Live Not by Lies

by Rod Dreher

  “You have to suffer for the truth because that’s what makes you authentic. That’s what makes that truth credible. If I’m not willing to suffer, my truth might as well be nothing more than an ideology,” she tells me.

  Komáromi elaborates further:

  Suffering is a part of every human’s life. We don’t know why we suffer. But your suffering is like a seal. If you put that seal on your actions, interestingly enough, people start to wonder about your truth—that maybe you are right about God. In one sense, it’s a mystery, because the Evil One wants to persuade us that there is a life without suffering. First you have to live through it, and then you try to pass on the value of suffering, because suffering has a value.

  Wealth, success, and status are no real defenses against suffering, Komáromi says. Look at all the people who have everything this world can offer, but who still fall into self-destructive behavior, even suicide. Christians must embrace suffering because that’s what Jesus did, and because they have the promise, on faith, that to share in his suffering will bring glory in the next life. But sometimes, she adds, we can see results in this life.

  “When I started to have children, more children came,” says Komáromi, whose kids are all adults now. “When we welcomed all these children back then, we were treated as idiots. Now, though, the whole situation has reversed, and people are so envious that we have such a big family. So in the long run, there is a sort of proof.”

  Mária Wittner, now in her eighties, is regarded by her countrymen as a national hero for fighting the Soviets when they invaded Hungary in 1956. She was only a teenager then. The communist regime arrested her shortly after she turned twenty, and a year later, sentenced her to death. Her sentence was later reduced because of her youth. But she endured terrible grief and pain in her eight months on death row.

  “There was an execution either every day or every other day, by hanging,” she tells me. “The people who were being brought to the execution, each one said their name aloud and left some sort of message in their final words. Some sang the national anthem, others praised their country, there were people saying, “Avenge me!”

  There were days when several people were hanged, even seven a day. Wittner’s friend Catherine was also sentenced to death. They spent Catherine’s last night together in the cell, and said their final goodbyes after sunrise. Wittner explains:

  The guards took her. The last sight I saw of her was that she straightened herself up and went with her back ramrod straight. The door closed, and then I was left alone. I started to bang on the door, shouting, “Bring her back!” even though I knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t matter. Then I fainted. When I came to my senses, I swore to myself that I will never be silent about what I have seen, if I have the opportunity to bear witness.

  This, she believes, is why her life was spared: so that she could tell the world what the communists did to people like her.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about fear, as such,” she says. “What is fear? Someone who is afraid is going to be made to do the most evil things. If someone is not afraid to say no, if your soul is free, there is nothing they can do to you.”

  The old woman looks at me across her kitchen table with piercing eyes. “In the end, those who are afraid always end up worse than the courageous.”

  Admirers or Disciples?

  The filmmaker Terrence Malick frames the conflict in his 2019 masterpiece, A Hidden Life, perhaps the best cinematic evocation of both the Gospel and the inner drama of resisting totalitarianism as a clash of rival religions: Nazism and Catholicism.

  It is based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who refuses to serve in the Nazi army because he will not swear loyalty to Adolf Hitler. For him, that would be an act of idolatry. The Nazis sent Jägerstätter to prison and executed him in 1943 for his treason. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI beatified him as a martyr.

  In the film, nearly all of the peasants in Jägerstätter’s tiny Alpine village accept Nazism without protest. Some do so with enthusiasm. Others have private doubts but are too afraid to speak them. Even the parish priest tells Franz that it would be better for his wife and children if he kept his mouth shut and conformed. Franz and his wife, Fani, are the only ones who both understand how evil Nazi totalitarianism is and are willing to suffer for bearing witness to their conviction.

  A Hidden Life makes clear that the source of their resistance was their deep Catholic faith. Yet everyone in the village is also Catholic—yet they conform to the Nazi world. Why did the Jägerstätters see, judge, and act as they did, but not one of their fellow Christians?

  The answer comes in a conversation Franz has with an old artist who is painting images of Bible stories on the wall of the village church. The artist laments his own inability to truly represent Christ. His images comfort believers, but they do not lead them to repentance and conversion. Says the painter, “We create admirers. We do not create followers.”

  Malick, who wrote the screenplay and who was trained in philosophy, almost certainly draws that distinction from the nineteenth-century Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote Jesus didn’t proclaim a philosophy, but a way of life.

