He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

The failing is on our part. He is always present and ever faithful; it is we who fail to see him or to look for him in times of ease and comfort, to remember he is there, shepherding and guarding and providing us the very things we come to count on and expect to sustain us every day. Yet we fail to remember that, comfortable as we are in our established order and the status quo, as day follows day.

The mind comes up with rationalizations to justify for itself a decision taken without sufficient reason, or to justify doing what the will has already determined for itself that it is going to do. That is why such rationalizations are so often suspect, why motives must always be examined so carefully.

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 yet to grasp this divine truth, simple as it sounds, and work at it, to face each moment of every day in the light of its inspiration, to attempt, insofar as we can, to recall it in every situation and circumstance of our daily lives, to labor day in and day out to make it the sole principle by which our every action is guided and toward which we aim, is to come to know at last true joy and peace of heart, secure in the knowledge we are attempting always and in everything to do God’s will, the only purpose ultimately for which we exist, the end for which alone we were created. There is no greater security a man could ask, no greater serenity a man can know.

Our Father is a prayer of praise and thanksgiving, a prayer of petition and of reparation. It encompasses in its short and simple phrases every relation between man and his Creator, between us and our loving, heavenly Father. It is a prayer for all times, for every occasion. It is at once the most simple of prayers and the most profound.

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. And the more important the situation is, the more totally we are committed to it, or the more completely our future depends upon it, then the easier it becomes for us to blind ourselves into thinking that what we want is surely what God must also want.

In large tests or small, therefore, God must sometimes allow us to act on our own so we can learn humility, so we can learn the truth of our total dependence on him, so we can learn that all our actions are sustained by his grace and that without him we can do nothing—not even make our own mistakes.

It is self that is humiliated; there would be no “humiliation” if we had learned to put self in its place, to see ourselves in proper perspective before God and other men.

How foolish and how selfish! It was not the Church that was on trial in Lubianka. It was not the Soviet government or the NKVD versus Walter Ciszek. It was God versus Walter Ciszek.

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.

The wonder of God’s grace transforming worthless human actions into efficient means for spreading the kingdom of God here on earth astounds the mind and humbles it to the utmost, yet brings a peace and joy unknown to those who have never experienced it, unexplainable to those who will not believe.

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. You don’t shun it when it comes upon you, but bear it in the measure grace is given you. You see in it a putting on of Christ in the true sense of the word.

Death must come to all men at the end of this earthly life, but it is not therefore evil. If the good news of Christianity is anything, it is this: that death has no hidden terror, has no mystery, is not something man must fear. It is not the end of life, of the soul, of the person. Christ’s death on Calvary was not in itself the central act of salvation, but his death and resurrection; it was the resurrection that completed his victory over sin and death, the heritage of man’s original sin that made a Redeemer and redemption necessary.

It is in choosing to serve God, to do his will, that man achieves his highest and fullest freedom. It may seem paradoxical to say that our highest and fullest freedom comes when we follow to the least detail the will of another, but it is true nonetheless when that other is God.

Then, as the years go by, difficulties increase, and there is a constant need for more sacrifice and a renewal of spirit in the initial promise or vow taken. And then it is that the test of one’s humility—the realization of one’s place before God—really begins.

Once this vision is lost, then the self very subtly begins to assume greater importance, and God’s will begins to grow less and less important. It’s not our failings or faults or sins of themselves that bring this about; it is a lack of humility.

And yet faith also teaches him that he cannot be indifferent, that he cannot just shrug his shoulders and sigh, “God will provide.” He knows that he must, in the words of one spiritual maxim, “work as if everything depended upon him and pray as if everything depended upon God.”

Abortion is legal in the Soviet Union. Anyone who wants one can have it performed. The government says it had to be legalized in order to prevent private abuses. The wages of husband and wife together make it hard to support more than one or two children, so everyone wants an abortion. Yet the question haunts them. 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. Even for Communism, it is a basic question of life and death, of wrong and right. If life at its very root can be treated so lightly, people would say, who is going to stop such a mentality from spreading? Society? Hardly. Society cannot even handle properly its present problems of crime and other social disorders. And when a society actually endorses evil, where will it end? Can man alone be trusted to solve mankind’s problems? Look at history, and the depths to which civilized countries have sunk, time after time.

Man was created to praise, revere, and serve God in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next. That is the fact of the matter; you believe it or you don’t—and that is the end of it. Philosophers may argue about it, and they have; some have managed to convince themselves and others of its truth, while others have not. But it is the first truth of the faith, and those who have faith accept it; those who do not, do not. I cannot myself convince anyone of it, but I believe it. I do not apologize for my faith; nor am I ashamed of it.