He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

We all too easily come to equate being comfortable with a sense of well-being, to seek our comfort solely in the sense of being comfortable.

“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.”

Saint Ignatius puts it starkly and forthrightly in his First Principle and Foundation: “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.”

We were not, and did not have to be, the product of our environment.

The sense of hopelessness we all experience in such circumstances really arises from our tendency to inject too much of self into the picture.

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.

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.

And how often during those years did I think of how much the body means to man, how essential its well-being is to his well-being, how prominent a part in every activity of human existence is played by that clay into which God first breathed the breath of life.

For whatever reason, it is always the poor old body that gets the worst of it, as if the mind and the will never had any sinful thoughts or inclinations, as if sin did not consist precisely in setting one’s will (not the body) against God’s will.

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 mysterious interplay of body and soul is an essential characteristic of our human nature.

For each of us, salvation means no more and no less than taking up daily the same cross of Christ, accepting each day what it brings as the will of God, offering back to God each morning all the joys, works, and sufferings of that day.

Work cannot be a curse if God himself undertook it; to eat one’s bread in the sweat of one’s brow is to do nothing more or less than Christ himself did. And he did it for a reason.

A man needs something, some sense of accomplishment to maintain his sense of human dignity, of his value and worth as a person; even under the most stringent, most repetitious and boring routine, a man seeks something to maintain his sense of dignity and of worth.

We experience daily just how difficult it is, therefore, to promote the kingdom of God in our personal lives by fulfilling his will in every respect.

Evil still exists alongside justice like the cockle among the wheat, hatred alongside love, the bad with the good, the sinner along with the saint. None of us, then, can escape the tensions of this imperfect world—neither sinner nor saint, bad nor good, the weak nor the strong, the sick nor the healthy, the simple nor the learned, the indifferent nor the dedicated.