"Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things"

Those are the words of Saint Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits.  From the principle and foundation of his Spiritual Exercises:

"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 the attainment of his end…"

One of the noble sons of Ignatius in our lifetime was Walter Ciszek (d. 1984), who spent more than two decades in Soviet prisons and labor camps. He was finally repatriated to America a month before the assassination of President Kennedy.

Father Ciszek mentions those words of the erstwhile Spanish knight in describing his own early despair in Russia over his fellow prisoners: deeply afraid, they would not speak of God or hear of God.

Ciszek’s temptation – man’s temptation – rather than humbly walking in the twenty-four hours set before us, is to rebel and flee the Lord.  ‘Non serviam.’

To learn to bend the knee to our immediate circumstances, to the true will of God rather than what we want it to be, is to realize that “there is no greater security a man could ask, no greater serenity a man can know.”