Beau Guedry ’08: Becoming a Jesuit

On a cold, rainy day in October 2021, I huddled under a tent with two priests and a packed crowd of Central American migrants in a park plaza somewhere in Mexico. In my clerical collar, shoes sinking into the mud, I sat amidst the group of young families, listening to a homily in a language I hardly understood, at a makeshift Mass. As I prayed and responded throughout the Mass, I wondered: Lord, how have You put me in such a strange situation? And why am I so happy and comfortable in this foreign and uncomfortable place?

The first question is easier to answer than the second: I was a novice in the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), a religious order founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. Beginning my second year of formation, I was doing what St. Ignatius called an “experiment”, a period of a few weeks or months where I was missioned to live, work, and pray in a house of other Jesuits involved in full-time apostolic ministry. It was a time designed for me to continue discerning whether God was calling me to take vows of perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience–the traditional three vows taken by all religious priests, brothers, and sisters–all while getting a firsthand look at what it was like to live, work, and pray as a Jesuit. The priests I was living with were ministering to migrants across the border near Brownsville, TX, offering Mass, confessions, and any donated supplies they could gather in the park where the migrants were forced to live in camping tents.

My story of becoming a Jesuit begins during my time at St. Laurence, where I was a student and parishioner from the time I was two years old. I attended SLCS from pre-K through 8th grade, and went to Mass every Sunday with my family. There, I was formed in a firm foundation of faith by my teachers, pastors, and family. My Catholic faith became an important part of my everyday life, giving rhythm, support, and understanding to each new stage as I grew up. It was at St. Laurence that I saw some of my first examples of life lived in faithful devotion to God and the call of the Gospel, through so many adult role models. I learned what it meant to pray, to serve others generously, and how to live a life fueled by God’s gifts of faith, hope, and love. (Of course, that’s the project of a whole lifetime–I’m still working on getting it right!)

With such a valuable and solid base to build on, it was easy for me to understand what St. Ignatius meant when he wrote, “The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his or her soul.” It meant that the project of life was responding lovingly to God’s love offered to us in Jesus; everything else was either an aid or an obstacle to finding out how to do that in my own life. For so many of the people who helped me at St. Laurence, using the direction of their life to respond lovingly to God’s love meant serving others (including me!) selflessly, and with joy.

When I graduated from St. Laurence and moved on to Strake Jesuit (and later, Saint Louis University, another Jesuit school), I saw the same kind of love-response lived out by the Jesuit priests and brothers I met. They were prayerful, intelligent, generous, loving, joyful men who truly loved Christ and tried to participate in His work in the world. They did this by serving others’ needs in whatever ways they felt called in their prayer and ministry; the Jesuits I met were professors and pastors, counselors and artists, missionaries and teachers and everything in-between. They were living out the mission of the Society of Jesus as our governing documents put it: in “the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.”

After studying and working alongside Jesuits through high school, college, and the first few years of my career, I discerned in prayer, through the help of a spiritual director, that God was calling me to enter the novitiate. This is a period of two years of religious formation where I would spend time considering a vowed life in the Society of Jesus by living in a community of Jesuits and other “novices”, praying (especially through St. Ignatius’ retreat known as the Spiritual Exercises), and the ministerial “experiments” like the one in Brownsville.

Those two years brought me all over the country. In addition to my time in south Texas, I lived in Grand Coteau, LA; New Orleans; Denver, CO; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and Pine Ridge, SD, one of the poorest areas in the United States, where I spent five months teaching ninth-grade algebra at a Jesuit high school on a Native American reservation. After all that time praying about and “trying on” life as a Jesuit, I realized that, despite all the difficulties you might imagine came with such a new and challenging way of life, I never felt closer to God or more alive than when I was doing what St. Ignatius prescribed the Society of Jesus should do. I could have confidence, then, to take religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Jesuit; it was confidence that God was leading me to the most loving response I could offer Him in my life, and would continue to do so for years to come.

I took those vows last fall (August 13, 2022), and have since been missioned to study philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, NY, as part of my religious formation and preparation toward priestly ordination.After three years here, I will likely work in a Jesuit ministry for a few years, then study theology for a few more years before being ordained a priest; at least, that is the typical order of events in Jesuit formation here in the U.S. It is a great joy for me to live this life of love for God and His people; I often say that I can’t believe I get to live this vocation, and I really mean that. God has blessed me very much throughout my life in so many ways, including the support I had and have through St. Laurence, and I hope I get to give some of that back to the Lord in gratitude through this Jesuit life in the Church.