Trust
Let us start with something trivial, namely online shopping – Allegro and all that. I am the type of consumer who hates buying blind, and if something costs more than 100 zloty, I have to think hard about whether I want to buy it at all and whether it is not some cheap "scam". When you go onto such a site to make an online purchase, you first pay attention to the opinions of other users. You browse the reviews and check the seller's rating to somehow verify their credibility. After receiving the parcel, you compare the product with the photo in the listing – is this REALLY the thing I spent my hard-earned money on? This whole ritual has its source in the assumption that we can be cheated. It seems a small matter, but it says a lot about our way of life. Over the last twenty, even thirty years, a big change has taken place in us. The institutions that for years formed the foundation of our order and somehow measured the quality of a word – churches, governments, media, banks, and experts – have begun, one after another, to lose trust. What am I saying – they have already lost it. And all this because of numerous financial scandals, lies from politicians, abuses in various institutions – even in the Church. I myself wonder, when writing catecheses, whether my sources are appropriate, and these days it is best to reach for the good old Fathers of the Church. They never fail in their timelessness – truly, what fatty bacon is to bigos, St Augustine is to a sermon. But that is not the point… This was supposed to be about the loss of trust. The longer I live, the more often I notice that each new challenge increases the feeling that no one can be trusted.
Trust is earned over years and lost in the blink of an eye. I myself remember how I lost my trust. In the Church, of all things. I will not hide that this was one of the motivations for why I wanted to become a priest. I wanted to show that things do not always have to be the way the media writes. And indeed I discovered that it is not about the institution. This problem has much deeper roots than institutions themselves, whatever they may be. This lack of trust affects human relationships. Look what it has come to in our times… Friends sign formal agreements over trifles, and couples decide to sign a prenup before marriage, in case things do not "click". Families argue through lawyers over wills. Notarised contracts have replaced the traditional handshake. Surveillance cameras have supplanted faith in a neighbour's honesty. What a wonderful world. Big Brother, world edition.
The Eurobarometer studies of recent years are interesting. One can conclude that more than half of Europeans believe that most people cannot be trusted. In Poland, this indicator is among the LOWEST in the European Union – only one in four Poles admits to having general trust in other people. Only four people in a hundred answer: yes, I trust. The rest… Well, exactly… I am afraid even to think what they think. It is a sad diagnosis. We live in a reality in which caution is considered a virtue and openness naivety. If things go on like this, the words of the Holy Father John Paul II, "Open the doors to Christ", will become one of the most incomprehensible sentences. Open them how? To whom? Who is he? What did he come for? What is his aim? Has he been verified? A drama is beginning to unfold before our eyes. Slowly, trusting other people means taking a risk – a high one – and believing someone without proof is becoming a synonym for being naive.
But where did this come from? There are many reasons. Yet one of them is fundamental: we have simply experienced disappointment. The famous Emmaus "But we had hoped". I think each of us, at some stage of life, has encountered a breach of trust – for instance, parents who promised something and did not deliver (PS: to this day I wonder where my promised First Communion money went). But it is not only family. Every kind of betrayal of trust hurts, and there is no shortage of examples. A friend revealed secrets that were meant to stay between us. A husband or wife turned out to be a liar, or in the worst-case scenario, unfaithful. An employer, after many months of promises, never paid the bonus. How good that I am a teacher, and the only raise I can expect is in the number of duties. There is no shortage of examples in our own "backyard" either, because such a "violator" of my trust can be a clergyman who was supposed to be an example to follow, while the "merry" carousel of falsehood sometimes spins here too. But enough of these examples. The sheer number of associations can be frightening. The brain has a strange tendency to remember negative experiences far more strongly than positive ones. One lost trust can lead to the formation of a habit of vigilance that lasts for years, and it is hard to learn to trust anew. No wonder – it is a natural defence mechanism, meant to protect us. Yet with time this protection turns into a wall; it stops performing its protective function and takes on an isolating one. And when no human being is any longer able to cross that wall, that is when Christ is most visible – he who comes despite the closed doors.
