Retired adults find new purpose as Ignatian Companions

Mary Yanish, a St. Ignatius parishioner and retired social worker, right, talks to Gerald Johns, a homeless man whom she helped get off the streets and into a room at St. Anne’s Home in San Francisco. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
 
August 23, 2018
Christina Gray
 
Mary Yanish wasn’t even one year into her retirement after a 40-year career as a licensed clinical social worker when she realized she still had work to do.
 
“I felt strongly when I retired that the main focus of the last stage of my life was my spiritual development,” said Yanish, a lifelong Catholic who had once dreamed of being a contemplative nun.
 
Catholic San Francisco talked to Yanish Aug. 14 at St. Anne’s Home for the elderly run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. She was there to see Gerald Johns, a legally blind, formerly homeless man accurately nicknamed “Smiley,” who moved there with her help on Aug. 2.  Helping him get off the streets and navigate the practical and spiritual details of his new life at age 68 is one part of her journey as an Ignatian Companion.
 
Yanish became an Ignatian Companion four years ago after she saw a notice in the St. Ignatius Parish bulletin announcing the start of a 10-month “service and spirituality” group at St. Agnes’s Ignatian Spiritual Life Center.
 
St. Ignatius and St. Agnes are both Jesuit parishes separated by less than a mile. Ignatian Companions is a program of St. Agnes’ Ignatian Spiritual Life Center and is endorsed by the Western Province of the Society of Jesus.
 
The San Francisco program now in its fifth year, was seeking “mature” Catholic men and women from any parish with the time and desire to serve the poor and marginalized in their communities while immersing themselves in Ignatian spirituality. Yanish became one of them.
 
According to co-founder Jim Briggs, Companions in Ignatian Service and Spirituality got its start on the campus of Santa Clara University more than a dozen years ago by lay men and women eyeing retirement who wanted to continue to grow in their faith. The former chief of staff to the university president described the program as “contemplatives in action.”
 
“Ignatian Companions are called to direct contact with the poor,” he said, often in ways closely related to their professional backgrounds. Retired doctors may serve at free health clinics for the uninsured, for example, and former teachers may tutor the educational disadvantaged.
 
People moving into the demographic of retirement or semi-retirement want to continue to fulfill their calling outside their professional identity, he said. “Part of the program’s discernment is understanding how they have been gifted and how they want to continue to use those gifts.”
 
Ignatian Companions commit to a 10-month program that couples 4-to-8 hours a week of volunteer work of their choice serving the needs of the poor and marginalized in their communities with a group meeting and daily study, prayer and reflection.
 
The San Francisco group meets at St. Agnes, the East Bay group at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley and the South Bay group at Santa Clara University. On Aug. 25 new and returning members from all groups will begin their new year together at an opening retreat at the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose motherhouse in Fremont.
 
Facilitated by a Jesuit priest for the first year, the group uses “The Guide for the Journey,” a workbook based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.
 
The founder of the Society of Jesus composed the exercises – a set of meditations, prayers and contemplations – to help people discern God’s will for them.
 
Yanish, whose primary service work is with the homeless, said the essence of Ignatian spirituality to her is, “finding God in all things, in all beings.”
 
A lot of people pass the homeless on the street and don’t even want to make eye contact, she said.
 
“I really make an effort to look into the eyes of each homeless man or woman,” she said, recognizing their shared humanity in the face of Jesus, an experience can be “transformative.”
 
Johns was one of the hundreds of homeless men and women she encountered each week when she joined the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity at the homeless encampment near Cesar Chavez Street to help serve hot meals.
 
A Native American, Johns told them his mother was orphaned on a reservation in Oregon and raised in a convent by a group of nuns there. He said he remembered the stories about these Catholic nuns but that he’d never been baptized in the Catholic faith.
 
Yanish said Johns told the sisters he wanted to “become Catholic and go to Mass every day,” and Yanish helped them move mountains to help him do that. He took multiple buses to attend the RCIA program at St. Dominic Church and found a place to sleep afterward wherever he could. this past Holy Saturday, he entered the church, taking the name “Augustine.”
 
Still, Johns remained homeless. Yanish helped him fill out the application for a room at St. Anne’s, wrote up a personal history and filled out the mounds of required paperwork, something she had lots of experience doing for patients in the past.
 
During the process, said Yanish, he asked her if she would be his power of attorney. “I have no one else,” he said. “I thought about it for a minute,” said Mary, and then said, “Yes, Smiley, yes I will.”
 
For more information visit ignatiancompanions.org.