Jesuit Father James Martin shared stories of his time in a variety of jobs, from assembly line worker and busboy-dishwasher to “corporate tool” during a Sept. 3 presentation at Loyola University Chicago.
Martin started by reading from his book, "Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest” (HarperOne, 2026) before joining in conversation with Loyola University President Mark C. Reed. The free event was hosted by the Loyola University Chicago’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies in partnership with the Midwest Jesuits’ Jesuit Friends and Alumni Network of Chicago.
The story he read — about mistakenly clearing unfinished meals from a Pennsylvania restaurant when the customers went out to watch the Bicentennial Wagon Train pass by in the summer of 1976 — taught him that it’s best to acknowledge errors rather than get defensive, but also that it’s wrong to berate service staff or anyone, really, as a customer did to him.
A prolific author, Martin said he started the book writing down anecdotes from his youth as a kind of break while working on his previous two books, one on the resurrection of Lazarus and one on prayer.
It occurred to him, he said, that when he looked back, he could see where God was working in his life, long before he ever considered whether he had a vocation to religious life or priesthood.
“I think one of the points of the book is that God worked in the life of a 15-year-old busboy-dishwasher who wasn’t particularly religious,” Martin said, “like, thank God, he works in all of our lives. And in doing what we’re doing, God can be present, particularly if we look back and see where God was. … It’s sometimes easier to see where God was than it is to see where God is.”
Martin said his look back included calling friends from high school and college and getting them to fill in some gaps in his memory and reading journals he wrote as a teenager and found when he was cleaning out his mother’s house.
“It was pages and pages of what I did and what I thought,” Martin said. “It’s one thing to imagine your thoughts at that age. It’s another thing to read them exactly as they were.”
In fact, Martin told the audience, he had suggested calling the book “Misspent Youth,” but his publisher thought it sounded too negative.
“I think part of the thing I’m here is to say is, I wasn’t always a Jesuit priest,” Martin said. “I had a regular life, and I wanted to tell the whole story. What it was like, right? I went to school, I had a lot of problems, and I was just who I was.”
It wasn’t until he had graduated from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and was working for General Electric that he seriously considered another life.
“It wasn’t for me, and I was really stressed, and I didn’t know what to do, and I saw this documentary about Thomas Merton,” Martin said.
That led him to speak with his pastor for the first time about the possibility of a vocation to the priesthood.
Two years later, he had a breakthrough when his therapist asked him what he would do if he could do anything he wanted, and he said, “Be a Jesuit priest.”
After entering the Society of Jesus, Martin studied at Loyola, and, he said, started writing his first book while living there.
Reed noted that Martin has written more than a dozen books despite studying and initially seeking a career in finance and asked when he realized he was called to be a writer.
Martin said it was early in his time as a Jesuit, starting in formation when he wrote “In Good Company,” his memoir about joining the Society of Jesus, and then writing for Company magazine and later writing for and working at America magazine.
“It’s a vocation within a vocation,” he said. “It’s also what God has called me to do.”
Reed also touched on some of Martin’s other areas of ministry, including his podcast, “The Spiritual Life,” and founding Outreach, which ministers to LGBTQ Catholics.
Martin acknowledged that, especially at the beginning, the protests and the personal attacks his ministry to the LGBTQ community brought bothered him. But, he said, when he prayed about it on retreat, the response he heard in prayer was a question: “Must you be liked?”
And, he noted, all of his work has been done with the knowledge and permission of his Jesuit superiors, and been affirmed during in-person meetings with both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV.
“I feel pretty secure that it’s within the church,” he said.