There is a Scottish saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It is really good, because it divides responsibility evenly. The first betrayal is the other person's problem, their decision. You have the right to feel hurt. But the second betrayal is already a signal to you that you need to think this situation through for yourself. Because you allowed something like that. You dismissed what you were seeing. Perhaps you truly wanted to believe that this time things would be different. And in this lies the trap we fall into. After the first wound, instead of reflecting on whom and how we entrust our confidence, we usually take one of two reactions. We can either keep trusting the same people, hoping they will change, or shut ourselves off completely from others and stop trusting anyone. Both of these options lead nowhere. The first one is precisely naivety. The second makes a person live as if in a sealed shelter, deprived of trust. LESSON TO TAKE AWAY: Trust requires making sure who the people are to whom we entrust it. Giving it to everyone without reflection is far from mature, considered trust. A prudent farmer can judge which soil is worth cultivating. An even wiser person knows whom they can trust. That is how responsibility works.
The second reason for the loss of trust is a more contemporary problem. It is the excess of information. Every day we encounter a mass of contradictory information, which reaches us mainly through our eyes. One great wave of hate and the spreading of disinformation. Expert "A" expresses the opinion: I like Nutella on a slice of bread spread with butter, while expert "B" argues for a slice with Nutella alone (PS: I am the first expert). But let us leave irony aside – this is, after all, reality. A politician presents one view, his opponent claims something completely opposite, and of course each insists that "my truth is the truest of all". As a result, a fatigue sets in which psychologists call "epistemic fatigue". It means the exhaustion of our ability to assess the truthfulness of information. In such a situation, it is easier to say: I trust no one. Trust, one of the oldest values in human relationships, has become a rarity. And yet this rarity is visible here and now! Just look at recent days on the internet. You can see the daily online quarrels, mutual accusations, and growing divisions. Yet in the midst of all this, from time to time something appears that reminds us we are still capable of acting together, and that Poland can still come out "on top". The beginning of this fresh story, which we will probably one day study in civics textbooks, is a song about cancer. The rapper Bedoes created the track "Ciągle tutaj jestem (diss na raka)" ["I Am Still Here (a diss on cancer)"] in collaboration with eleven-year-old Maja Mecan, a girl suffering from leukaemia, battling the disease for the third time. The song shows the hardships of the fight, presenting the perspectives of both the sick person and her loved ones. When the popular influencer Łatwogang decided to listen to one song non-stop for nine days in his flat – or rather his studio apartment – to raise funds for sick children, no one suspected what would happen and how much such a situation would unite the nation. Not politics of any kind, but the pure, living Gospel in another human being. The initial goal was set at 500 thousand zloty. In the meantime, new guests kept appearing in Łatwogang's flat: Doda, Robert Lewandowski, Magda Gessler, Dawid Podsiadło, Katarzyna Nosowska, Julia Wieniawa, Cezary Pazura, and many other well-known figures. They shaved their heads, got tattoos, and donated hundreds of thousands of zloty – the DZIK company transferred 5 million! People who had quarrelled for years managed to reconcile. Poles, divided as we are on almost every other matter, supported this initiative with a sum exceeding 250 million zloty. It is hard to find better proof that deep beneath the surface of divisions and distrust there still beats a heart that unites. AND HOW MUCH WE LONG FOR THAT.
There are three things we confuse with trust. The first misunderstanding: considering trust to be naivety. We meet comments in the style of: "Do you really trust him? You're naive." As if trust were a sign of a lack of maturity or life experience. Yet this is completely wrong thinking. Naivety consists in turning a blind eye to warning signals and telling yourself: "everything will be fine", while all the signs in heaven and on earth show that you are only telling yourself that. Trust is an entirely different matter. It is a choice made with full awareness of the risk. I trust, even though I realise I may be wrong. Maturity is recognised by this: when I am wrong, I can admit my mistake. Because precisely when I trust, there is always that one per cent chance that I may be wrong about someone or something.
We come to the next mistake. The conviction that in order to trust, you need one hundred per cent certainty. In life, certainty is rarely on offer. When you go in for surgery, you have no full guarantee of success, and yet you entrust your health to the doctor and lie down on the table. Similarly, when taking out a loan, you are not sure you will be able to repay it, and yet you decide to sign the contract. Entering a relationship, we cannot be certain of loyalty, and yet at the altar we say to each other: "I do". Trust operates in the zone of uncertainty. Even the famous "want someone to count on? Count on yourself" is no guarantee of certainty. This needs to be put in order and turned into a symbiosis. TRUST GOD, TRUST OTHERS, and TRUST YOURSELF – then you will know the true taste of trust.