  Christ understood that being a “disciple” was in innermost and deepest harmony with what he said about himself. Christ claimed to be the way and the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6). For this reason, he could never be satisfied with adherents who accepted his teaching—especially with those who in their lives ignored it or let things take their usual course. His whole life on earth, from beginning to end, was destined solely to have followers and to make admirers impossible.2

  Admirers love being associated with Jesus, but when trouble comes, they either turn on him or in some way try to put distance between themselves and the Lord. The admirer wants the comfort and advantage that comes with being a Christian, but when times change and Jesus becomes a scandal or worse, the admirer folds. As Kierkegaard writes:

  The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, will not reconstruct his life, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires. Not so for the follower. No, no. The follower aspires with all his strength to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he is living amongst a “Christian people,” he incurs the same peril as he did when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ.3

  The follower recognizes the cost of discipleship and is willing to pay it. This does not mean that he is obligated to put himself at maximum peril at all times, or stand guilty of being an admirer. But it does mean that when the Gestapo or the KGB shows up in his village and demands that he bow to the swastika or the hammer and sickle, the follower will make the sign of the cross and walk with fear and trembling toward Golgotha.

  Suffer Without Bitterness

  Here is one of Christ’s hardest commands:

  But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matthew 5:44, KJV)

  Many of us find it difficult to be charitable to a sales clerk who is rude to us, or to someone who cuts us off in traffic. Few of us would be able to love someone responsible for us losing our job, or worse, being blacklisted in our profession. Rare is the man or woman who could find love in their hearts for their mugger or rapist.

  But then, most of us aren’t Silvester Krčméry.

  You will recall that Krčméry, who died in 2013, was one of the most important figures in the Slovak Catholic anti-communist resistance. In his eventual court trial, communist prosecutors called him a liar for saying that Czechoslovaks had no religious freedom. You are allowed to go to church to worship, aren’t you? they taunted—a barb that contemporary US progressives toss at conservatives who arg
ue for religious liberty.

  Krčméry threw the accusation back in their faces. He said Jesus is not satisfied with mere churchgoing, but wants believers to live for Christ in all times and places. This is what Krčméry had learned studying with Father Kolaković, and this is what first brought him to the attention of the secret police.

  “Do not be afraid and always act as you think Christ would act in your place and in a particular situation,” Father Kolaković had taught his followers. When the secret police arrested Krčméry, he laughed, because he understood that he was being given the gift of suffering for Jesus.

  In prison, Krčméry was denied a Bible and found himself grateful that he had spent the past few years of freedom memorizing Scripture. Like other political prisoners, Krčméry endured repeated tortures. He had been trained to resist brainwashing. In the end, he relied on faith alone to guide his path. The more he surrendered in his weakness, the greater his spiritual strength.

  The young doctor decided to be united in his suffering with Christ’s, and to offer his pain as a gift to God for the sake of other persecuted people. He believed that the Lord was allowing him to endure this trial for a reason—but he had to convince himself in the face of his agonies.

  “Therefore I repeated again and again: ‘I am really God’s probe, God’s laboratory. I’m going through all this so I can help others, and the Church.”4

  Krčméry decided that he had to be useful. He discovered that simple acts of solidarity with fellow sufferers, both given and received, mattered more than he could have imagined. In that communist prison, the biblical command to bear one another’s burdens became intensely real. “A brother who helped in hard times was closer in suffering than the closest relatives and friends, outside, often on a permanent basis,” he writes. This Catholic layman lived out the truth of the Orthodox priest John of Kronstadt’s advice to the widowed priest Alexei Mechev: to join his grief with the griefs of others, and he would find them easier to bear.

  Torture, deprivation, isolation—all of those things could have destroyed Silvo Krčméry, and made him a hateful man, or at least a defeated one. But the transcript of his 1954 trial shows that it refined him, purified him, made him strong in the Lord. In his final defense statement, Krčméry defiantly proclaimed to the court:

  God gave me everything I have and now that I face persecution because of Him, and am called on to profess my faith in Him, should I now pretend I don’t believe? Should I hide my faith? Should I deny Him?5

  He taunted his communist persecutors, declaring, “We will not allow ourselves to be led to hate, to rebel, or even to complain. . . . That is where our strength and superiority lie.”

  It would be ten years before Silvester Krčméry saw the outside of a prison. He spent the rest of his life evangelizing from his home in Bratislava and working with the sick, especially addicts. The man who said that refusing hatred was the strength of persecuted Christians did not seek vengeance, even after communism’s fall.

  “Bless You, Prison”: Receive Suffering As a Gift

  “Bless those who persecute you,” Jesus taught. Vengeance is easier to resist if you have that mind-set. In his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reveals how he and his fellow inmates were beaten, humiliated, deprived of liberty, made to live in filth and freezing temperatures and crawling with lice, and to endure many other grotesque manifestations of communism’s determination to create heaven on earth. That’s why nothing in that epochal book’s pages shocks more than these lines:

  And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison! . . . Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”6

  Solzhenitsyn’s audacious claim was that suffering had refined him, taught him to love. It was only there, out of the experience of intense suffering, that the prisoner began to understand the meaning of life and first began to sense the good inside himself.

  To be clear, there is nothing in the Gospels that requires Christians to seek out suffering. The Word of God is not a prescription for masochism. But the life of Christ, as well as the Old Testament’s example of the prophets, compels believers to accept the impenetrable mystery that suffering, if rightly received, can be a gift.

