There is no such thing as a vocation that does not involve human and institutional frailty. Or divine grace.

Written while in the first fervor of religious life, Martin's book does not directly take up Wills's dilemma. However, Martin points to the at-once compelling and liberating nature of Christian vocation: How can one resist such desire and joy? How can one not sell all that one has for the "pearl of great price," even if it involves much suffering? The demands made upon Martin in the novitiate in his difficult work with the dying--and the hard-won joy it brings--lead to a further thought. Might not part of the present vocational crisis be that some of our contemporary understandings of Christian vocation--be they of religious life, priesthood, marriage, or single life--far from being too demanding, do not demand enough, do not appeal strongly enough to our longing for generosity and selflessness?

No zealot or sap, Martin shows how surprisingly joyous and alluring commitment to God can be. At a time when much is being written and spoken about the future of religious life and the priesthood, In Good Company serves as a welcome witness--at once inviting, sane, grateful, and gracious--that every Christian vocation "costs not less than everything," but can give in return all to those who accept the call.

Christopher Ruddy, a former Commonweal intern, is a doctoral candidate in theology at the University of Notre Dame.