We stand before the third misunderstanding, which may be the most serious, and it concerns the conviction that trusting another person, trusting yourself, and trusting God are completely separate spheres that do not work together. In reality, they are deeply connected. On the one hand, a person who has learned to trust themselves and their choices is able to trust others too, and thanks to this has an easier path to trusting God. On the other hand, a person who has trust in God is more often inclined to trust other people, and through this begins to trust more in their own strength and in themselves. You only have to want it.
Trust is an act of the will. Here is something rarely said openly: trust is a choice. It may be accompanied by a whole variety of feelings, or by none. You can trust while terrified. You can trust with tears in your eyes. You can trust when you can barely see the path ahead of you. Faith does not consist in feeling certainty, but in deciding to act despite its absence. The Bible abounds in figures who trusted at moments when they had no grounds for it. Abraham set out into the unknown without a map; he had only one command: "Go". Peter left the boat and stepped onto the water at night because Jesus told him to. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father meets his son who had failed him and squandered half the estate, returning after several years with empty hands. He goes out to meet the boy. He runs to him and kisses him. Neither of them was certain of that meeting. Each of them made his own decision in freedom. I too look at my life and do not know how I could fail to trust. There was once a film called Suicide Squad – looking at certain situations from my life, I could play that entire squad myself. I have lost count of how many times I was on the threshold of death. At the age of two, I walked out onto the road in Czaniec near the BP station at the peak of the day, and nothing ran me over; drivers scooped me off the road and carried me home. That was my first time in the news on the radio – maybe that is where the passion for recording and radio comes from. When I was three, and we moved to Łęki, I jumped out of my pram into a rushing river; my little brother saved me, though he lost his favourite Adidas shoes in the process. At ten, I nearly drowned in the sea at Ustka, because the waves pulled me onto the breakwater. At eighteen, freshly after passing my driving test, the car (the legendary sky-blue "Panda") stalled in the middle of a junction in front of a lorry. It braked by a miracle. After so many situations when I was "one step" from death, I learned that sometimes the only thing left is trust. I was afraid, that is true – mortally afraid; I know what I felt then, and fear is an understatement – but despite that, I truly TRUSTED, and I TRUST STILL. I am only counting on not having used up my limit of "Deus Providebit" (Divine Providence). Trust has an extraordinary power to influence life. It completely changes the context of a situation. When someone places their trust in you, you become a somewhat different person than you were without that feeling.
And what about God? In the context of a pilgrimage, this question carries enormous weight. "Jesus, I trust in You" – the motto of this year. It is easy to say; after all, we pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. An export product straight from Łagiewniki to the whole world – but it is much harder to live it out in daily life. What does it really mean to trust God in 2026, in the world I described earlier? It is not about pretending you understand His plans, nor about finding the "holy" peace you may have lost. It is about something at once simple and complicated: the readiness to keep acting, even when you are not sure where you are heading. It is the ability to hand over the very thing you are most attached to. "Cast your cares on the Lord, and He will sustain you." Psalm 55:23
Faustina wrote in her Diary a sentence that one understands better and better with age: "The greater the misery, the greater the right to His mercy." We think we first have to get ourselves together, and only then come to God. Yet it is precisely in that moment full of chaos that you have the greatest right to mercy. I experienced this many times, for instance in the hospital in Bielsko when I was covering there just after my ordination. People literally clung to mercy. But I also saw many who dug in their heels and said: I will not trust. "I don't want to", "I can't". We have free will; we can do with it what we want, and that too is part of this freedom. But as with everything, we end up paying. Trust and distrust both have their price.
Let me present a situation I know from real life, though of course I will simply omit certain details. A certain father had two daughters. After his death, in his will, he made the younger sister the heir to the family home. The older one considered this unjust. Perhaps she was right, perhaps not – after all, only the younger one had cared for their father – but that is not the key point of this story. What matters are the events that took place over the following years. A veritable parade of "family love". Lawyers, courts, letters from attorneys. Their children did not even know their cousins existed, because the parents regarded each other as enemy number one. And so it went, a full 20 years.
