He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

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.

This right here is the way. I don't understand it wholly, but I have an inkling.

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.

Here again but this one I understand way more

I was no longer afraid of making a “mistake,” since God’s will was behind every development and every alternative.

Now that I get!

whatever he chose to send me in the future, I would accept.

His newest proposal was that I might serve as chaplain in a newly formed army of Polish Communists under Wanda Wasilewski, or perhaps as chaplain in General Ander’s army, an army of Free Poles formed to fight on the proposed second front. I told him quite simply I was willing to do either. He seemed genuinely pleased with the promptness of my reply and my new disposition. He told me that I seemed more relaxed and easy in my mind—as indeed I was, because the fear of making a mistake had left me now that I was conscious God was with me.

Ah this is a good example. I learnbetter this way. So he just said yes and trusted God's will to take ultimate precedence. Super interesting.

Whether I went to Rome or not was for God to decide, for him to arrange. I stood ready to accept any and all events as coming from his hand. Discussions of this Roman business took up many sessions with the interrogator, yet through it all I remained totally detached and perfectly relaxed.

Detachment is the key word here

Through all this, I remained at peace. Where before, the notion of such cooperation would have upset and tormented me, I felt no such distress any longer. If these things were to be, then they were to be—for a purpose God alone knew. If they were not to be, then they would never happen.

If it is meant to be it will be! There it is.

When at last the interrogator asked me to sign an agreement covering the Roman business, I just refused. I had not thought of doing so in advance; in fact, I had simply gone along with everything up to that point. But suddenly it seemed the only thing to do, and I did it. He became violently angry and threatened me with immediate execution. I felt no fear at all. I think I smiled. I knew then I had won. When he called for the guards to lead me away—and I had no assurance but that they were leading me before a firing squad—I went with them as if they were so many ministers of grace. I felt his presence in the moment and knew it drew me toward a future of his design and purpose. I wished for nothing more.

By just seeing where God takes you, ultimately the Holy Spirit will tell you what you needed to do.

It had been easy during the periods of prayer and contemplation to imagine future happenings and the way I would try to respond to them. In the light of the vision I then enjoyed, it was easy to float freely and euphorically into the future, ready to accept whatever God might have prepared for me there. But the future was now the present, and as is always the case, it was a lot more unmanageable and full of bustle than it had seemed in the abstract. Accordingly, my new spirit of interior resolve to search out and understand and accept God’s will in every detail of every situation was quickly put to a rude test by the rough and ready realities of life.

It is aways trickier in practice

I realized almost immediately that I was asking the questions, raising the doubts, that I had promised not to ask in abandoning myself to the will of God. And I realized, too, that it’s one thing to give up such doubts and questions in a moment of grace and inspiration and spiritual insight, but another thing to prevent them from arising spontaneously when the harsh and rough circumstances of a moment of daily life drive from the mind everything except thoughts of here and now. So I did not feel ashamed of such doubts and questions; I simply recognized them for what they were and tried to recollect myself to recapture my commitment to God’s will even under these circumstances.

For me, each day came forth from the hand of God newly created and alive with opportunities to do his will. For me, each day was a series of moments and incidents to be offered back to God, to be consecrated and returned in total dedication to his will. That was what my priesthood demanded of me, as it demanded of every Christian.

children of this world were dedicated to surviving this life by whatever method possible. I, too, must be totally dedicated, but with an added dimension. I must not seek to avoid hardships or to soften their impact. I must see in them the will of God and through them work out my salvation. Otherwise, I would be acting rather as a child of this world than a child of light.

I would not merely passively survive, like the children of this world, but with his help and his grace I would actively participate—and I would survive. I never doubted that, because I did not fear nonsurvival. Death would simply be a call to return to the God I served each day. My life was to do the will of God, as the prayer our Savior taught us put it quite simply, “on earth as in heaven.” His will would determine how long I would spend on earth.

And how often during those years did I think of how much the body means to man, how essential its well-being is to his well-being, how prominent a part in every activity of human existence is played by that clay into which God first breathed the breath of life.

The tiniest movement was like a scream of pain. Swinging my legs over the side of the bunk was torture; standing up was a near impossibility. How would I ever march down to the ship, let alone shovel coal for another fifteen hours straight? It couldn’t be done. It was physically impossible. But I did it.

