Live Not by Lies

by Rod Dreher

  “One of the KGB guys walked up to the first priest. He asked him very calmly and quietly, “Is there a God?” The priest said yes. They shot him in the forehead in such a way that his brains covered the priest standing behind him. He calmly loaded his pistol, went to next priest, and asked, “Does God exist?”

  “Yes, he exists.” The KGB man shot this priest in the same way. We didn’t blindfold them. They saw everything that was about to happen to them.

  Ogorodnikov fights back tears as he comes to the end of his story. In a voice cracking with emotion, the old prisoner says, “Not one of those priests denied Christ.”

  This is why the old man volunteered to keep Ogorodnikov company after sundown: memories of the priests’ faces in the moments before their execution haunted him at night. This encounter with the broken prison guard made Ogorodnikov understand why, in his mystical visions, he had not been able to see the faces of the condemned. He too would have been driven mad by the horror. He had to be content with the knowledge that because he had been present to share the Gospel with them, those poor souls, damned in this life, would live forever in paradise.

  Expect the Worst, Show Mercy to the Broken

  Unless you have been through the experience, it is hard to grasp how mentally fragile torture and solitary confinement can make a man. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn urges his readers to have mercy on prisoners who broke under torture. Nearly all of them did, at some point, he says. Unless you’ve endured it, he writes, you cannot imagine how great the pressure is to say anything that will make the physical and psychological pain stop.

  In his life as a political prisoner in communist Romania, the late Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand testified to both truths. The Romania that Soviet troops occupied at the end of World War II was a deeply religious country. After Romanian Stalinists seized dictatorial control in 1947, among the most vicious anti-Christian persecution in the history of Soviet-style communism began.

  From 1949 to 1951, the state conducted the “Piteşti Experiment.” The Piteşti prison was established as a factory to reengineer the human soul. Its masters subjected political prisoners, including clergy, to insane methods of torture to utterly destroy them psychologically so they could be remade as fully obedient citizens of the People’s Republic.

  Wurmbrand, held captive from 1948 until he was ransomed into Western exile in 1964, was an inmate at Piteşti. In 1966 testimony before a US Senate committee, Wurmbrand spoke of how the communists broke bones, used red-hot irons, and all manner of physical torture. They were also spiritually and psychologically sadistic, almost beyond comprehension. Wurmbrand told the story of a young Christian prisoner in Piteşti who was tied to a cross for days. Twice daily, the cross bearing the man was laid flat on the floor, and one hundred other inmates were forced by guards to urinate and defecate on him.

  Then the cross was erected again and the Communists, swearing and mocking, “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, had been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrement, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it.7

  Wurmbrand asked the priest how he could consent to commit such sacrilege. The Catholic priest was “half-mad,” Wurmbrand recalled, and begged him to show mercy. All the other prisoners were beaten until they accepted this profane communion while the communist prison guards taunted them.

  Wurmbrand told the American lawmakers:

  I am a very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the twentieth century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes.8

  After his release, Pastor Wurmbrand, who died in 2001, devoted the rest of his life to speaking out for persecuted Christians. “Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”9

  Let the Weakness of Others Make You Stronger

  Accompanying other persecuted people in their suffering can lead us to deep repentance and spiritual strength. One of Wurmbrand’s fellow Piteşti prisoners was George Calciu, an Orthodox Christian medical student who was eventually ordained a priest. In 1985, he was sent into exile in the United States, where he served at a northern Virginia parish until his death in 2006.

  In a lengthy 1996 interview, Father George told about his encounter with a fellow prisoner named Constantine Oprisan. They met when Calciu was transferred from Piteşti to Jilava, a prison that was built entirely underground. The communists put four prisoners in each cell. In his cell was Oprisan, who was deathly ill with tuberculosis. From their first day in captivity there, Oprisan coughed up fluid in his lungs.

