He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

It was not a crisis of faith, any more than it is for anyone who has ever suffered a great loss or faced a family tragedy and asked himself the same questions. It was rather a crisis of understanding, and no one need be ashamed to admit he has been troubled by it. Anyone who has done much reading in the Old Testament is familiar with those questions. “How long, O Lord, how long will you allow our enemies to triumph over us?” Most especially in the days after David, in the ages of captivity, when the glories of the golden age of Solomon were but a memory by the rivers of Babylon and Israel had been broken and led away in shame, does the question recur again and again. To Israel, surely, it must have seemed the end of the world, the end of the covenant, the end of God’s special care for his chosen people. Yet, from our vantage point in history, we know it was really quite the opposite. Israel’s troubles were in truth a manifestation of Yahweh’s special providence, his special love for his chosen people. Like a fond and loving father, he was trying to wean them away from trust in kings or princes or in armies or the powers of this world. He was trying to teach them, again and again, that their faith must only be in him alone. He was leading them, through every trial and in every age, to the realization that God alone is faithful in all tribulations, that he alone is constant in his love and must be clung to, even when it seems all else has been turned upside down.

How easy it is, in times of ease, for us to become dependent on our routines, on the established order of our day-to-day existence, to carry us along. We begin to take things for granted, to rely on ourselves and on our own resources, to “settle in” in this world and look to it for our support. We all too easily come to equate being comfortable with a sense of well-being, to seek our comfort solely in the sense of being comfortable. Friends and possessions surround us, one day is followed by the next, good health and happiness for the most part are ours. We don’t have to desire much of the things of this world—to be enamored of riches, for example, or greedy or avaricious—in order to have gained this sense of comfort and of well-being, to trust in them as our support—and to take God for granted. It is the status quo that we rely on, that carries us from day to day, and somehow we begin to lose sight of the fact that under all these things and behind all these things, it is God who supports and sustains us. We go along, taking for granted that tomorrow will be very much like today, comfortable in the world we have created for ourselves, secure in the established order we have learned to live with, however imperfect it may be, and give little thought to God at all. Somehow, then, God must contrive to break through those routines of ours and remind us once again, like Israel, that we are ultimately dependent only upon him, that he has made us and destined us for life with him...

God is constant in his love if we will but look to him, he will sustain us in every storm if we will but cry out to him, he will save us if we will but reach out our hand to him. He is there, if we will only turn to him and learn to trust in him alone. The upheavals in this world, or in the Church herself, are not the end of everything, especially of his love. They can in fact serve best as signs to remind us of his love and of his constancy, to make us turn once more to him and cling to him again when all else that we counted on is overturned around us. And so it is in each of our lives. It is a sad commentary on our human frailty that we fail to think of God or see him behind the comfortable routines of our day-to-day existence. It is only in a crisis that we remember him and turn to him, often as querulous and questioning children. It is in moments of loss or family tragedy or personal despair that men turn to him and ask, “Why?”—indeed are almost forced to turn to him, again and at last, for help and for support and consolation. Mysteriously, God in his providence must make use of our tragedies to remind our fallen human nature of his presence and his love, of the constancy of his concern and care for us. It is not vindictiveness on his part; he does not send us tragedies to punish us for having so long forgotten him. The failing is on our part. He is always present and ever faithful; it is we who fail to see him or to look for him in times of ease and comfort, to reme...

Despite my excitement, I sensed this was a moment of the greatest importance. It was a turning point, a new departure, and it was going to influence my whole future life. Yet it was what I had always wanted, hoped for, dreamed about since that day at St. Andrew’s. I was more than ever certain now it was the will of God for me. And underneath all my happy discussion with Makar of future plans, I felt again that immense joy, that deep interior peace, that intense conviction I had felt when first I heard the call to the Russian apostolate on that day years ago. It was not to be that easy, though. The next morning brought with it a flood of second thoughts. Had I let my enthusiasm for an old dream run away with my better judgment? Could I be so sure of God’s will? Wasn’t I interpreting the present situation as a “sign” of God’s providence only because I wanted it to be that way? Wasn’t I merely following my own desires and simply calling them God’s will for me? Anyone who has ever wrestled with his conscience over a particular course of action has experienced what I went through then. Any young man or woman who has felt called to a vocation and then hesitated, wondering if the call is genuine, knows the agonies of such second thoughts and how powerful the counterarguments can be. 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 wa...

