Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
I recently took up the account of one priest who faced the reality of death and suffering in brutal prisons and learned to “fear no evil.”
“He Leadeth Me” is the story of Servant of God Father Walter Ciszek, a Polish-American priest who set out to minister to the Russian people and was imprisoned in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1963.
Father Ciszek entered Russia with a fellow priest, following a strong call they felt to missionary service there. They found work in a lumber camp but were unable to reach their fellow workers, who were fearful of any mention of religion due to the daily Soviet surveillance and hostility to religion.
Ultimately, he saw the dilemma they faced came from an “inability to work as we thought God would surely want us to work, instead of accepting the situation itself as His will.”
“His will is what He actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people and problems,” he wrote. “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.”
Arrested, tortured, imprisoned
His faith would meet a great challenge shortly after this realization. He was arrested and sent to the infamous Lubianka prison in Moscow, where he was tortured and interrogated, accused of being a Vatican spy.
After a year of interrogations and solitary confinement, he signed a false confession upon being threatened with execution. Overwhelmed by his failure in signing the document, he realized that he had put his faith in his own ability to outwit his interrogators rather than putting himself in God’s hands.
“We were created to do God’s will and not our own, to make our own wills conform to his and not vice versa,” he reflected. “We can promise quite easily in prayer that we will do it. What we fail to see is how much of self still resides in that promise, how much we are trusting in our own powers when we say that we will do it. 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.”
Following a period of despair and uncertainty, Father Ciszek found peace in a radical surrender to God’s will.
“I had talked of finding and doing His will, but never in the sense of totally giving up my own will. I had talked of trusting Him, indeed I truly had trusted Him, but never in the sense of abandoning all other sources of support and relying on His grace alone,” he wrote. “Only when I had reached a point of total bankruptcy of my own powers had I at last surrendered.”
After an additional four years in Lubianka, he was sent to a Siberian labor camp where he did grueling manual labor with barely adequate food and rest.
And yet here he was excited to have the ability to say Mass again in secret with the help of sympathetic prisoners. His observations about their devotion to the Eucharist are a sobering example to those who find it difficult to go to Mass or to fast only an hour before receiving Communion.
Hunger for the afterlife
Following his release, he was kept in the Soviet Union under surveillance and observed that “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.”
But he found there was a great appetite among the Russian people for belief in the afterlife. “I found it especially among the simple people, the good people, for whom the desire or the expectation of an afterlife was not a fantasy or an illusion, as they so often heard it described by communist propagandists,” he wrote. “Death to them was not an end, but a beginning, a passage into eternal life. They took joy in the fact that they would one day be together with their loved ones again.”
“Salvation, these simple people would say, is not measured in terms of how well we make out in what we do here on earth; it depends ultimately on our belief in God and our abandonment in him.” In this belief these people held on to he saw “something that all the theologians and books of theology could not match in their approach to death. That I should find it in the Soviet Union startled me at first. It taught me much.”
While decades have passed since Father Ciszek’s time in Soviet Russia, his work provides timeless spiritual insight into seeing the will of God in the things set before us each day and surrendering to God in the great trials of our lives. Such a lifetime of learning to surrender to the one who has conquered death helps us to see death in a new light, without fear, as a passage into new life.
Lauretta Brown is culture editor for OSV News. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @LaurettaBrown6.