Two decades of paying for one lost trust. As a result, we get a relationship that concerns millions of families, companies, parishes, and communities. Lack of trust has its price, and that price is enormous. We pay it in the energy we invest in defence. In the bonds we avoid out of fear of risk, and in the decisions we make. We are often held back by the fear of disappointment or of letting others down. We build ourselves an "interpersonal fortress". When you experience deep hurt, you begin to build walls around yourself. At first this can be helpful. Over time, the fortress that was meant to protect you turns into your prison. "To love at all is to be vulnerable… lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket it will change… it will become unbreakable, impenetrable." – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
Speaking of locking oneself in a prison. Let us live through it once more. Let us go back to 2020. Do you remember the coronavirus pandemic? It was not just a pandemic. It was one great social experiment. Some people recall: masks, disinfectant, remote lessons – yet this pandemic had an enormous impact on our society: alienation. Already in 2023, the World Health Organisation signalled that loneliness constitutes a global health threat – we walked out of one pandemic and into another. Well done to us. This current pandemic of "loneliness" is compared to problems such as malaria or food shortages. The statistics are alarming: in developed countries, one in four adults admits to chronically feeling lonely. In Poland, this indicator is growing at a much faster pace. People under forty are unable to find love. Loneliness has many causes – one of the significant ones is the lack of trust. To form a real relationship, to open up to someone and share what truly hurts, you must trust that person. When trust is missing, relationships become merely superficial. They are reduced to outings together, photos, and ordinary small talk.
The sociologist Robert Putnam spent many years studying social capital in the USA. He noticed that since the seventies, participation in various associations, clubs, parish groups, and sports teams has decreased significantly. It is an accurate reflection of our times. We enter Łagiewniki. A place that for decades has drawn crowds of people. Let us ask ourselves: do we gather here together because we are still capable of acting together? Or perhaps precisely because, deep down, each of us remains a little lonely?
Lack of trust in people ultimately affects our relationship with God. It is hard to trust the Invisible One when the visible ones have failed us. Someone left the Church after a particular person in a cassock let them down. That did not mean, however, that they had moved away from God. They moved away from wounded trust. That can be understood. Yet in this lies a tragic error. For the betrayal of one particular person, you pay by giving up something that this person merely symbolised. It is like removing love from your life just because someone was unfaithful. YOU CANNOT PAY SUCH A PRICE FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S MISTAKE. It is the person who wounded you who should bear the consequences – not you!
But is it possible to regain trust? When the subject of rebuilding trust comes up, many people imagine a scene of dramatic reconciliation. "Me in shock, the missus in shock, the kids in tears." A beautiful cinematic atmosphere: sunset, emotions, tears, kisses, and apologies delivered like formal speeches. In the end, everything finishes happily. But we need to make a cinematic cut. Reality shows that this process is much more complicated, time-consuming, and usually does not run in a straight line. So yes – regaining trust is possible. Relationships based on trust that has been damaged can be repaired. Psychologists, therapists, and family mediators are, fortunately, in agreement here. The essential condition is the readiness of both sides to work on themselves. This means that rebuilding trust begins with yourself.
We experience betrayal and begin to question our own ability to judge situations. "How could I have trusted her? What is wrong with me? Why did I end up with such a person again?" Trust in others has been violated. As a ricochet, you can lose faith in your own intuition, judgement, feelings, even your own worth. When you stop trusting yourself, every new relationship starts without foundations. A therapist who supports people after the end of a marriage says that the hardest question her patients wrestle with is: can I trust my own feelings? Are my desires, sensations, and intuition reliable? In therapy, the conclusion usually reached is: yes. It takes time to believe it again. In the Christian tradition, there is a beautiful answer to this. God knows us better than we know ourselves. When we lose trust in our own judgement, we can seek support in someone greater than ourselves. This is not about avoiding responsibility, but about finding stability. Lord, you search me, and you know me; you know when I sit and when I rise. From afar you discern my thoughts; you see my activity and my rest, and all my ways are known to you. Psalm 139 – biblical baby steps. Trust is rebuilt gradually. Grand gestures such as apologies, promises, or declarations are only the beginning of the process. What matters is what happens afterwards – every day, in ordinary situations.
Trust resembles porcelain. A broken thing can be put back together, but the traces of damage remain. That is true. Yet porcelain that has been glued and bears visible cracks looks more beautiful than porcelain in perfect condition. The Japanese have a term for this: kintsugi. It is the art of restoration using gold or silver resin. The cracks become an integral part of the object's value. Artists who practise kintsugi stress that the philosophical dimension of this art matters most: the story of an object, including its repairs and cracks, is an inseparable part of its beauty. It is similar in relationships. A relationship that has gone through a difficult period and survived bears visible marks. These marks testify that both people decided to stay together. That has its meaning and an unimaginable value. Priceless in the eyes of God.
In just a few days we will enter the sanctuary. We will see the image that Faustina described as something no artist could ever capture. Beneath it are those three words: "Jesus, I trust in You."
