One of the many benefits to spending the summers on a Mediterranean island where the sleepy days stretch out so long (tonight’s sunset wasn’t until almost 9:30 p.m.), is the ability to read on the beaches or outdoor cafes before spending the nights celebrating Spain’s Euro 2012 soccer victory — or really any other excuse to drink sangria and San Miguel beer. Although I have many friends here, most have more traditional day-jobs than teaching online undergraduate courses for the summer, so I bring extra luggage packed only with books.
And who do I take with me to the not-so-deserted island? This year, in addition to Ratzinger and Rahner who accompany me just about everywhere, and Hemingway in my increasing fascination with the history and spectacle of bull-fighting, I have found a new spiritual friend and inspiration — Walter Ciszek, S.J.
I had been to Ciszek’s grave in Wernersville and knew of his Fordham connections (the “baby” Jesuit scholastics live in Ciszek Hall while still in formation), but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to afford myself the time and intellectual space to chew on his books “With God in Russia” and “He Leadeth Me.”
Ciszek’s life story reads like a Tom Clancy novel. An American priest from Shenandoah, Pa., he always felt called by God to serve as a missionary in the East. He studied Byzantine history and languages in Rome, was sent to minister to Catholic Poles on the eve of World War II, and found himself swept into Russia with the outbreak of war in 1939.
Arrested as a Vatican “spy,” he was incarcerated and tortured in the dreaded Lubyanka Prison in Moscow before being sentenced to hard labor in the Arctic mines of Siberia. Presumed dead for decades by his family and religious superiors, he was miraculously freed in 1963 by a prisoner exchange dialogue spearheaded by the U.S. State Department, where he returned to Fordham and found out Masses had been said for his deceased soul.
The most striking element to Ciszek’s writing, besides its sincerity, is a profound sense of almost freakishly out-of-place optimism. He repeatedly refers to his trials as necessary steps in his own spiritual journey:
“God must contrive to break through those routines of ours and remind us once again, like Israel, that we are ultimately dependent only on him, that he has made us and destined us for life with him through all eternity, that the things of this world and this world itself are not our lasting city, that his we are and that we must look to him and turn to him in everything. Then it is, perhaps, that he must allow our whole world to be turned upside down in order to remind us it is not our permanent abode or final destiny, to bring us to our senses and restore our sense of values, to turn our thoughts once more to him — even if at first our thoughts are questioning and full of reproaches.”
It’s challenging, I think, to view “those routines,” through which God must break in, as regular life outside a prison death camp or the good health of ourselves or loved ones. But Ciszek saw the empty and hypnotic lullabies of unreflective comfort and ultimate self-interest as at odds with the radical gratitude to God demanded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in his First Principle and Foundation. We were created by a Mind for a Goal (both of which are divine), and to whatever extent the things of this world can help us in that journey, they should be embraced. To whatever extent they detract from it, they should be avoided. There are no limits to this view of created realities — including sickness or health, wealth or poverty, liberty or bondage.
Whether it is “With God in Russia,” or “With God in Mallorca,” or “With God in the maternity ward,” or “With God in divorce court,” or “With God in hospice,” one constant Term exists in each human narrative. It falls to us not to control or comprehend shifting situations, but to rest on him whose constancy never wavers despite them, “in every change, he faithful will remain.” With Ciszek, each of us echoes to greater or lesser degrees the Gospel exclamation uttered with trembling tears, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24).
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”