He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

What could I tell them except to pray and to trust in God?

“Oh, if only I could turn back the clock to before it happened, if only it had never happened, if only I had it to do over again.”

“Why has God allowed this evil to happen?”

Why persecutions? If God must allow natural disasters, or even wars because of human failings, why can’t he at least allow his flock to be shepherded and comforted during such calamities? Surely he could defend and protect his flock instead of having it singled out for special attack such as this.

How could God allow all this? And why?

I did not blame the people. I knew they had not lost their faith but were just afraid right now to practice it openly.

How much did God, who had allowed all this to happen,

expect of these simple, ordinary people of the backwoods of Albertyn?

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.

“How long, O Lord, how long will you allow our enemies to triumph over us?”

Like a fond and loving father,

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.

Lord behind the events and happenings of this world; he can be found there, and he must be sought in them, so that his will may be done. It was he who had chosen them, not they him.

He was ever faithful, and so in turn must they be, even when he led them where they would not go, into a land they knew not, or into exile.

in times of peace and prosperity, Israel came to take Yahweh for granted, to settle down in some routine and to accept the status quo as the be-all and the end-all,

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 don’t have to desire much of the things of this world

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.

we begin to lose sight of the fact that under all these things and behind all these things, it is God...

that he must allow our whole world to be turned upside down in order to remind us it is not our permanent abode or final destiny, to bring us to our senses and restore our sense of values, to turn our thoughts once more to him—even if at first our thoughts are questioning and full of reproaches.

It is not princes or rulers, structures or organizations, that sustain the Church. It is God who sustains her.

The upheavals in this world, or in the Church herself, are not the end of everything, especially of his love.

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,

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 remember he is there, shepherding and guarding and providing us the very things we come to count on and expect to sustain us every day. Yet we fail to remember that, comfortable as we are in our established order and the status quo, as day follows day.

One thing only need be of great concern to us in all this seeming upheaval and catastrophe: to be faithful to God and to look to him in everything, confident of his love and his constancy,

It was as if my whole life, in God’s plan, had pointed to this moment.

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?

But these were arguments against doing what I knew I wanted to do, these were questions based on fact and on reality, and they were valid arguments.

I turned to prayer, but my mind was in such turmoil, my intellect so actively involved in weighing reasons pro and con, that I could not hear the voice of God.

Prayer became difficult, almost impossible. I felt my faith was weakened, that I had come to this decision by listening to the voice of reason rather than by listening to the voice of God.

was the loss of that deep interior sense of peace, that sense of joy and enthusiasm, that strong spirit of faith in God’s involvement in my life that, up to now, had been such an integral part of all my spirituality.

I wanted to be totally open to God’s will, to hear his voice, and to leave self out of it. That was my prayer for guidance. And immediately there came flooding back that sense of peace, that feeling of joy, that confidence in the simple and direct faith expressed in trusting him alone. I knew then what I must do.

That God’s will can be discerned by the fruits of the spirit it brings. That peace of soul and joy of heart are two such signs, provided they follow upon total commitment and openness to God alone and are not founded on the self’s desires.

Only in the decision to go on to Russia did I find the joy and the interior peace that are marks of God’s true intervention in the soul.

Yet the strong realization rushed over me that I was not cut off from God, that he was with me, indeed that I was dependent only on him in a new and very real way.

“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.”

could ask his blessing on those for whom we labored and prayed in secret, for those who themselves were perhaps praying in secret, but who couldn’t worship him publicly.

It was the grace quite simply to look at our situation from his viewpoint rather than from ours.

Not the will of God as we might wish it, or as we might have envisioned it, or as we thought in our poor human wisdom it ought to be. But rather the will of God as God envisioned it and revealed it to us each day in the created situations with which he presented us.

We had to learn to look at our daily lives, at everything that crossed our path each day, with the eyes of God; learn to see his estimate of things, places, and above all people, recognize that he had a goal and a purpose in bringing us into contact with these things and these people, and strive always to do that will—his will—every hour of every day in the situations in which he had placed us.

Ultimately, we come to expect God to accept our understanding of what his will ought to be and to help us fulfill that, instead of learning to see and accept his will in the real situations in which he places us daily.

To predict what God’s will is going to be, to rationalize about what his will must be, is at once a work of human folly and yet the subtlest of all temptations.

The plain and simple truth is that his will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. The trick is to learn to see that—not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God’s grace, but every day. Each of us has no need to wonder about what God’s will must be for us; his will for us is clearly revealed in every situation of every day, if only we could learn to view all things as he sees them and sends them to us.

I turned to God in prayer.

to cloud my vision and prevent me from seeing the current situation with the eyes of God? No man, no matter what his situation, is ever without value, is ever useless in God’s eyes.

Under the worst imaginable circumstances, a man remains a man with free will, and God stands ready to assist him with his grace.

The sense of hopelessness we all experience in such circumstances really arises from our tendency to inject too much of self into the picture. Doing so, we can easily be overwhelmed by personal feelings of inadequacy or sheer physical powerlessness, by the realization of one man’s seeming insignificance in a corrupt world.

God does not ask the impossible of any man.

the soul at last recognizing its mistakes for what they were and condemned forever to the loss of heaven, constantly tormenting itself with reproaches and tearing itself apart because it still sees and understands and wants the things it has lost forever, but knows it is condemned to lose forever because of its own choices, its own failings, its own mistakes.

But above all I prayed.