He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

On October 12, 1963, I landed at New York’s Idlewild Airport after having spent twenty-three years in the Soviet Union and most of that time in prison or the slave labor camps of Siberia.

For every man’s life contains its share of suffering; each of us is occasionally driven almost to despair, to ask why God allows evil and suffering to overtake him or those he loves.

It is impossible to describe the feeling that comes over you at such a time. The feeling that somehow, in an instant of time, everything is changed and nothing again will ever be quite the same. That tomorrow will never again be like yesterday. That the very trees, the grass, the air, the daylight are no longer the same, for the world has changed.

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,

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.

No situation is ever without its worth and purpose in God’s providence.

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.

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

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—

experience of Lubianka was designed by God to purge me of dependence upon self and to lead me to reliance only upon him.

Lie once, and innocence is lost forever. Fall once, and the vessel is broken.

Now, with sudden and almost blinding clarity and simplicity, I realized I had been trying to do something with my own will and intellect that was at once too much and mostly all wrong.

It was something like that awful eternity between anxiety and belief 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 float motionless and totally relaxed.

Only when I had reached a point of total bankruptcy of my own powers had I at last surrendered.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It is much easier to see the redemptive role of pain and suffering in God’s plan if you are not actually undergoing pain and suffering.

That there was a force of evil loose in the world, doing battle for the minds of men, was as realistic as the barbed wire that fenced us in and the propaganda that bombarded us daily.

Twenty centuries later the kingdom of God was still a mustard seed, and priests like themselves still faced the impossible task of making men who had never believed, or who had yielded up their beliefs under the pressure of daily life or a barrage of propaganda, listen again to the good news of salvation and God’s love—and come to believe in him.

The kingdom of God will not be brought to fulfillment on earth by one great, sword-swinging battle against the powers of darkness, but only by each of us laboring and suffering day after day as Christ labored and suffered, until all things at last have been transformed. And this process of transformation continues to the end of time.

The body can be confined, but nothing can destroy the deepest freedom in man, the freedom of the soul, and the freedom of mind and will.

God in his providence does not leave men at peace until they are converted in a crisis that, sooner or later, must come to every heart.

grace is always given to us, but we must learn to recognize it in the people and circumstances presented to us by God’s providence,

From the time of the apostles—twelve simple men, alone and afraid, who had received the commission to go forth into the whole world to preach the good news of the kingdom—there has been no other way for the spreading of the kingdom than by the acts and the lives of individual Christians striving each day to fulfill the will of God.

“Humility is truth” is a spiritual adage that sums it up well, for humility is nothing more or less than knowing our place before God.

But prior to love, and bolstering it at the core, is faith; we must have faith before we can love, or we will surely end up loving the wrong thing—loving ourselves more than God, or loving creatures for themselves—and this is the meaning of sin. To increase our love, to love properly, we must strive always to increase our faith, and we do this by means of prayer and the sacraments.

“work as if everything depended upon him and pray as if everything depended upon God.”

God, in the wonderful ways of his divine providence, uses many means to attain his end.