In July 1964, as a 22-year-old, newly minted college graduate, I found myself on a bus from Bethlehem, Pa., to the John XXIII Ecumenical Center at Fordham University in the Bronx, N.Y. I was heading to meet the Rev. Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit priest who was unknown to me at the time, but whom my pastor thought could offer some good advice to me, a young Byzantine Catholic interested in mathematics and pursuing religious life.
My pastor was right. After our initial meeting, Walter and I began a friendship that would endure until his death. Profoundly influenced by our time together, I eventually entered the Society of Jesus and studied philosophy and theology in Rome. Residing initially at the Gesù and then at the Russicum (or Russian College), I would meet many of the Jesuits who knew Father Ciszek from his days in Rome.
Years later, I became the first postulator for the cause of Walter’s canonization and was charged with preparing the supporting documentation for his cause for sainthood. Through this process, and through our 20-year friendship, I came to realize that at the center of all his experiences and studies was his journey in prayer.
While self-control and will power are important in any spiritual development, prayer is essential. And for Walter, every life experience helped to mature his prayer life. Throughout 23 years of Russian confinement—he was finally released on Oct. 12, 1963—Walter turned to God in prayer in every crisis. “I consoled myself,” he would say, “as always, with the thought that God knew what He was doing. I kept repeating, ‘Thy will be done.’” But, still, God’s will could be hard to understand.
Even in confinement, the kindness shown to Walter by many men and women in Russia witnessed to God’s presence in his life. He met women dedicated to fostering a spiritual life for their children and who recognized that God’s presence in their children’s lives could not be replaced by state propaganda and political posturing.
While in Russia, Walter experienced the poorest of the poor, not only in prison but in the work camps and small Russian towns where he worked. On his return to the United States, he was astounded by the propensity toward blatant materialism he found in a society immersed in excess and a temptation toward promiscuity and immediate self-gratification always present. As he rebuilt his life in the United States, necessity and friendship led him to become skilled at spiritual direction, which he offered to many people who were drawn to him. He learned the importance of managing exterior conditions if peace of heart was to be found and to work towards continual and unbroken perseverance in prayer.
In order to help the mind and heart to focus and gain control over passions, he used the repetition of a scriptural verse. He understood progress in the spiritual life as directly linked to growth in prayer, which was nurtured by patient self-control, discretion and charity. Nevertheless, there is no virtue without freedom (2 Cor 3:17), and growth in the virtues nurtured growth of prayer in faith-filled confidence and allowed for the humble and patient magnanimity of spiritual friendship.
For Walter, spiritual direction nurtured the discernment for growth into a more focused disposition. He knew that a spiritual director might tell a directee how to fast and make vigils, do penance, cry out for tears and a continued state of compunction, or how to say a prayer, but ultimately they knew that God was the true director of one’s spiritual life and that a person’s personal experience with God mattered.
Walter’s literary works, especially With God in Russia and He Leadeth Me, spoke to two effects of growth in prayer: humility and faith. His prayer life was dynamically cyclic: outward (prompted by Scripture); inward (allowed to affect the heart); and then outward again (fulfilled in daily life). The principle that guided all theory of contemplation and divinization, called theosis in the Christian East, was that like can be known only by like. True knowledge of the Trinity could be given to us only in the proportion that we were transformed into the likeness of God. This transformation was seen by Walter as affected by and nurtured through growth in prayer—a process of growth under the Holy Spirit into the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. Walter recognized this as a practice of prayer designated by the Greeks as monologistos, a form in which a single prayer formula was constantly repeated in order to help focus the mind and heart in order to sustain unceasing prayer.
Through his prayer, Walter grew in his understanding that doing the will of the Father was not always an easy task—the words of our Lord he had been repeating to himself were uttered in the agony in the garden. They were Christ’s own prayer just before the hours of his greatest trials and humiliations. While Walter viewed the Our Father as a model for prayer given to us by Christ, it was Christ’s words in the garden that he used to reach a “state” of prayer. He was concerned not only with the words of the prayer but strove for an appreciation of the mode of silence in which our Lord prayed.
“Humility is truth” was a spiritual adage that Walter understood well.
Walter’s 23 years of confinement provided him opportunities to satisfy this appreciation; not so much as an example of obedience but, in fact, as the most perfect illustration of the virtue of humility. For humility, after all, was based for Walter on a very simple recognition of a fundamental truth: the true relationship between God and man. “Humility is truth” was a spiritual adage that Walter understood well, for humility was nothing more or less than knowing our place before God.
The true state of prayer for Walter shared the characteristics of habit or disposition. He knew that it was not an external enemy that brings us dread—as he learned in solitary confinement in Moscow’s Lubianka Prison—but that our foe is shut up within ourselves. Each of us has our own Lubianka. The “inner man” was one who devoted himself to the totally interior work of the struggle against evil thoughts. There existed a relationship between “inner man” and prayer, and for Walter, spiritual direction nurtured the discernment for growth into a more focused disposition.
Work in Russia provided Walter with stability and allowed his mind to be well-anchored. Engaging in manual labor while reciting Scripture allowed him to grow in self-control, which allowed him to focus more completely and achieve a steadfastness of heart. As a result of a direct privilege of grace and enlightened discretion, he realized the full effect of his conversion in confinement. He now had a single vision of Christ in all things, a desire to discern God’s will in every situation and the ability to see all things new in him. Walter’s foundation of prayer and faith had provided him with a growing freedom in God, a freedom that drew people toward him; a true freedom in God that affected the heart and allowed friendship to grow and see all things new in him.
Walter’s journey in holiness was a growth in resemblance, in a participation with God. He appreciated the fact that discipline over one’s thoughts so that they are all submitted to the presence and the love of Christ becomes the means for one’s entrance into true freedom. It was an interior voice that made one conscious of God’s presence and helped focus one’s faith in prayer. For Walter the need to listen for the interior voice of conscience and to discern God’s will in every situation became critical if one was to enter into a relationship with the living Lord.
There was a uniqueness in Walter’s journey, and certainly in his cross, that made him a model for many Christians today. The conversion experience in a silent cell left Walter with an unconditional readiness to change his life and place everything in God’s hands. Lubianka provided the nails for his cross and the necessary purification for a saintly life of priestly service grounded in prayer.
