He Leadeth me

Light of Truth

Father Walter Ciszek is known for his courage while imprisoned in the Soviet Union. But his spiritual writings show him to be “a saint of the ordinary life.” Walter Joseph Ciszek, S.J. (November 4, 1904–December 8, 1984) was a Polish-American Jesuit priest who conducted clandestine missionary work in the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1963. Fifteen of these years were spent in confinement and hard labour in the Gulag, plus five preceding them [1] in Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. He was released and returned to the United States in 1963, after which he wrote two books, He Leadeth Me and with God in Russia. Excerpts from He Leadeth Me.

“After twenty-three years inside the Soviet Union, fifteen of them spent in Soviet prisons or the prison camp of Siberia – I have been asked… “How did you manage to survive?” …To me, the answer is simply and I can say quite simply: Divine Providence.

But how can I explain it?
I don’t just mean that God took care of me. I mean that He called me to, prepared me for, and then protected me during those years in Siberia. I am convinced of that; but then, it is my life and I have experienced His hand at every turning……”

[…] I had little need to speak much of the power of evil to these prisoner-priests. It was tangible. It was all about us. That there was a force of evil loose in the world, doing battle for the minds of men, was as realistic as the barbed wire that fenced us in and the propaganda that bombarded us daily. So this was their battlefield, this was where Christ in His providence had seen fit to place them, this was where they must labour and suffer and perhaps die. Not in the Indies of the sixteenth century, not in the Holy Land of the twelfth century, not even in the equally humdrum and frequently frustrating routine of a parish life filled with days of people’s problems and this world’s concerns, but here in the seemingly hopeless conditions of a camp where men struggled simply to survive and took pride and comfort in having survived just one more day.

They had to convince themselves, these prisoner-priests, of the need to renew their faith in the belief that Christ’s victory was the guarantee of their victory. The kingdom of God had to be worked out on earth, for that was the meaning of the Incarnation. It had to be worked out by men, by other Christs; it had to be worked out this day, each day, by constant effort and attention to just those persons and circumstances God presented to them that day. The “kingdom of God” had indeed been begun on earth with the coming of Christ, but the world had not visibly changed at His birth. Twelve Galilean fishermen had been instructed to tell the good news to the whole world – and how hopeless a task that must have seemed even to the boldest of them after Pentecost! Twenty centuries later, the kingdom of God was still a mustard seed, and priests like themselves still faced the impossible task of making men who had never believed, or who had yielded up their beliefs under the pressure of daily life or a barrage of propaganda, listen again to the good news of salvation and God’s love – and come to believe in Him. That good news reached men one at a time, by God’s grace and according to His providence, not in some great and visionary crusade or overnight through some miraculous event. Each day, every day of our lives, God presents to us the people and opportunities upon which he expects us to act. He expects no more of us, but He will accept nothing less of us; and we fail in our promise and commitment if we do not see in the situations of every moment of every day His divine will. That is how the kingdom of God has been spread from the time of Christ’s coming until now. It depends on the faith and commitment of every man, but especially of the priest, every day of his life. Every moment of every man’s life is precious in God’s sight, and none must be wasted through doubt and discouragement. The work of the kingdom, the work of labouring and suffering with Christ, is no more spectacular for the most part than the routine of daily living. Perhaps a priest experiences no spectacular successes, at least as man measures successes, no miraculous conversions, no enthusiastic displays of devotion, nothing dramatic at all. Yet he must come to believe, and be firmly convinced, that Christ is the guarantor of his success. Christ has arranged for him to be here, this day and among these people, in order that the kingdom of God may be advanced in this place and among these people. As a priest, he must be a witness in a special way to the power of the kingdom to transform all things human, even the tortured and twisted, the humdrum and the seemingly insignificant. In fact, it is the unspectacular and the seemingly hopeless that are the real challenge. For these things, too, must be transformed and redeemed, if Christ’s victory is to be complete. The kingdom of God will not be brought to fulfilment on earth by one great, sword-swinging battle against the powers of darkness. But only by each of us labouring and suffering day after day as Christ laboured and suffered, until all things at last have been transformed. And this process of transformation continues until the end of time. ….Across that threshold I had been afraid to cross, things suddenly seemed so very simple. There was but a single vision, God, who was all in all; there was but one will that directed all things, God’s will. I had only to see it, to discern it in every circumstance in which I found myself, and let myself be ruled by it. God is in all things, sustains all things, directs all things… Nothing could separate me from Him, because He was in all things. No danger could threaten me, no fear could shake me, except the fear of losing sight of Him….

Filled with this new spirit and transformed interiorly, I no longer dreaded the next interview with the interrogator…. for I saw all things now as coming from the hands of God. I was no longer afraid of making a “mistake,” since God’s will was behind every development and every alternative. Secure in His grace, I felt capable of facing every situation and meeting every challenge; whatever He chose to send me in the future, I would accept.”

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