He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

I learned to pray for my interrogators, not so they would see things my way or come to the truth so that my ordeal would end, but because they, too, were children of God and human beings in need of his blessing and his daily grace. I learned to stop asking for more bread for myself, and instead to offer up my sufferings, the pains of hunger that I felt, for the many others in the world and in Russia at that time who were enduring similar agony and even greater suffering. I tried very hard not to worry about what tomorrow would bring, what I should eat, or what I should wear, but rather to seek the kingdom of God and his justice, his will for me and for all mankind.

“Thy will be done.” That was the key, but only slowly did I come to experience how perfect a prayer is the Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer.

Yup Amen. The Lord kniws what you need, so instead say and FEEL what the Lord's prayer is truly abouy. Glorifying Him and seeking his ways.

He begins by placing us in the presence of God: God the almighty, who has created all things out of nothingness and keeps them in existence lest they return to nothingness, who rules all things and governs all things in the heavens and on earth according to the designs of his own providence. And yet this same all-powerful God is our Father, who cherishes us and looks after us as his sons, who provides for us in his own loving kindness, who guides us in his wisdom, who watches over us daily to shelter us from harm, to provide us food, and to receive us back with open arms when we, like the prodigal, have wasted our inheritance. Even as a father guards his children, he guards us from evil—because evil does exist in the world. And just as he can find it in his Father’s heart to pardon us, he expects us to imitate him in pardoning his other sons, our brothers, no matter what their offenses.

The Lord's prayer broken down

The Our Father is a prayer of praise and thanksgiving, a prayer of petition and of reparation. It encompasses in its short and simple phrases every relation between man and his Creator, between us and our loving, heavenly Father. It is a prayer for all times, for every occasion. It is at once the most simple of prayers and the most profound. One could meditate continuously on each word and phrase of that formula and never fully exhaust its riches. If one could only translate each of its phrases into the actions of his daily life, then he would indeed be perfect as his heavenly Father clearly wishes him to be. Truly, the Lord’s Prayer is the beginning and end of all prayers, the key to every other form of prayer.

And every true prayer begins precisely here: placing oneself in the presence of God.

When you begin prayer take a moment to place yourself in the Lord's presence.

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

Real 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 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.

Because the restless human mind, our chief instrument in all human communications, is also our chief stumbling block to prayer.

We are so easily distracted. Calm the mind and isolate yourself with the Lord.

And it is helpful and consoling on such occasions to remember two things: (1) that God himself has initiated this conversation by inspiring us to set aside the time for prayer; and (2) that he appreciates our efforts to respond, and he blesses them.

This

If we could achieve union with God in prayer, we would then see his will quite clearly and desire nothing but to conform our will to his. So there is truth in the realization that even our most unsuccessful efforts to achieve union with God in prayer are nevertheless an effort to respond to his inspiration and his grace to pray.

I had to learn to turn to God as best I could and when I could. I had to learn to find him in the midst of trials as well as nerve-racking silences, to discover him and find his will behind all these happenings, to see his hand in all the past experiences of my life, to praise and thank him and ask his blessing on all those faces that crowded to memory (when there was no face to be seen each day except those of my guards), to ask his pardon for my many failures then and now in the interrogations, to promise pardon and to seek to forgive those I sometimes felt were persecuting me, and to ask at every moment for his constant, fatherly protection against the evils that seemed to surround me on all sides. “Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples had asked. “He said to them, ‘This is how you should pray: Our Father …’

Even in the bleakest of times. No especally then must we turn to the Lord. Both all the times and when we need him most

nd when they bring you to trial and deliver you up, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say; but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.”

When we need Him most, the Holy Spirit shines. It's our job to feed Him every other time.

The answer was a single word: I. I was ashamed because I knew in my heart that I had tried to do too much on my own, and I had failed. I felt guilty because I realized, finally, that I had asked for God’s help but had really believed in my own ability to avoid evil and to meet every challenge. I had spent much time in prayer over the years, I had come to appreciate and thank God for his providence and care of me and of all men, but I had never really abandoned myself to it. In a way, I had been thanking God all the while that I was not like the rest of men, that he had given me a good physique, steady nerves, and a strong will, and that with these physical graces given by God, I would continue to do his will at all times and to the best of my ability. In short, I felt guilty and ashamed because in the last analysis I had relied almost completely on myself in this most critical test—and I had failed.