  The man was suffocating. Perhaps a whole liter of phlegm and blood came up, and my stomach became upset. I was ready to vomit. Constantine Oprisan noticed this and said to me, “Forgive me.” I was so ashamed! Since I was a student in medicine, I decided then to take care of him . . . and told the others that I would take care of Constantine Oprisan. He was not able to move, and I did everything for him. I put him on the bucket to urinate. I washed his body. I fed him. We had a bowl for food. I took this bowl and put it in front of his mouth.10

  Constantine Oprisan—“he was like a saint,” Father George said—was so weak that he could barely talk. But every word he said to his cellmates was about Christ. Hearing him say his daily prayers had a profound effect on the other three men, as did simply looking at the “flood of love in his face.”

  Constantine Oprisan was a physical wreck because he had been so badly tortured in Piteşti for three years, reported Father George. Yet he would not curse his torturers and spent his days in prayer.

  All the while, we did not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the justification of our life in this cell. Over the course of a year, he became weaker and weaker. We felt that he had finished his time here and would die.11

  After he died

  every one of us felt that something in us had died. We understood that, sick as he was and in our care like a child, he had been the pillar of our life in the cell.12

  After the cellmates washed his body and prepared it for burial, they alerted the guards that Constantine Oprisan was dead. The guards led the men out of the windowless cell for the first time in a year. Then one guard ordered Calciu and another man to take the body outside and bury it. Constantine Oprisan was nothing but skin and bones; his muscle tissue had wasted away. For some reason, the skin pulled tight over his emaciated skeleton had turned yellow.

  My friend took a flower and put it on his chest—a blue flower. The guard started to cry out to us and forced us to go back into the cell. Before we went into the cell, we turned around and looked at Constantine Oprisan—his yellow body and this blue flower. This is the image that I have kept in my memory—the body of Constantine Oprisan completely emaciated and the blue flower on his chest.13

  Looking back on that drama nearly a half century later, Father George said that nursing the helpless Constantine Oprisan in the final year of his life revealed to him “the light of God.”

  When I took care of Constantine Oprisan in the cell, I was very happy. I was very happy because I felt his spirituality penetrating my soul. I learned from him to be good, to forgive, not to curse your torturer, not to consider anything of this world to be a treasure for you. In fact, he was living on another level. Only his body was with us—and his love. Can you imagine? We were in a cell without windows, without air, humid, filthy—yet we had moments of happiness that we never reached in freedom. I canno
t explain it.14

  In terms of sacramental theology, a mystery is a truth that cannot be explained, only accepted. The long death of Constantine Oprisan, which gave spiritual life to those who helped him bear his suffering, is just such a mystery. The stricken prisoner was dying, but because he had already died to himself for Christ’s sake, he was able to be an icon to the others—a window into eternity through which the divine light passed to illuminate the other men in that dark, filthy cell.

  A Christianity for the Days to Come

  The faith of martyrs, and confessors like those who survived to bear witness, is a far cry from the therapeutic religion of the middle-class suburbs, the sermonizing of politicized congregations of the Left and the Right, and the health-and-wealth message of “prosperity gospel” churches. These and other feeble forms of the faith will be quickly burned away in the face of the slightest persecution. Pastor Wurmbrand once wrote that there were two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments.”15

  The kind of Christians we will be in the time of testing depends on the kind of Christians we are today. And we cannot become the kind of Christians we need to be in preparation for persecution if we don’t know stories like this, and take them into our hearts.

  I shared some of these accounts with a Czech friend who left his communist homeland for America in his twenties. This kind of story is not news to him—and yet, he wrote, “It’s difficult to read. It’s even more difficult to realize that it has been nearly forgotten, or worse, never known.”

