Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., on Knowing and Doing the Will of God

Knowing and Doing the Will of God | Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, S.J. | An Excerpt from He Leadeth Me | Ignatius Insight

Editor's note: The following selection is from Chapter 3, "Russia", in which Fr. Ciszek, having journeyed into Russia with Fr. Nestrov under the guise of being common workers, grapples with the frustration of not being able to establish any sort of Catholic connections or support.

And then one day, together, it dawned on us. God granted us the grace to see the solution to our dilemma, the answer to our temptation. It was the grace quite simply to look at our situation from His viewpoint rather than from ours. It was the grace not to judge our efforts by human standards, or, by what we ourselves wanted or expected to happen, but rather, according to God's design. It was the grace to understand that our dilemma, our temptation, was of our own making and existed only in our minds; it did not and could not coincide with the real world ordained by God and governed ultimately by His will.

St. Ignatius puts it starkly and forthrightly in his First Principle and Foundation: "Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God Our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created. Hence, man is to make use of them insofar as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them insofar as they prove a hindrance to him. Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things." Ignatius calls that the principle and foundation of his Spiritual Exercises, but it is also the most fundamental truth of man's existence and God's providence. Those four sentences put it as plainly and simply as it can be put. How often had Nestrov and I heard those words, read those statements, prayed and meditated over them? And yet, under the pressure of circumstances at Teplaya-Gora, we had forgotten them. We had accepted them as abstract principles of the spiritual life, but they had not become part of our daily lives. At least they had not so far been operative in our approach to life and our dilemma at Teplaya-Gora.

If they had been, we would have understood much earlier that our sale purpose at Teplaya-Gora—as indeed in our whole lives—was to do the will of God. Not the will of God as we might wish it, or as we might have envisioned it, or as we thought in our poor human wisdom it ought to be. But rather the will of God as God envisioned it and revealed it to us each day in the created situations with which he presented us. His will for us was the twenty-four hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances he set before us in that time. Those were the things God knew were important to him and to us at that moment, and those were the things upon which he wanted us to act, not out of any abstract principle or out of any subjective desire to "do the will of God." No, these things, the twenty-four hours of this day, were his will; we had to learn to recognize his will in the reality of the situation and to act accordingly. We had to learn to look at our daily lives, at everything that crossed our path each day, with the eyes of God; learning to see his estimate of things, places, and above all people, recognizing that he had a goal and a purpose in bringing us into contact with these things and these people, and striving always to do that will—his will—every hour of every day in the situations in which he had placed us. For to what other purpose had we been created? For what other reason had he so arranged it that we should be here, now, this hour, among these people? To what other end had he ordained our being here, if not to see his will in these situations and to strive to do always what he wanted, the way he wanted it, as he would have done it, for his sake, that he might have the fruit and the glory?

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