There's levels to submission. He was a good man, but too prideful in his ability. He reminds me of me. I need to learn this lesson. It is what I am working hardest on rn during lent.

I had not really left myself open to the Spirit. I had, in fact, long ago decided what I expected to hear from the Spirit, and when I did not hear precisely that, I had felt betrayed. Whatever else the Spirit might have been telling me at that hour, I could not hear.

Don't impose your will just submit. Sometimes God's will is not what we want, but trust that it's better

This tendency to set acceptable conditions upon God, to seek unconsciously to make his will for us coincide with our desires, is a very human trait.

the more important the situation is, the more totally we are committed to it, or the more completely our future depends upon it, then the easier it becomes for us to blind ourselves into thinking that what we want is surely what God must also want.

Dude yes. The more important it is the harder it is to remove your will and submit. I gotta work on this big time too

When I entered religion, I saw this character trait as a talent given me by God rather than as a flaw. I took pride in developing it further, through ascetical practices such as fasting, severe penances, exercises of will, and personal discipline. Had I failed to see that these were not always done solely in response to God’s grace or out of some apostolic motive, but also out of pride? Yes, I prided myself on doing these things better or more often than others, vying as it were with the legends of the saints to prove that I (that telltale word, again) could prove their equal and somehow be better than my contemporaries.

Shoot I'm staring in the mirror rn. Literally me. I must do better.

but we were created to do God’s will and not our own, to make our own wills conform to his and not vice versa.

My will is a gift, but it must conform to the Lord's will first and foremost. I must let go of pride to do so

Learning the full truth of our dependence upon God and our relation to his will is what the virtue of humility is all about.

We rely on Him for all things

It is self that is humiliated; there would be no “humiliation” if we had learned to put self in its place, to see ourselves in proper perspective before God and other men.

as a contest between his will and my own, so in this moment of total crisis I had seen death almost solely in terms of self and not as the moment of my return to God, as it truly is. I had reason, therefore, to feel shame and guilt.

utter failure on my part to abandon myself to God’s will in total Christian commitment; I had failed miserably to be what I professed to be, or to act according to the principles I professed to believe. And yet that moment of failure was in itself a great grace, for it had taught me a great lesson. Severe as the test had been, God had sustained me and was now instructing me by the light of his grace.

Failure is the best teacher

“He who endures to the end will be saved.”

God was testing me by this experience, like gold in the furnace, to see how much of self remained after all my prayers and professions of faith in his will.

Yet, thanks be to God, I did still endure—and I had learned, to the depths of my shaken soul, how totally I depended on him for everything even in my survival and how foolish had been my reliance upon self.

I imagined I must know how Saint Peter felt when he had survived his denials and been restored to Christ’s friendship. Even though our Lord had promised that he, being once converted, would confirm his brethren, I doubt very much that Peter ever again boasted that he would never desert the Lord even if all others deserted him. I find it perfectly understandable that Peter, in his letters to the early churches, should have reminded his Christians to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. For just as surely as man begins to trust in his own abilities, so surely has he taken the first step on the road to ultimate failure.

And the greatest grace God can give such a man is to send him a trial he cannot bear with his own powers—and then sustain him with his grace so he may endure to the end and be saved.

Failure is the best teacher

There were to be four more years of interrogations and testing in Lubianka before the Lord was finished tempering and purifying my soul.

What a way to look at it

Having failed once, I was literally terrified that I might fail completely this time and lose the last thing I still clung to, my faith in God.

It's a real fear man. But God is always there as is his will, no matter if we feel it or not.

I was so desolate that even prayer seemed impossible. I felt endangered and threatened anew, but I could find no light or consolation in prayer. I found myself instead reproaching God for not sparing me this new ordeal.

This anger is sadly normal among us fallen children. The fact it took him this long displahs this guy's outrageous strength through God

Then he suggested that, since I wanted to remain a priest, I should become a member of the Orthodox Church. He explained how easy it would be for him to arrange that, and also to arrange for me to have a platform from which I might denounce the Pope. He stressed how the Orthodox Church, unlike the Catholic Church, had condemned fascism and was helping the government in the war against totalitarianism. But the Popes had attacked Communism, especially Pius XII, who surely must secretly sympathize with Mussolini and Hitler. That led to long arguments about the Church. Finally, I managed to convince him that the Catholic Church was, to me, at least as meaningful as the Communist Party was to him. I felt toward her the same sense of loyalty and allegiance that he felt to the Communist Party. I could not help it; it was part of me. So we agreed to disagree, and I felt I had won another round.