Consider whether in your life there are situations or people where this trust has been violated. Or perhaps you yourselves have broken it towards someone? Perhaps you sometimes lack the courage simply to trust? That is something worth doing as you stand before this image. Not with empty hands, but carrying that particular burden with you. "O my God, my only hope, I have trusted in You completely, and I am certain I shall not be disappointed." Diary no. 317
Find a moment to make that decision today. In this walking, with that foot aching from blisters, with the problems in your head that give you no peace, and with the relationship that still brings suffering. Right now. Right here. JESUS, I TRUST IN YOU.
Fr Adam Płonka
Trust is earned over years and lost in the blink of an eye. I myself remember how I lost my trust. In the Church, of all things. I will not hide that this was one of the motivations for why I wanted to become a priest. I wanted to show that things do not always have to be the way the media writes. And indeed I discovered that it is not about the institution. This problem has much deeper roots than institutions themselves, whatever they may be. This lack of trust affects human relationships. Look what it has come to in our times… Friends sign formal agreements over trifles, and couples decide to sign a prenup before marriage, in case things do not "click". Families argue through lawyers over wills. Notarised contracts have replaced the traditional handshake. Surveillance cameras have supplanted faith in a neighbour's honesty. What a wonderful world. Big Brother, world edition.
The Eurobarometer studies of recent years are interesting. One can conclude that more than half of Europeans believe that most people cannot be trusted. In Poland, this indicator is among the LOWEST in the European Union – only one in four Poles admits to having general trust in other people. Only four people in a hundred answer: yes, I trust. The rest… Well, exactly… I am afraid even to think what they think. It is a sad diagnosis. We live in a reality in which caution is considered a virtue and openness naivety. If things go on like this, the words of the Holy Father John Paul II, "Open the doors to Christ", will become one of the most incomprehensible sentences. Open them how? To whom? Who is he? What did he come for? What is his aim? Has he been verified? A drama is beginning to unfold before our eyes. Slowly, trusting other people means taking a risk – a high one – and believing someone without proof is becoming a synonym for being naive.
But where did this come from? There are many reasons. Yet one of them is fundamental: we have simply experienced disappointment. The famous Emmaus "But we had hoped". I think each of us, at some stage of life, has encountered a breach of trust – for instance, parents who promised something and did not deliver (PS: to this day I wonder where my promised First Communion money went). But it is not only family. Every kind of betrayal of trust hurts, and there is no shortage of examples. A friend revealed secrets that were meant to stay between us. A husband or wife turned out to be a liar, or in the worst-case scenario, unfaithful. An employer, after many months of promises, never paid the bonus. How good that I am a teacher, and the only raise I can expect is in the number of duties. There is no shortage of examples in our own "backyard" either, because such a "violator" of my trust can be a clergyman who was supposed to be an example to follow, while the "merry" carousel of falsehood sometimes spins here too. But enough of these examples. The sheer number of associations can be frightening. The brain has a strange tendency to remember negative experiences far more strongly than positive ones. One lost trust can lead to the formation of a habit of vigilance that lasts for years, and it is hard to learn to trust anew. No wonder – it is a natural defence mechanism, meant to protect us. Yet with time this protection turns into a wall; it stops performing its protective function and takes on an isolating one. And when no human being is any longer able to cross that wall, that is when Christ is most visible – he who comes despite the closed doors.
There is a Scottish saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It is really good, because it divides responsibility evenly. The first betrayal is the other person's problem, their decision. You have the right to feel hurt. But the second betrayal is already a signal to you that you need to think this situation through for yourself. Because you allowed something like that. You dismissed what you were seeing. Perhaps you truly wanted to believe that this time things would be different. And in this lies the trap we fall into. After the first wound, instead of reflecting on whom and how we entrust our confidence, we usually take one of two reactions. We can either keep trusting the same people, hoping they will change, or shut ourselves off completely from others and stop trusting anyone. Both of these options lead nowhere. The first one is precisely naivety. The second makes a person live as if in a sealed shelter, deprived of trust. LESSON TO TAKE AWAY: Trust requires making sure who the people are to whom we entrust it. Giving it to everyone without reflection is far from mature, considered trust. A prudent farmer can judge which soil is worth cultivating. An even wiser person knows whom they can trust. That is how responsibility works.