  Father Kirill Kaleda, the Russian Orthodox priest who pastors the church dedicated to the martyrs of the Bolshevik persecution, offers a prudent view on suffering in the life of a Christian.

  “Taking up your cross and carrying it is always going to be uncomfortable. We can say clearly that this current ideology of comfort is anti-Christian in its very essence,” says Father Kirill. “But we should point out the fact that the church, not once, ever called its followers to look for suffering, and even made it clear that they are warned not to do that. But if a person finds himself in a situation where he’s suffering, then he should bear it with courage.”

  Alexander Ogorodnikov, whom you met in earlier chapters, is one of the most famous dissidents of the late Soviet period. Born into a communist family, he was a leader in the Komsomol youth movement, his enthusiasm earning him notice from the KGB as a potential recruit. But he converted to Christianity in his twenties. His campaigning for religious liberty landed him a prison sentence in 1978. He was freed nine years later after US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher appealed to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on his behalf.

  Ogorodnikov, now nearly seventy, is quiet and intense. His face is partially paralyzed as a result of the beatings he received in the gulag. It is one thing to read about the torture of Soviet prison camps in a book. It is quite another to listen to an account from the mouth of a man who experienced it. I find out later from my translator that Ogorodnikov had been anxious about meeting me at my hotel, the Hotel Metropol, because in communist times, it was a KGB den.

  Though he did not have a death sentence, Soviet authorities nevertheless decided to teach Ogorodnikov a lesson by placing him on death row in one of the USSR’s harshest prisons—a facility where, according to one of Ogorodnikov’s captors, the state sent people to be broken, “to bleed you out, drop by drop.”

  “When I went into the cell and looked at the others who were there, I told them, ‘Listen brothers, I was sent here to help you meet death, not as criminals but as men with souls that are going to meet their makers, to go meet God the Father,” he tells me. “Given that they always took people to go be shot really early in the morning, many of them didn’t sleep. They were waiting for the knock at the door to see who would be called out. So, of course they didn’t sleep. Neither did I. I helped them turn this night of terror into a night of hope.”

  The young Christian, not yet thirty, told these hardened criminals that though he was not a priest, he would still be willing to hear their confessions.

  “I told them I couldn’t absolve them, but when I die and go before the Lord, I will be a witness to their repentance,” he says. “If I wanted to describe for you their confessions, I would need to be Dostoevsky. I don’t have the words myself. I told them that God is merciful, and the fact that they are admitting what they had done, and denouncing it, would wash them and purify them. They were all going to be shot sooner or later, but at least they would die with a clean conscience.”

  When the prison authorities realized that confinement in a cell with the worst of the worst was not leading Ogorodnikov to repent of his sins against the Soviet state, they put him in solitary confinement.

  “I was alone in the chamber one night,” he remembers. “I felt very clearly that someone woke me up in the middle of the night. It was soft, but clear.

  He goes on:

  When I woke up, I had a very, very clear vision. I could see the corridor of the jail. I could see the person being taken out of his cell in chains, but I only saw them from behind, but I knew exactly who it was. I understood that God sent me an angel
to wake me up so I could accompany that man in prayer as he was being taken out to be shot.

  “Who am I to be shown this?” I asked God. Then I understood that I was seeing the extent of God’s love. I understood that the prayers of this prisoner and I had been heard and that he was forgiven. I was in tears. This awakening didn’t occur with all of those prisoners, only with some of them.

  Ogorodnikov interpreted this as a sign that not all of the prisoners with whom he prayed had been sincere in their repentance. As he languished in solitary confinement, the mystical awakenings continued, as an unseen force would nudge him out of sleep with a gentle touch. The same kind of vision played out in front of the prisoner’s open eyes: the image of guards leading a shackled prisoner to his execution.

  After this happened a few times, Ogorodnikov wondered why, in these waking visions, he was not allowed to see the condemned prisoners’ faces. He did not penetrate this mystery until later, in a different prison, through what he regards as a divine revelation.

  In that small prison, Ogorodnikov was the only captive, and he was looked after by a single guard, who was clearly a pensioner, allowed to work the night shift because he was lonely.

  One night, he entered Ogorodnikov’s cell with a wild look on his face. “They come at night,” said the old man to the prisoner. Strange words, but Ogorodnikov understood that the old man was being driven to the brink of insanity by something and that he needed to confess. Ogorodnikov urged him to speak. This is what the haunted prison guard said:

  When I was a young guard in a different prison, they would gather twenty or thirty priests who had been behind bars, and took them outside. They rigged them up to a sled, so that they were pulling the sled. They had them pull the sled out into the forest. They made them run all day, until they brought them to a swamp. And then they put them into two rows, one behind the other. I was one of the guards who stood in the perimeter around the prisoners.