People of all ages are willing to pay huge amounts of money to go to the concerts of beloved entertainers like Barbra Streisand or Paul McCartney or to see their favorite sports icons in person, or even to travel across the world to see a charismatic leader such as the Pope or the Dalai Lama in the flesh. These are unforgettable moments, peak moments, in people's lives!
There's a definite personal sacrifice - financial and timewise - in making plans to see someone "up close and personal." But, what would we be willing to sacrifice if this hero or heroine of ours would personally ask us to follow him/her? Or to work alongside him/her? Especially if this charismatic person would remind us that we'll need to do exactly what he does, eat the same food, drink the same drink, wear the same kind of clothes, work wherever she works, no matter how difficult that is. Would we still consider it a grand adventure to follow or work alongside someone who, for example, works long hours, has little privacy, eats a restricted diet? Yet, anyone who has achieved true greatness in this world has done so through immense personal discipline and self-sacrifice.
What if Jesus asked us personally to follow him and work alongside him? Yes, perhaps we say we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and our Savior, that he is the Supreme Healer of our souls. But - would we be content to experience what Jesus experienced? To be exhausted from traveling on foot from one end of the country to the other? To constantly be besieged by crowds so that there is no privacy? To be so busy preaching and healing that there's barely time to eat or drink? To not really have a permanent home anymore?
Jesus does ask us - personally - to follow him. And he tells us "Therefore whoever wishes to come with me must labor with me, so that through following me in the pain he or she may also follow me in the glory." Being a true Christian, a Christ-follower, involves immense discipline and self-sacrifice, and a willingness to experience both great joy and great pain. For most of us, following Jesus means doing what Jesus did - accepting and living the challenges of our daily lives, the roller coaster of happy events and traumas. Yet sometimes, when we're enduring our own exhaustion and having a "pity party" with ourselves, it's worthwhile to meet someone who followed Jesus on a grand scale.
Fr. Walter Ciszek, an American-born Jesuit priest, volunteered to work in Poland in the late 1930's. The German army took over Warsaw in 1939; the Soviet army over-ran eastern Poland; so Fr. Ciszek and other Polish refugees fled into the Soviet Union, where he hoped to serve there as a priest - in disguise. In June, 1941, Fr. Ciszek was arrested by the Soviet Secret Police as a suspected spy. After a grueling interrogation, he spent five years in the infamous Lubianka prison in Moscow,and endured fifteen years of hard labor in Siberia. His family and friends and fellow Jesuits in the U.S. presumed he was dead. The Society of Jesus sent out an official death notice in 1947.
But Fr. Ciszek was busy following in the footsteps of Jesus by risking his life to care for his fellow prisoners: counseling them, hearing confessions, and most perilously, secretly celebrating Mass. He says
"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."
Eventually he was released into the Russian population as an ex-convict under surveillance, and, after a complicated diplomatic exchange was worked out with President Kennedy's assistance, he came home to the United States in 1963. Here he was hit with a barrage of questions, the chief one being "How did you manage to survive?"
Fr. Ciszek's short answer was "Divine Providence." His full answer was in his books "With God in Russia" (still in print) and "He Leadeth Me." These books detail how he found God in all things, even in a Soviet labor camp. This is how he describes his and another priest friend's epiphany in the labor camp about the daily discipline of following Jesus and finding out God's will for us:
"God's 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....If only we could learn to view all things as he sees them and sends them to us." (from "He Leadeth Me.")
You know, I think that sometimes the Gospels become so familiar to us that we think of Jesus as following a script: "Oh, yes; this is where I heal the blind man; or "Yep, this is the well where I'll meet the Samaritan woman;" or even "I'm about to die - but that Resurrection's coming!" No, Jesus like us had to view every twenty-four hours of his life as a new, unexpected manifestation of his Father's will for him. He had to be interiorly ready to be present to each new person who needed healing, each new crowd who wanted to hear him preach, each new verbal attack from the Pharisees. Imagine how deeply he leaned onto and into his Father in prayer to receive strength and guidance for each new day! For each new day and event in it was important to his Father and revealed the face of his Father to him - as each of our new days and our events and circumstances are important to our same Father and reveal His Face to us!
"If only we could learn to view all things as God sees them and sends them to us!"
God is present to us in toddlers who throw up and in the pain of Legos underfoot.
God is present to us as we weep and hold the hand of a dying parent.
God is present as we stack cans in a food pantry or walk or race to raise money for cancer research or collect blood donations for the Red Cross.
God is present in unexpected and tiring new hours of work because a fellow worker didn't show up.
God is present in cleaning the house, making love to our spouse, paying the bills.
God is present in our teenager's win in sports and in the wonderful new sonogram of our child in our womb.
God is present when we weep over a divorce or sweat and shake as we flee to a safe house to escape domestic violence.
God is present when we wait numbly in a hospital waiting room as a loved one undergoes serious surgery.
God is present in every dreary day in a prison cell.
God is present when we endure another round of chemo or have our psychiatric meds adjusted - again.
God is present when we weep at a loved one's grave and the pain is a knife in our chest.
God is present when we fearfully "come out" to our parents as having a gay or a lesbian orientation.
God is present when we tentatively reach out in friendship to someone of a different religion or race.
God is present to us as we pray in quivering hope as we wait to be executed or to die in Hospice.
Do we understand God's will? No. Never. We can't. We're not God.
But can we - as Jesus did - trust God's Will? Yes! If we have faith, if we love God as our Father, then, in following Jesus, we trust every moment of every twenty-four hours as God's will for us - a God who will bring all things to the good for us who love and trust Him. That God is with us every moment of the day and night, suffering with us and giving us the wisdom and grace and love to endure and somehow discover Him in new ways through experiencing everything that happens to us.
Charismatic heroes and stars will fade and die and be forgotten. Jesus the Christ will be remembered and followed until the end of time when his kingdom is finally established everywhere forever.
Every day, he calls us "Come follow me, the Lamb of God who takes away your sins."
Some people might think we're fools to follow the One who had nowhere to lay his head and who died a criminal's death on a cross.
Paradoxically, there is no greater joy than in becoming a fool for Christ, in trusting his Father as he did, in seeing his will in every 24/7 of our lives, in surrendering to his overwhelming love for us, and in awaiting life everlasting with him!