The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [128]
It may be hard to see how this aspect of Jesuit spirituality relates to your life. Poverty and chastity have more obvious applications: Poverty gives insights into the freedom of the simple life. Chastity offers perspectives on how to love freely and be a good friend. But what about obedience?
Well, obedience is something that everyone has to face in the spiritual life. Because whether you’re in a religious order or not, you’ll find yourself having to surrender to “God’s will” or “God’s desires” or just God. But not in the way that you might think.
Often when we think about God’s will, we think of trying to figure it all out. What is God’s will? What am I supposed to do? One of the themes of this book has been the Ignatian model of “discernment,” in which your desires help to reveal God’s desires for you. We look for signs of those desires in our lives.
But there is a danger: We might overlook the fact that God’s “plan” often doesn’t need much figuring out or discernment.
Sometimes it’s right in front of us. And that’s what one of my Jesuit heroes realized in a labor camp in the Soviet Union.
At the beginning of the book, I mentioned the story of Walter Ciszek, the American-born Jesuit priest who had been sent by his superiors to work in Poland in the late 1930s. (Speaking of obedience, he had volunteered.) Originally hoping to work in the Soviet Union itself, Ciszek found it impossible to gain entrance and ended up in an Oriental Rite church in Albertin, Poland. When the German army took Warsaw in 1939, and the Soviet army overran eastern Poland and Albertin, Ciszek fled with other Polish refugees into the Soviet Union, hoping to serve there (in disguise) as a priest.
In June 1941, Ciszek was arrested by the Soviet secret police as a suspected spy. He spent five years in Moscow’s infamous Lubianka prison and then was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in Siberia. In addition to his forced labor, he served as priest to his fellow prisoners, risking his life to offer counseling, hear confessions, and— most perilously—celebrate Mass.
We said Mass in drafty storage shacks, or huddled in mud and slush in the corner of a building site foundation. . . . Yet in these primitive conditions, the Mass brought you closer to God than anyone might conceivably imagine.
Ciszek wouldn’t return to the United States until 1963. By then many Jesuits assumed he was long dead. And why wouldn’t they? The Society of Jesus sent out an official death notice in 1947. But toward the end of his captivity, Ciszek was suddenly and surprisingly permitted to write letters home. Only then did family and friends learn of his “rebirth.”
After a complicated diplomatic exchange was worked out with the help of President John F. Kennedy, he returned to the United States on October 12, 1963, coming directly to the Jesuit community of America magazine in New York. Thurston Davis, S.J., the editor-in-chief at the time, wrote in the next week’s issue, “In his green raincoat, grey suit and big-brimmed Russian hat he looked like the movie version of a stocky little Soviet member of an agricultural mission.”
Ciszek settled down to work on the story of his time in Russia, called With God in Russia, detailing the extreme conditions in which he lived—his sudden capture by the Soviets, the grueling interrogation, the long train ride to Siberia, the wretched prison camps, and his eventual release into the Russian population as an ex-convict under surveillance. The book, still in print, was a huge success. But a few years later he realized that the book he really wanted to write was the story of something else: his spiritual