He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

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.

“Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God Our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created. Hence, man is to make use of them insofar as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them insofar as they prove a hindrance to him. Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things.”

had to learn to recognize his will in the reality of the situation and to act accordingly. We

had to learn to look at our daily lives, at everything that crossed our path each day, with the eyes of God;

The simple soul who each day makes a morning offering of “all the prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day”—

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.

And I learned soon enough that 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. Gradually, too, I learned to

God the almighty, who has created all things out of nothingness and keeps them in existence lest they return to nothingness,

I had to learn to turn to God as best I could and when I could. I had to learn to find him in the midst of trials as well as nerve-racking silences, to discover him and find his will behind all these happenings, to see his hand in all the past experiences of my life, to praise and thank him and ask his blessing on all those faces that crowded to memory (when there was no face to be seen each day except those of my guards), to ask his pardon for my many failures then and now in the interrogations, to promise pardon and to seek to forgive those I sometimes felt were persecuting me, and to ask at every moment for his constant, fatherly protection against the evils that seemed to surround me on all sides.

The Spirit had not abandoned me, for the whole experience had been his work. The sense of guilt and shame I felt was rooted in my failure to put grace ahead of nature, my failure to trust primarily in God rather than in my own powers.

And yet that moment of failure was in itself a great grace, for it had taught me a great lesson. Severe as the test had been, God had sustained me and was now instructing me by the light of his grace.

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

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

Perhaps it can be mended and made serviceable again, but it can never again be as good as new.

knew that I must abandon myself entirely to the will of the Father and live from now on in this spirit of self-abandonment to God. And I did 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.

God’s will was “out there” somewhere, hidden, yet clear and unmistakable. It was my role—man’s role—to discover what it was and then conform my will to that, and so work at achieving the ends of his divine providence. I remained—man remained—in essence the master of my own destiny.

There was but a single vision, God, who was all in all; there was but one will that directed all things, God’s will.

for I saw all things now as coming from the hands of God.

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.

Redemption, salvation for every individual, consists in doing the will of God, no more and no less;

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.

Why? 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. Work was not a curse, even the brutish grunt work I was doing, but a way to God—and perhaps even a way to help others to God. 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.

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.

where I finally came to understand that everything depends on God and not on self in matters spiritual,

I thanked God over and over again for the awful period of purification I underwent in Lubianka so that I could serve these tortured men, and I thanked him, too, for the mysterious workings of his providence that had brought me here.

His task, therefore, was to do what was asked of him each day as perfectly as he could and leave the rest to God.

The thought that I

was doing his will, trying to fulfill whatever he demanded of me each day, gave me that confidence.

No evil could touch me, ultimately, as long as God...

“Man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God and by this means to save his soul.”

Such sacrifice is the first test of any vocation,

The answer lies not in God’s will but in the world in which we live and try to follow his will.

Christ’s life and suffering were redemptive; his “apostolate” in the scheme of salvation was to restore the original order and harmony in all creation that had been destroyed by sin.

will. “All creation,” said Saint Paul, “groans and labors up till now,”

Just as all men share in the disobedience of Adam, so all men must share in the obedience of Christ to the Father’s will.

So the world has not been changed overnight, and it is the world in which we seek to follow Christ’s example that afflicts us as it afflicted him.

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 w...

The thought that actions otherwise worthless in themselves could be somehow redemptive, could serve the growth of his kingdom upon earth because they were undertaken in obedience to his will, and that such actions could even be the source of grace for others, could share in Christ’s work of meriting grace for all—

that thought sustained me in joy and drove me on to work ever

harder to achieve more perfect communion with G...

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, whe...

The wonder of God’s grace transforming worthless human actions into efficient means for spreading the kingdom of God here on earth astounds...

In this subtle insight of the soul touched by God’s divine power lies the root of true interior joy. And as long as this vision persists, as long as the soul does not lose sight of this great truth, the inner joy and peace that follow upon it persist through even the saddest and gravest moments of human trial and suffering. 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—not in the distorted, senseless acts of bloody butchery I had shuddered over as a boy, but as purposeful, redemptive, healing acts by which the world is reconciled to the will of the Father. Such suffering can only bring with it deep spiritual joy, for from it springs redemption and salvation, the ultimate victory over sin and further suffering and even death itself. By man’s first disobedience, says Saint Paul, sin entered the world, and through sin, death. And only by man’s obedience,

For my part, at any rate, I learned it only through the constant practice of prayer, by trying to live always in the presence of God,

by trying to see all things as a manifestation of his divine will.

my inner struggle of soul never ceased.

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.