He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

It was then, especially, that I turned to prayer.

prayer does not take away bodily pain or mental anguish. Nevertheless, it does provide a certain moral strength to bear the burden patiently. Certainly, it was prayer that helped me through every crisis.

I learned to purify my prayer and remove from it the elements of self-seeking.

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 b...

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.

It is a prayer for all times, for every occasion.

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.

Prayer, true prayer, is a communication—and it occurs only when two people, two minds, are truly present to each other in some way.

Conversation with God comes easily whenever God is felt

Real prayer occurs, as I have said, when at last we find ourselves in the presence of God.

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

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.

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.

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.

We can see but one solution only, and naturally we assume that God will help us reach

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.

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

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.

before the Lord was finished tempering and purifying my soul.

What a wonderful treasure and source of strength and consolation our Lord’s agony in the garden became for me from that moment on.

knew immediately what I must do, what I would do, and somehow I knew that I could do it.

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.

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.

We are afraid to abandon ourselves totally into God’s hands for fear he will not catch us as we fall.

was brought to make this perfect act of faith, this act of complete self-abandonment to his will, of total trust in his love and concern for me and his desire to sustain and protect me, by the experience of a complete despair of my own powers and abilities that had preceded it.

chose, consciously and willingly, to abandon myself to God’s will, to let go completely of every last reservation.

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.

Secure in his grace, I felt capable of facing every situation and meeting every challenge; whatever he chose to send me in the future, I would accept.

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.

My situation had not improved, but my disposition in the acceptance of God’s will had returned. Along with it had come peace and a renewed confidence—not in my own ability to survive, but a total trust and confidence in God’s ability to sustain me and provide me with whatever strength I needed to meet the challenges he would send me.

But until the body fails us, or pains us, or forces itself upon our attention by some little twinge or complete collapse, we tend to take for granted this first and most precious of God’s gifts to man or to give it short shrift.

“The spirit indeed is willing” to serve God and seek perfection, but “the flesh is weak,” is lazy and slothful, is prone to concupiscence and sin, seeks its own pleasures and distracts the soul from seeking God alone.

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.

I really came to appreciate the marvelous gift of life God had given man in the resources of the human body.

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.

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.

Because I saw this work as the will of God for me.

The labor I did was not a punishment, but a way of working out my salvation in fear and trembling.

I could not, therefore, look upon this work as degrading; it was ennobling, for it came to me from the hand of God himself. It was his will for me.

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.

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.

For my part, I could not help but see in every encounter with every prisoner the will of God for me, now, at this time and in this place, and the hand of providence that had brought me here by strange and torturous paths.

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.

This simple truth, that the sole purpose of man’s life on earth is to do the will of God, contains in it riches and resources enough for a lifetime. Once you have learned to live with it uppermost in mind, to see each day and each day’s activities in its light, it becomes more than a source of eternal salvation; it becomes a source of joy and happiness here on earth. The notion that the human will, when united with the divine will, can play a part in Christ’s work of redeeming all mankind is overpowering.

Pain and suffering do not thereby cease to exist; the ache and anguish of body and soul do not vanish from man’s consciousness. But even they become a means of nourishing this joy, of fostering peace and conformity to God’s will, for they are seen as a continuation of Christ’s passion—

I had continuously to learn to accept God’s will—not as I wished it to be, not as it might have been, but as it actually was at the moment.

Of course there were doubts; at one time there was near despair. It was not reason that sustained me then but faith.

If you look upon sacrifice and suffering only through the eyes of reason alone, your tendency will be to avoid as much of it as you can, for pain in itself is never pleasant. But if you can learn to see the role of pain and suffering in relation to God’s redemptive plan for the universe and each individual soul, your attitude must change.

No man’s life, no man’s suffering, is lost from the eyes of God.