I always say there is more in the tank

That we survived, under the circumstances, is a tribute to the stubbornness and power of the human will driving the body beyond what a man thought he could endure, and a tribute as well to the marvelous work of God’s creation that is the human body. No machine ever devised by man could have withstood,

It is customary to speak of the “indomitable human spirit” as that which carries man through crises like this, but the body surely merits more attention than it usually gets. Not the trained, beautifully conditioned body of the athlete, but the weak, underfed, and ordinary body with which we are all endowed.

There is a strain in Christian asceticism that tends to despise the body, that looks upon it as the corruptible part of man and the source of corruption. Because the soul is immortal and the body is corruptible,

It was the body that bore the brunt of all suffering, though the soul might well experience anguish. And it was the body that had to sustain you, for all the strength of will and determination a man might have.

Body, spirit, and mind must all be strengthened for God

It was the body that underwent the suffering, felt the agony, and carried the heavy weight across its shoulders of this daily passion and slow death of inhuman work.

Yet it was only now, when each day ended with exhaustion and the body cried out for every extra minute of rest, every little respite from work, every extra crumb of food, that I really came to appreciate the marvelous gift of life God had given man in the resources of the human body.

Similar to the marathon experience. Insane what the body is able to endure. It's God's wonderful creation made in his likeness. Through God's grace it receives power, just as I felt in the marathon. Jesus Christ ran it with me.

The intimacy that exists between soul and body is a marvel of creation and a mystery of human existence. Yet we do wrong to think, because the soul will be judged after death while the body crumbles in the grave, that this mortal handful of dust is any less a gift of God, any less noble or beautiful than the immortal soul. It is in the body that we exist and work out our salvation.

THIS

The mysterious interplay of body and soul is an essential characteristic of our human nature. If the body is sick or sore, tired or hungry or otherwise distressed, it affects the spirit, affects our judgment, changes our personality. So slight a thing as a headache can affect our relations with those around us.

What we tend to forget, though, is the very folksy truth that God by his Incarnation took on a human body. We don’t often stop to reflect on the most basic meaning of this doctrine: that God, too, knows exactly how it feels to be cold, or tired, or hungry, or sore with pain, because he, too, has had a body. He has spent long hours, for years at a time, doing the routine and unspectacular work of a carpenter, has walked long days over dusty roads with tired feet, has curled his shoulders against the night air or a chill rain, has been without sleep while others slept, has been thirsty and hot and weary and ready to drop from exhaustion.

Christ was all man and all God. He knows us wholly.

Christ must have known what it is like to wake up stiff and sore on a dull, gray morning, must have had headaches and toothaches and backaches and aching bones, must have been anxious and annoyed and irritated at times. In the Incarnation God came to know for himself what a thing is the life of man, what a work of his hands is this creature composed of body and soul. From the dark of the womb to the black of the tomb, through childhood to manhood and the last, slow long-drawn-out agony of dying, he has known for himself what it means to live in a handful of clay, to feel the cool touch of mother’s hand on fevered flesh, to taste the salt of sweat and tears, to hear music and birdsong and the vilest of insults, to stumble and fall, be bruised and mangled and torn. He cried out at last, as have all of us at one time or another, to be spared any more burdens or suffering. The Incarnation, in short, meant that God became man, like us in all things, says Saint Paul, except sin.

Cont

Redemption, salvation for every individual, consists in doing the will of God, no more and no less; “Father,” said Christ at the moment of his supreme agony in the garden, “not my will but thine be done.” Yet God will not, has not, asked us to bear any more than he himself has borne in his Incarnation and suffering and death, nor to experience anything he himself did not experience.

For each of us, salvation means no more and no less than taking up daily the same cross of Christ, accepting each day what it brings as the will of God, offering back to God each morning all the joys, works, and sufferings of that day.

This is the epitome of being a good christian

It means getting up each morning and going to bed exhausted. It means the routine, not the spectacular. It can mean drudgery, pain, putting aside pleasures, happiness, or the love the human heart craves until another time, so that what is necessary at the moment can be done. It means working for others, touching the lives of others, through the medium of the body.

Cont

Truly, man is a creature composed of body and soul, and we work out our salvation in this vale of tears through the medium of the flesh.