And though our situation may have been somewhat unique, the temptation itself was not. It is the same temptation faced by everyone who has followed a call and found that the realities of life were nothing like the expectations he had in the first flush of his vision and his enthusiasm. It is the temptation that comes to anyone, for example, who has entered religious life with a burning desire to serve God and him alone, only to find that the day-to-day life in religion is humdrum and pedestrian, equally as filled with moments of human misunderstanding, daily routines, and distractions as the secular life he left behind in the world. It is the same temptation faced by young couples in marriage, when the honeymoon is over, and they must face a seemingly endless future of living together and scratching out an existence in the same old place and the same old way. It is the temptation to say: “This life is not what I thought it would be. This is not what I bargained for. It is not at all what I wanted, either. If I had known it would be like this, I would never have made this choice, I would never have made this promise. You must forgive me, God, but I want to go back. You cannot hold me to a promise made in ignorance; you cannot expect me to keep a covenant based on faith without any previous knowledge of the true facts of life. It is not fair. I never thought it would be like this. I simply cannot stand it, and I will not stay. I will not serve.”

If we could constantly live in the realization that we are sons of a heavenly Father, that we are always in his sight and play in his creation, then all our thoughts and our every action would be a prayer. For we would be constantly turning to him, aware of him, questioning him, thanking him, asking for his help, or begging his pardon when we have fallen. And every true prayer begins precisely here: placing oneself in the presence of God. It is a phrase all spiritual writers use, it is a concept each may visualize in his own way, but the realization of it in practice is sometimes most difficult to achieve. Words do not make a prayer, even the words of the Our Father taught us by our Lord himself, or the words of any other familiar prayer made easy by constant repetition. There is no formula that works of itself, no magic charm that must automatically be heard by God and produce its effect. 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 figure. His fictionalized presence will not do; his imaginative presence will not do. By faith we know that God is present everywhere and is always present to us if we but turn to him. So it is we who must put ourselves in God’s presence, we who must turn to him in faith, we who must leap beyond an image to the belief—indeed the realization—that we are in the presence of...

Across that threshold I had been afraid to cross, things suddenly seemed so very simple. There was but a single vision, God, who was all in all; there was but one will that directed all things, God’s will. I had only to see it, to discern it in every circumstance in which I found myself, and let myself be ruled by it. God is in all things, sustains all things, directs all things. To discern this in every situation and circumstance, to see his will in all things, was to accept each circumstance and situation and let oneself be borne along in perfect confidence and trust. Nothing could separate me from him, because he was in all things. No danger could threaten me, no fear could shake me, except the fear of losing sight of him. The future, hidden as it was, was hidden in his will and therefore acceptable to me no matter what it might bring. The past, with all its failures, was not forgotten; it remained to remind me of the weakness of human nature and the folly of putting any faith in self. But it no longer depressed me. I looked no longer to self to guide me, relied on it no longer in any way, so it could not again fail me. By renouncing, finally and completely, all control of my life and future destiny, I was relieved as a consequence of all responsibility. I was freed thereby from anxiety and worry, from every tension, and could float serenely upon the tide of God’s sustaining providence in perfect peace of soul.

The betterment of mankind, the abstract notion of humanity, or a glorified concept of man are very tenuous ideals that quickly lose their power to inspire or to satisfy in the face of daily experience and the constant grind of day-to-day living. One can be dedicated for a while to the goal of serving suffering humanity, one can be inspired by the notion of brotherhood as a goal, but human nature being what it is—and human failings all too prevalent—it is difficult to support and maintain these moments of inspiration without some deeper and more significant motivation. In Marxist ideology, in atheistic Communism, man and the material world are all there is; for the rest, there is only a vague vision of some future perfect society, some more elevated and better stage of mankind that will exist in a golden age to come, for which even the most doctrinaire apologists of Communism have long since given up trying to set a date. Suddenly, today’s Communists find themselves in the position of those first- and second-century Christians who began to realize that the Parousia, the second coming of Christ, was not just around the corner. Ironically, the future golden age of Communism is now treated by the ordinary citizen, and especially the young, with the same contempt that Communist spokesmen used to reserve for their “pie in the sky” descriptions of religion. Man, after all, is only man—especially if he is the fellow next door with all his petty failings, or the stupid guy at the n...

For what can ultimately trouble the soul that accepts every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strives always to do his will? “If God is for us, who can stand against us?” Nothing, not even death, can separate us from God. Nothing can touch us that does not come from his hand; nothing can trouble us because all things come from his hand. Is this too simple, or are we just afraid really to believe it, to accept it fully and in every detail of our lives, to yield ourselves up to it in total commitment? This is the ultimate question of faith, and each must answer it for himself in the quiet of his heart and the depths of his soul. But to answer it in the affirmative is to know a peace, to discover a meaning to life, that surpasses all understanding.