THE BALLS HOLYYY

In fact, I sometimes thought of death by suicide as the only way out of this dilemma. Illogical, surely, but despondency and despair are like that.

Even he had those thoughts in the midst of despair.

This was despair. For that one moment of blackness, I had lost not only hope but the last shreds of my faith in God. I had stood alone in a void, and I had not even thought of or recalled the one thing that had been my constant guide, my only source of consolation in all other failures, my ultimate recourse: I had lost the sight of God.

Jeez man poor guy. It's so real especially in his situation. My faith broke way easier than his.

I had to ask that that moment of despair had not made me unworthy of his help.

Humans are very similar

Suddenly, I was consoled by thoughts of our Lord and his agony in the garden. “Father,” he had said, “if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me.” In the Garden of Olives, he, too, knew the feeling of fear and weakness in his human nature as he faced suffering and death. Not once but three times did he ask to have his ordeal removed or somehow modified. Yet each time he concluded with an act of total abandonment and submission to the Father’s will. “Not as I will, but as thou wilt.” It was not just conformity to the will of God; it was total self-surrender, a stripping away of all human fears, of all doubts about his own abilities to withstand the passion, of every last shred of self including self-doubt.

That's important to remember. Also God gives us the thoughts we need in those moments

I knew immediately what I must do, what I would do, and somehow I knew that I could do it. I knew that I must abandon myself entirely to the will of the Father and live from now on in this spirit of self-abandonment to God.

I can only describe the experience as a sense of “letting go,” giving over totally my last effort or even any will to guide the reins of my own life. It is all too simply said, yet that one decision has affected every subsequent moment of my life. I have to call it a conversion.

So simple yet I imagine it is at once a complete conversion as he describes. The death of the self and the burth of a vessel of the Lord. An ego death but with a powerful rebirth

Up until now, I had always seen my role—man’s role—in the divine economy as an active one. Up to this time, I had retained in my own hands the reins of all decisions, actions, and endeavors; I saw it now as my task to “cooperate” with his grace, to be involved to the end in the working out of salvation. God’s will was “out there” somewhere, hidden, yet clear and unmistakable. It was my role—man’s role—to discover what it was and then conform my will to that, and so work at achieving the ends of his divine providence.

Shiii that's exactly as I see it. Gotta evolve.

Perfection consisted simply in learning to discover God’s will in every situation and then in bending every effort to do what must be done.

Extension of the previous

God’s will was not hidden somewhere “out there” in the situations in which I found myself; the situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal. He was asking of me an act of total trust, allowing for no interference or restless striving on my part, no reservations, no exceptions, no areas where I could set conditions or seem to hesitate.

Acceptance if I am understanding correctly is the key to whole submission. Accepting the situations at hand and handing him the reins. I admit I do not completely understand, but I can just barely grasp the gist.

It demanded absolute faith: faith in God’s existence, in his providence, in his concern for the minutest detail, in his power to sustain me, and in his love protecting me. It meant losing the last hidden doubt, the ultimate fear that God would not be there to bear you up.

when a child first leans back and lets go of all support whatever—only to find that the water truly holds him up and he can f...

Of course we believe that we depend on God, that his will sustains us in every moment of our life. But we are afraid to put it to the test. There remains deep down in each of us a little nagging doubt, a little knot of fear that we refuse to face or admit even to ourselves, that says, “Suppose it isn’t so.”

Yup. I struggle here like most of us.

It is not really a question of trust in God at all, for we want very much to trust him; it is really a question of our ultimate belief in his existence and his providence, and it demands the purest act of faith.

Yeah there is a difference between desire and doing

God in his providence had been constant in his grace, always providing opportunities for this act of perfect faith and trust in him, always urging me to let go the reins and trust in him alone. I had trusted him, I had cooperated with his grace—but only up to a point. Only when I had reached a point of total bankruptcy of my own powers had I at last surrendered.

I have to call it a conversion experience; it was at once a death and a resurrection.

It was not something I sought after or wanted or worked for or merited. Like every grace, it was a free gift of God.

I know it was a choice I never could have made, and never had made before, without the inspiration of God’s grace.

Yet this time I chose to cross it—and the result was a feeling not of fear but of liberation, not of danger or of despair but a fresh new wave of confidence and of happiness.