He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

It is the status quo that we rely on, that carries us from day to day, and somehow we begin to lose sight of the fact that under all these things and behind all these things, it is God who supports and sustains us. We go along, taking for granted that tomorrow will be very much like today, comfortable in the world we have created for ourselves, secure in the established order we have learned to live with, however imperfect it may be, and give little thought to God at all.

Then it is, perhaps, that he must allow our whole world to be turned upside down in order to remind us it is not our permanent abode or final destiny, to bring us to our senses and restore our sense of values, to turn our thoughts once more to him—even if at first our thoughts are questioning and full of reproaches.

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.

I knew then what I must do. I experienced then what I had heard before from spiritual directors or read in spiritual books but never fully understood: That God’s will can be discerned by the fruits of the spirit it brings.

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.”

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.

rote formulas are, in and of themselves, no more prayers than are the poor dog’s barkings truly speech. God may hear and understand, as we may hear and feed the dog; some minimal communication has been achieved, and no effort goes unrewarded with the Lord. But we have not, for all that, truly learned how to pray. Real prayer occurs, as I have said, when at last we find ourselves 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. It seems by nature bent upon distraction rather than on recollection. It prefers to be free, to wander ceaselessly, to seize on each new idea and explore its every direction rather than to fashion its attention upon one direction and remain pinned down.

Sometimes, indeed very often, the time we have set aside for prayer passes simply in a struggle to control our restless mind, collect our thoughts, and focus our attention upon God. And it is helpful and consoling on such occasions to remember two things: (1) that God himself has initiated this conversation by inspiring us to set aside the time for prayer; and (2) that he appreciates our efforts to respond, and he blesses them.

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. God’s will was not hidden somewhere “out there” in the situations in which I found myself; the situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal. He was asking of me an act of total trust, allowing for no interference or restless striving on my part, no reservations, no exceptions, no areas where I could set conditions or seem to hesitate. He was asking a complete gift of self, nothing held back. It demanded absolute faith: faith in God’s existence, in his providence, in his concern for the minutest detail, in his power to sustain me, and in his love protecting me. It meant losing the last hidden doubt, the ultimate fear that God would not be there to bear you up.

I was continuously distracted, even when I tried to pray. The quiet, interior contacts with God I had enjoyed in prison, periods of reflection or of contemplation, were less effective and frequent now. Nor was that the only adjustment I had to make. My desire to see God’s will in every situation, to search out and understand his providence at work in every circumstance, now began to bump up against the real world once more.

Each day to me should be more than an obstacle to be gotten over, a span of time to be endured, a sequence of hours to be survived. 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.

Death would simply be a call to return to the God I served each day. My life was to do the will of God,

“Man is a creature composed of body and soul.” We have recited that truth from the day we first learned our catechism. But 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.

I felt I had to be extremely careful about giving even the external appearance of cooperating, lest there be any suspicion among the prisoners about placing the seal of confession in jeopardy.

As a laborer in this vineyard, he sensed the seeming impossibility of ever influencing in any significant way the masses of people living in a professedly atheistic state. On the other hand, he could daily feel the power of God’s grace, could trust completely in his divine providence. 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 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.

Nor, in my opinion, can a proper understanding of pain and suffering be achieved without the larger vision of salvation or the more immediate context of apostolate and of vocation. 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.

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.

Despite this added hardship, everyone observed a strict Eucharistic fast from the night before, passing up a chance for breakfast and working all morning on an empty stomach. Yet no one complained.

these men would actually fast all day long and do exhausting physical labor without a bite to eat since dinner the evening before, just to be able to receive the Holy Eucharist—that was how much the sacrament meant to them in this otherwise God-forsaken place.

I was amazed at the devotion of these men. Most of them had really had very little formal religious training; for the most part they knew little of religion except the prayers and beliefs that pious parents or grandparents had taught them. And yet they believed, and were willing to make unheard-of sacrifices for the consolation of attending Mass or receiving Communion.

“Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood,” Christ said to his disciples, “you shall not have life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall have life and have it more abundantly.” These men, with simple and direct faith, grasped this truth, and they believed in it. They could not explain it as a theologian might, but they accepted it and lived by it and were willing to make voluntary sacrifices even in a life of almost total deprivation, in order to receive this bread of life.

A man needs something, some sense of accomplishment to maintain his sense of human dignity,

we taught them to say the Morning Offering—to dedicate to God all the prayers, works, and sufferings of each day in conformity to his will—as a means of winning grace for others, especially for their families and friends. In that way, no matter how harsh the conditions in the camps might be, how cruel and useless the work might seem, it took on new meaning and added value.

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;

the end of life, annihilation, death—really holds no fear at all. That is not a Christian fable; it is a fact, and the proof of it is the resurrection. “If Christ be not risen,” said Saint Paul to his Christians, “then your faith is in vain.” You cannot be a Christian and doubt that fact. Christ’s coming upon earth, his taking on of human flesh, had no purpose if it was not to die and then to triumph over death.

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.

Even ascetical practices such as penances, fasting, or mortifications can be hindrances rather than helps if they are self-imposed. Striving instead to eliminate all self-will, to accept God’s will revealed in the circumstances of daily life, is the surest way

churches officially still clung to the strict interpretation of laws established long ago and intended to protect the faithful from falling into error, laws that prohibited intercommunion with other Christian denominations. Such laws seemed to have little relevance to the situations in which we found ourselves in Siberia, and the faithful were the first to sense this. They wanted to worship God, to practice their religion, and to them it was the same Triune God who was worshiped and adored in the churches, the same Christ who was offered in the sacrifice of the Mass no matter which rite was celebrated.

We for our part can accept and offer back to God every prayer, work, and suffering of the day, no matter how insignificant or unspectacular they may seem to us. Yet it is precisely because our daily circumstances often seem so insignificant and unspectacular that we fail so often in this regard.

unfortunately those who have lost a true sense of humility—that constant realization of the relationship between each individual and God—have also lost thereby the ability to look upon their burdens in this way. They see instead only the burden, the difficulties, the humiliation; and they become depressed. They begin to pity themselves, to question things in their married lives or in their vocations that they valued highly before. Sacrifice, work, and dedication seem meaningless; charity, patience, and love become merely empty words. They begin to question now even the wisdom or the validity of their initial decision, to look for freedom or some way out. Perhaps they justify it with the data of science, or psychology, or arguments about changing times in a changing world. But ultimately, what they are trying to explain is the radical change in themselves that has brought them to the point of interior crisis in a vocation they once embraced with so much joy and enthusiasm.