He Leadeth Me

Walter Ciszek dreamed of going to Soviet Russa to minister to souls as a priest. The Lord led him there.

Ciszek was born in 1904 in a mining town in Pennsylvania. He was ordained a priest in 1928, and following Pope Pius XI's 1929 appeal for priests to go to the Soviet Union as missionaries, he set his heart on going to Russia. After studying in Rome, he managed to be assigned to the small village of Albertyn in eastern Poland. When the Nazis and Soviets carved up Poland in September 1939, Ciszek had the opportunity to minister in the Soviet Union. Shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Ciszek was arrested, accused of being a "Vatican spy," and sent to the notorious Lubyanka prison, operated by the secret police.

Ciszek spent five years in Lubyanka. When he was not in solitary confinement, he faced night-long interrogation sessions with the secret police, who sought his confession to being a Vatican spy. Ciszek told and retold his story to the interrogators, who twisted his words and relentlessly persisted in their efforts to gain his confession. Ciszek resisted, but eventually he signed a false confession. 

For Ciszek, the experience was shattering, but in a salutary way, for "all things work for good for those who love God" (Romans 8:28). Ciszek realized he had relied too much on himself to overcome the interrogators and too little on God. In his testament He Leadeth Me, Ciszek wrote of the experience, "Learning the full truth of our dependence upon God and our relation to his will is what the virtue of humility is all about... 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."

The interrogations continued, with the secret police now pressuring Ciszek to work on their behalf. The strain of resisting them drove Ciszek to despair. But, as so often happens, it was at his lowest point that he was enlightened and freed from his burden by the Lord. In that moment he recalled Jesus in Gesthemane, both His pleading and His prayer: "not as I will, but as You will" (Matthew 26:39). Ciszek wrote, "What a wonderful treasure and source of strength and consolation our Lord's agony in the garden became for me from that moment on... I 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."

"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... 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, in his love protecting me.

"There was but a single vision, God, who was all in all: there was but one will who 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."

I won't spoil what happens next between Ciszek and his interrogators, but suffice it say that the Father Ciszek's conversion experience (as he describes it) had a decisive effect on his life. Ciszek spent more than twenty years in the Soviet Union; he was liberated in 1963 when the Kennedy Administration negotiated an exchange of prisoners with the Soviets. He Leadeth Me is a powerful testimony of learning to trust in God's providence in all things and abandoning oneself to His will, and to the joy and peace which are the fruits of that abandonment. 

Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet every day for the salvation of souls.