The second reason for the loss of trust is a more contemporary problem. It is the excess of information. Every day we encounter a mass of contradictory information, which reaches us mainly through our eyes. One great wave of hate and the spreading of disinformation. Expert "A" expresses the opinion: I like Nutella on a slice of bread spread with butter, while expert "B" argues for a slice with Nutella alone (PS: I am the first expert). But let us leave irony aside – this is, after all, reality. A politician presents one view, his opponent claims something completely opposite, and of course each insists that "my truth is the truest of all". As a result, a fatigue sets in which psychologists call "epistemic fatigue". It means the exhaustion of our ability to assess the truthfulness of information. In such a situation, it is easier to say: I trust no one. Trust, one of the oldest values in human relationships, has become a rarity. And yet this rarity is visible here and now! Just look at recent days on the internet. You can see the daily online quarrels, mutual accusations, and growing divisions. Yet in the midst of all this, from time to time something appears that reminds us we are still capable of acting together, and that Poland can still come out "on top". The beginning of this fresh story, which we will probably one day study in civics textbooks, is a song about cancer. The rapper Bedoes created the track "Ciągle tutaj jestem (diss na raka)" ["I Am Still Here (a diss on cancer)"] in collaboration with eleven-year-old Maja Mecan, a girl suffering from leukaemia, battling the disease for the third time. The song shows the hardships of the fight, presenting the perspectives of both the sick person and her loved ones. When the popular influencer Łatwogang decided to listen to one song non-stop for nine days in his flat – or rather his studio apartment – to raise funds for sick children, no one suspected what would happen and how much such a situation would unite the nation. Not politics of any kind, but the pure, living Gospel in another human being. The initial goal was set at 500 thousand zloty. In the meantime, new guests kept appearing in Łatwogang's flat: Doda, Robert Lewandowski, Magda Gessler, Dawid Podsiadło, Katarzyna Nosowska, Julia Wieniawa, Cezary Pazura, and many other well-known figures. They shaved their heads, got tattoos, and donated hundreds of thousands of zloty – the DZIK company transferred 5 million! People who had quarrelled for years managed to reconcile. Poles, divided as we are on almost every other matter, supported this initiative with a sum exceeding 250 million zloty. It is hard to find better proof that deep beneath the surface of divisions and distrust there still beats a heart that unites. AND HOW MUCH WE LONG FOR THAT.
There are three things we confuse with trust. The first misunderstanding: considering trust to be naivety. We meet comments in the style of: "Do you really trust him? You're naive." As if trust were a sign of a lack of maturity or life experience. Yet this is completely wrong thinking. Naivety consists in turning a blind eye to warning signals and telling yourself: "everything will be fine", while all the signs in heaven and on earth show that you are only telling yourself that. Trust is an entirely different matter. It is a choice made with full awareness of the risk. I trust, even though I realise I may be wrong. Maturity is recognised by this: when I am wrong, I can admit my mistake. Because precisely when I trust, there is always that one per cent chance that I may be wrong about someone or something.
We come to the next mistake. The conviction that in order to trust, you need one hundred per cent certainty. In life, certainty is rarely on offer. When you go in for surgery, you have no full guarantee of success, and yet you entrust your health to the doctor and lie down on the table. Similarly, when taking out a loan, you are not sure you will be able to repay it, and yet you decide to sign the contract. Entering a relationship, we cannot be certain of loyalty, and yet at the altar we say to each other: "I do". Trust operates in the zone of uncertainty. Even the famous "want someone to count on? Count on yourself" is no guarantee of certainty. This needs to be put in order and turned into a symbiosis. TRUST GOD, TRUST OTHERS, and TRUST YOURSELF – then you will know the true taste of trust.
We stand before the third misunderstanding, which may be the most serious, and it concerns the conviction that trusting another person, trusting yourself, and trusting God are completely separate spheres that do not work together. In reality, they are deeply connected. On the one hand, a person who has learned to trust themselves and their choices is able to trust others too, and thanks to this has an easier path to trusting God. On the other hand, a person who has trust in God is more often inclined to trust other people, and through this begins to trust more in their own strength and in themselves. You only have to want it.
