He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

We would survive, although the world around us had changed completely. We would go on, today and tomorrow and the next day, picking up the pieces and working out each day our eternal destiny and our salvation. There would be a tomorrow, and we would have to live in it—and God would be there as well.

If we could constantly live in the realization that we are sons of a heavenly Father, that we are always in his sight and play in his creation, then all our thoughts and our every action would be a prayer. For we would be constantly turning to him, aware of him, questioning him, thanking him, asking for his help, or begging his pardon when we have fallen. And every true prayer begins precisely here: placing oneself in the presence of God.

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

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. It is in the body that we see and take delight in the beauties of God’s created universe, and in the body that we ourselves bear the marks of Christ’s passion.

The authorities in the camps did more than simply frown on such priestly activities. Officially, of course, they were against religion and had the power of the law and the Soviet Constitution, which forbade proselytizing, on their side. But there was more to their opposition than that. They knew priests had influence on other people. From the point of view of those in charge of the camps, therefore, that made priests especially dangerous no matter what they were telling their fellow prisoners. Accordingly, priests were called in regularly for interviews by the NKVD security agents.

Camp officials were deathly afraid of and constantly on guard against little insurrections or revolts among the prisoners. They went to great lengths to break up nationality groups among the prisoners, or language groups, or even people from the same town or other common background, i.e., those who had been to universities or were former party members.

It is not the Father, not God, who inflicts suffering upon us but rather the unredeemed world in which we must labor to do his will, the world in whose redemption we must share.

From a purely human standpoint, my sojourn in the Soviet Union could have been considered the most stupid and senseless action of my life. But I saw these hardships, this drab reality, as an integral part of my apostolate. I could not separate this earthly reality from the will of God, because the will of God has to be worked out by each of us here on earth.

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. It was only by struggling with such feelings, however, that growth occurred.

Perhaps nowhere on earth is the contrast between those who believe and those who do not believe more striking than it is in the Soviet Union. Death is very nearly a taboo subject in the Communist milieu. In an ideology of atheistic materialism, death is obviously the end of everything for a man.

My life, like Christ’s—if my priesthood meant anything—was to do always the will of the Father. It was humility I needed: the grace to realize my position before God—not just in times when things were going well, as they had been in Norilsk, but more so in times of doubt and disappointment, like today, when things were not going the way I would have planned them or wished them. That’s what humility means—learning to accept disappointments and even defeat as God-sent, learning to persevere and carry on with peace of heart and confidence in God, secure in the knowledge that something worthwhile is being accomplished precisely because God’s will is at work in our life and we are doing our best to accept and follow it.

We cannot naïvely pretend that God can be found anywhere—that he can be served and loved and invoked as Savior—and ignore the Church he founded. The Church is full of human failings because it is composed of human beings; it has its share of scandals and bad leaders, of mediocre minds, of selfishness and skin-deep spirituality, of fallible and imperfect men who do not always practice what they preach. Nevertheless, it remains the institution Christ founded to preserve and guard the faith, the Mystical Body wherein even the weak can be made strong.

The hallways of the clinics adjoining the abortion rooms were full of posters, not praising abortion but informing patients of the possible detrimental effects on both mind and body such an operation could have. The doctors, mostly women, and the nurses and other personnel would try to dissuade patients from the operation. Women confided years later that they could not rid themselves of feelings of guilt about it. And these were not “believers” but women and girls who had received a complete atheistic education in Soviet schools.

It means, for example, that every moment of our life has a purpose, that every action of ours, no matter how dull or routine or trivial it may seem in itself, has a dignity and a worth beyond human understanding. No man’s life is insignificant in God’s sight, nor are his works insignificant—no matter what the world or his neighbors or family or friends may think of them. Yet what a terrible responsibility is here. For it means that no moment can be wasted, no opportunity missed, since each has a purpose in man’s life, each has a purpose in God’s plan. Think of your day, today or yesterday. Think of the work you did, the people you met, moment by moment. What did it mean to you—and what might it have meant for God? Is the question too simple to answer, or are we just afraid to ask it for fear of the answer we must give?