It is the first gift God and our parents fashion for us; it sustains and supports us through a long life and makes possible both joys and sorrows; and when at last we are parted from it in death, it surely deserves whatever rest it can get before it rises to be glorified at the last judgment.

Yes, a lot of the talk on such occasions is simply rhetoric and lip service; but a lot of it is not. There is a pride that the ordinary Soviet citizen feels in being part of a society that has made tremendous gains—industrially, economically, educationally, scientifically, socially, and perhaps culturally—in the past generation, a nation that has risen from the ashes and the rubble of war to become one of the two recognized world superpowers.

For as against communism as I am, it's important to recognize the other side

Moreover, the camps gave me an opportunity to work again in some fashion as a priest, and I took full advantage of it. The camp officials knew all about such activities through informers, and insisted that I stop. When I refused, when I continued to minister to my fellow prisoners, I was punished by being assigned to rough brigades, to the hardest types of labor, to extra heavy duty that would drive me to near exhaustion and leave me little time or energy to function as a priest.

Love it but yikes. What a man

I worked to the limit of my strength each day and did as much as my health and endurance under the circumstances made possible. Why? Because I saw this work as the will of God for me. I didn’t build a new city in Siberia because Joseph Stalin or Nikita Khrushchev wanted it, but because God wanted it. The labor I did was not a punishment, but a way of working out my salvation in fear and trembling.

The definition of trusting God's will

there was the realization that work of itself is not a curse but a sharing in God’s own work of creation, a redemptive and redeeming act, noble of itself and worthy of the best in man—even as it was worthy of God himself.

There is a tremendous truth contained in the realization that when God became man, he became a workingman. Not a king, not a chieftain, not a warrior or a statesman or a great leader of nations, as some had thought the Messiah would be. The Gospels show us Christ the teacher, the healer, the wonder-worker, but these activities of his public life were the work of three short years. For all the rest of the time of his life on earth, God was a village carpenter and the son of a carpenter.

Exactly. Work is so noble that God himself did it most of his life on earth as Jesus Christ.

There is little we can say about the jobs we do or have done that could not be said of the work God himself did when he became a man. Yet he did not think it demeaning, beneath his dignity, dehumanizing. If anything, he restored to man’s work its original dignity, its essential function as a share in God’s creative act.

to show us that these routine chores, too, are not beneath man’s dignity or even God’s dignity, that simple household tasks and the repetitious work of the wage earner are not necessary evils but noble and redemptive works worthy of God himself.

Work cannot be a curse if God himself undertook it;

He did it for years on end, he did it for more than three-quarters of his life on earth, to convince us that God has not asked of us anything more tedious, more tiring, more routine and humdrum, more unspectacular than God himself has done.

that the plainest and dullest of jobs is—or at any rate can be, if viewed properly in respect to God and to eternity—a sharing in the divine work of creation and redemption, a daily opportunity to cooperate with God in the central acts of his covenant of salvation.

that work is not a curse but a gift of God, the very same gift he gave to the first man, Adam, when he created him in his own image and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it as the steward of the Lord.

chosen from among men and ordained for men in the things that are of God; you realized, too, that this imposed upon you an obligation of service, of ministry, with no thought of personal inconvenience, no matter how tired you might be physically or what risks you might be running in the face of official threats.

We come to know the workings of the spirit in ourselves slowly. How much more slowly, then, do we begin to detect the workings of that same spirit in others?

Strange as it may seem, these informers or suspected informers were never excluded from our company. They shared in our Masses. We heard their confessions and they heard ours; such was the power of our confidence in the seal of the confessional.

God persists and his true people forgive

The key word, in fact, of our priestly apostolate in the camps had to be the word witness. It was not so much a matter of preaching God and talking religion to the men around you as it was a matter of living the faith that you yourself professed.

faith itself gave another dimension to life, that a man could believe in something beyond the material world and that this belief gave meaning and purpose to a life lived in circumstances that otherwise would be cause only for despair.

For a priest is ordained to do more than simply celebrate the Mass or hear confessions, to console the sick and comfort the dying, to offer words of consolation and spiritual wisdom to those in need.

It is the priest’s function to offer these things back to God for his fellow men and to serve as an example, a witness, a martyr, a testimony before the men around him of God’s providence and purpose.

“Man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God and by this means to save his soul.” Yet that is the great truth behind all human existence.