S.J.

Reason and rationalizations boil through your mind. There are present and future responsibilities toward family and friends to think of, thoughts of the good to be done at home or in other possible ways of serving God and man, mistrust about the motives swaying the mind now this way and now that, doubts about one’s abilities to live up to the call (and even about the call itself), vague fears for the future and very real fears of making a mistake right here and now, knowing a decision must be made and yet knowing, too, that it involves a commitment from which there can be no turning back, something that will change the whole course of your life. Men faced with the possibility of a new and perhaps better job, women considering a proposal to marry, parents planning a move of one sort or another, teenagers trying to decide their future in

Anyone who has ever wrestled with his conscience over a particular course of action has experienced what I went through then. A

proselytization is strictly forbidden. The constitution guarantees freedom of atheist propaganda, but those who try to spread the truths of the faith or foster religion are in fact breaking the law.

man, no matter what his situation, is ever without value, is ever useless in God’s eyes. No situation is ever without its worth and purpose in God’s providence. It is a very human temptation to feel frustrated by circumstances, to feel overwhelmed and helpless in the face of the established order—whether that order is an NKVD prison, or the whole Soviet system, or “the status

Under the worst imaginable circumstances, a man remains a man with free will, and God stands ready to assist him with his grace. Indeed, more than that, God expects him to act in these circumstances, this situation, as he would have him act. For these situations, too, these people and places and things, are God’s will for him now.

Prayer, true prayer, is a communication—and it occurs only when two people, two minds, are truly present to each other in some way. So in prayer we must do more than merely visualize God as present as some sort of father figur

prayer occurs, as I have said, when at last we find ourselves in the presence of God. Then every thought becomes the father to a prayer, and words quite often are superfluous. Such prayer is all-absorbing. Once you have experienced it, you can never forget the experience. But I am not speaking here of some great mystical grace. I am speaking only of a conversation with God, the spontaneous outpouring of a soul that has come to realize—however fleetingly—that it is standing at the knee of a loving and providing Father. Thoughts of praise and of thanksgiving spontaneously arise, as well as questions and petitions and thoughts of friends and their needs, mingled with trusting confessions of failure and simple promises to follow in the future only what he would have us do.

for the most part, prayer demands an effort on our part. We must learn, even as Christ himself did, to draw apart from the circumstances that surround us if we wish to be alone with the Father.

An attitude of readiness to try over and over again in our quest to find God and his will in prayer is itself a grace and a blessing of major consequence. What other purpose has man in life but to do God’s will?

prayed for the Spirit to move me—and I felt nothing.