Trust is an act of the will. Here is something rarely said openly: trust is a choice. It may be accompanied by a whole variety of feelings, or by none. You can trust while terrified. You can trust with tears in your eyes. You can trust when you can barely see the path ahead of you. Faith does not consist in feeling certainty, but in deciding to act despite its absence. The Bible abounds in figures who trusted at moments when they had no grounds for it. Abraham set out into the unknown without a map; he had only one command: "Go". Peter left the boat and stepped onto the water at night because Jesus told him to. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father meets his son who had failed him and squandered half the estate, returning after several years with empty hands. He goes out to meet the boy. He runs to him and kisses him. Neither of them was certain of that meeting. Each of them made his own decision in freedom. I too look at my life and do not know how I could fail to trust. There was once a film called Suicide Squad – looking at certain situations from my life, I could play that entire squad myself. I have lost count of how many times I was on the threshold of death. At the age of two, I walked out onto the road in Czaniec near the BP station at the peak of the day, and nothing ran me over; drivers scooped me off the road and carried me home. That was my first time in the news on the radio – maybe that is where the passion for recording and radio comes from. When I was three, and we moved to Łęki, I jumped out of my pram into a rushing river; my little brother saved me, though he lost his favourite Adidas shoes in the process. At ten, I nearly drowned in the sea at Ustka, because the waves pulled me onto the breakwater. At eighteen, freshly after passing my driving test, the car (the legendary sky-blue "Panda") stalled in the middle of a junction in front of a lorry. It braked by a miracle. After so many situations when I was "one step" from death, I learned that sometimes the only thing left is trust. I was afraid, that is true – mortally afraid; I know what I felt then, and fear is an understatement – but despite that, I truly TRUSTED, and I TRUST STILL. I am only counting on not having used up my limit of "Deus Providebit" (Divine Providence). Trust has an extraordinary power to influence life. It completely changes the context of a situation. When someone places their trust in you, you become a somewhat different person than you were without that feeling.
And what about God? In the context of a pilgrimage, this question carries enormous weight. "Jesus, I trust in You" – the motto of this year. It is easy to say; after all, we pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. An export product straight from Łagiewniki to the whole world – but it is much harder to live it out in daily life. What does it really mean to trust God in 2026, in the world I described earlier? It is not about pretending you understand His plans, nor about finding the "holy" peace you may have lost. It is about something at once simple and complicated: the readiness to keep acting, even when you are not sure where you are heading. It is the ability to hand over the very thing you are most attached to. "Cast your cares on the Lord, and He will sustain you." Psalm 55:23
Faustina wrote in her Diary a sentence that one understands better and better with age: "The greater the misery, the greater the right to His mercy." We think we first have to get ourselves together, and only then come to God. Yet it is precisely in that moment full of chaos that you have the greatest right to mercy. I experienced this many times, for instance in the hospital in Bielsko when I was covering there just after my ordination. People literally clung to mercy. But I also saw many who dug in their heels and said: I will not trust. "I don't want to", "I can't". We have free will; we can do with it what we want, and that too is part of this freedom. But as with everything, we end up paying. Trust and distrust both have their price.
Let me present a situation I know from real life, though of course I will simply omit certain details. A certain father had two daughters. After his death, in his will, he made the younger sister the heir to the family home. The older one considered this unjust. Perhaps she was right, perhaps not – after all, only the younger one had cared for their father – but that is not the key point of this story. What matters are the events that took place over the following years. A veritable parade of "family love". Lawyers, courts, letters from attorneys. Their children did not even know their cousins existed, because the parents regarded each other as enemy number one. And so it went, a full 20 years.
Two decades of paying for one lost trust. As a result, we get a relationship that concerns millions of families, companies, parishes, and communities. Lack of trust has its price, and that price is enormous. We pay it in the energy we invest in defence. In the bonds we avoid out of fear of risk, and in the decisions we make. We are often held back by the fear of disappointment or of letting others down. We build ourselves an "interpersonal fortress". When you experience deep hurt, you begin to build walls around yourself. At first this can be helpful. Over time, the fortress that was meant to protect you turns into your prison. "To love at all is to be vulnerable… lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket it will change… it will become unbreakable, impenetrable." – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
Speaking of locking oneself in a prison. Let us live through it once more. Let us go back to 2020. Do you remember the coronavirus pandemic? It was not just a pandemic. It was one great social experiment. Some people recall: masks, disinfectant, remote lessons – yet this pandemic had an enormous impact on our society: alienation. Already in 2023, the World Health Organisation signalled that loneliness constitutes a global health threat – we walked out of one pandemic and into another. Well done to us. This current pandemic of "loneliness" is compared to problems such as malaria or food shortages. The statistics are alarming: in developed countries, one in four adults admits to chronically feeling lonely. In Poland, this indicator is growing at a much faster pace. People under forty are unable to find love. Loneliness has many causes – one of the significant ones is the lack of trust. To form a real relationship, to open up to someone and share what truly hurts, you must trust that person. When trust is missing, relationships become merely superficial. They are reduced to outings together, photos, and ordinary small talk.
The sociologist Robert Putnam spent many years studying social capital in the USA. He noticed that since the seventies, participation in various associations, clubs, parish groups, and sports teams has decreased significantly. It is an accurate reflection of our times. We enter Łagiewniki. A place that for decades has drawn crowds of people. Let us ask ourselves: do we gather here together because we are still capable of acting together? Or perhaps precisely because, deep down, each of us remains a little lonely?
Lack of trust in people ultimately affects our relationship with God. It is hard to trust the Invisible One when the visible ones have failed us. Someone left the Church after a particular person in a cassock let them down. That did not mean, however, that they had moved away from God. They moved away from wounded trust. That can be understood. Yet in this lies a tragic error. For the betrayal of one particular person, you pay by giving up something that this person merely symbolised. It is like removing love from your life just because someone was unfaithful. YOU CANNOT PAY SUCH A PRICE FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S MISTAKE. It is the person who wounded you who should bear the consequences – not you!
But is it possible to regain trust? When the subject of rebuilding trust comes up, many people imagine a scene of dramatic reconciliation. "Me in shock, the missus in shock, the kids in tears." A beautiful cinematic atmosphere: sunset, emotions, tears, kisses, and apologies delivered like formal speeches. In the end, everything finishes happily. But we need to make a cinematic cut. Reality shows that this process is much more complicated, time-consuming, and usually does not run in a straight line. So yes – regaining trust is possible. Relationships based on trust that has been damaged can be repaired. Psychologists, therapists, and family mediators are, fortunately, in agreement here. The essential condition is the readiness of both sides to work on themselves. This means that rebuilding trust begins with yourself.
We experience betrayal and begin to question our own ability to judge situations. "How could I have trusted her? What is wrong with me? Why did I end up with such a person again?" Trust in others has been violated. As a ricochet, you can lose faith in your own intuition, judgement, feelings, even your own worth. When you stop trusting yourself, every new relationship starts without foundations. A therapist who supports people after the end of a marriage says that the hardest question her patients wrestle with is: can I trust my own feelings? Are my desires, sensations, and intuition reliable? In therapy, the conclusion usually reached is: yes. It takes time to believe it again. In the Christian tradition, there is a beautiful answer to this. God knows us better than we know ourselves. When we lose trust in our own judgement, we can seek support in someone greater than ourselves. This is not about avoiding responsibility, but about finding stability. Lord, you search me, and you know me; you know when I sit and when I rise. From afar you discern my thoughts; you see my activity and my rest, and all my ways are known to you. Psalm 139 – biblical baby steps. Trust is rebuilt gradually. Grand gestures such as apologies, promises, or declarations are only the beginning of the process. What matters is what happens afterwards – every day, in ordinary situations.
Trust resembles porcelain. A broken thing can be put back together, but the traces of damage remain. That is true. Yet porcelain that has been glued and bears visible cracks looks more beautiful than porcelain in perfect condition. The Japanese have a term for this: kintsugi. It is the art of restoration using gold or silver resin. The cracks become an integral part of the object's value. Artists who practise kintsugi stress that the philosophical dimension of this art matters most: the story of an object, including its repairs and cracks, is an inseparable part of its beauty. It is similar in relationships. A relationship that has gone through a difficult period and survived bears visible marks. These marks testify that both people decided to stay together. That has its meaning and an unimaginable value. Priceless in the eyes of God.
In just a few days we will enter the sanctuary. We will see the image that Faustina described as something no artist could ever capture. Beneath it are those three words: "Jesus, I trust in You."
Consider whether in your life there are situations or people where this trust has been violated. Or perhaps you yourselves have broken it towards someone? Perhaps you sometimes lack the courage simply to trust? That is something worth doing as you stand before this image. Not with empty hands, but carrying that particular burden with you. "O my God, my only hope, I have trusted in You completely, and I am certain I shall not be disappointed." Diary no. 317
Find a moment to make that decision today. In this walking, with that foot aching from blisters, with the problems in your head that give you no peace, and with the relationship that still brings suffering. Right now. Right here. JESUS, I TRUST IN YOU.
Fr Adam Płonka