  See, Judge, Act

  To recognize the value in suffering is to rediscover a core teaching of historical Christianity, and to see clearly the pilgrim path walked by every generation of Christians since the Twelve Apostles. There is nothing more important than this when building up Christian resistance to the coming totalitarianism. It is also to declare oneself a kind of savage in today’s culture—even within the culture of the church. It requires standing foursquare against much of popular Christianity, which has become a shallow self-help cult whose chief aim is not cultivating discipleship but rooting out personal anxieties. But to refuse to see suffering as a means of sanctification is to surrender, in Huxley’s withering phrase, to “Christianity without tears.”

  How are we supposed to judge the right approach to suffering though? Unfortunately, there is no clear formula. As Father Kirill Kaleda says, we ought not to go out looking for it. Even Christ, in Gethsemane, prayed that the cup of suffering might be taken from him if it be God’s will. The virtue of prudence is critical, in part to help us discern the difference between reasoning and rationalizing. All of us prefer the cup to pass, but if our moment comes, then we have to be ready to make a costly stand.

  We will not know how to behave when that time arrives if we have not prepared ourselves to accept pain and loss for the sake of God’s kingdom. Most of us in the West don’t yet have opportunities to suffer for the faith like Christians under communism did, but we have their stories to guide us, as well as the accounts of Christian martyrdom worldwide throughout the ages. Familiarize yourself with their stories, and teach them to your children. These stories are near the core of the lived Christian experience, and form an essential part of Christian cultural memory. Learn them, so you will know when and how to live them.

  God cannot will evil, though as he showed in his Passion, he can permit suffering for some greater good. Judging accurately whether or not he is calling us to share in his Passion in a particular instance requires having faith that our suffering will have purpose, though that purpose may not be clear to us at the time. When he went to prison as a layman, George Calciu was moved to deep conversion by the witness of priests who were his fellow inmates. When he returned to prison later in life, Calciu was a priest and led other inmates to Christ as he had been led decades earlier. Ogorodnikov’s ministry, he is confident, led condemned men to paradise. Krčméry’s laid the groundwork for the underground church. Solzhenitsyn emerged from the grinding misery of the gulag as a fearless man of God whose prophetic witness to the world helped bring down an evil empire.

  When we act—either to embrace suffering on our own or to share in the suffering of others—we have to let it change us, as it changed these confessors of the communist yoke. It could make us bitter, angry, and vengeful, or it could serve as a refiner’s fire, as it did with Solzhenitsyn, Calciu, Krčméry, Ogorodnikov, and so many others, purifying our love of God and tortured humanity.

  No Christian has the power to avoid suffering entirely. It is the human condition. What we do control is how we act in the face of it. Will we run from it and betray our Lord? Or will we accept it as a severe mercy? The choices we will make when put to the ultimate test depend on the choices we make today, in a time of peace. This is what Father Tomislav Kolaković understood when he arrived in Czechoslovakia and set about preparing the church for the coming persecution. This is why when the secret police came for Silvester Krčméry, he knew how to carry that cross like a true Christian.

  CONCLUSION

  Live Not by Lies

  Father Kolaković saw what was coming and prepared Christians for it. Don’t doubt it. He is speaking to us even now. He is telling us what to do.

  DR. NICHOLAS BARTULICA, 92, A CROATIAN ÉMIGRÉ AND KOLAKOVIĆ FRIEND

  What if the answers to life’s questions that young Christians the world over are looking for are not to be found in the West but rather in the East—in the stories and lives of the Christian dissidents? That’s what one young Slovak man learned, to his great surprise, when he began reporting on a project about the persecuted Christians of the communist era.

  Though he was only a toddler when the Velvet Revolution ended totalitarianism in his country, Timo Križka knows about the suffering of Christians under communism better than most. The Bratislava photographer and filmmaker’s great-grandfather, a Greek Catholic priest, was forced out of ministry in the 1950s for refusing the government’s order to convert to the Orthodox Church, which at that time was under Soviet control. That priest, Father Michal Durišin, chose a life of suffering for himself and his family, rather than stain his conscience.

  Several years ago, Križka set out to honor his ancestor’s sacrifice by interviewing and photographing the still-living Slovak survivors of communist persecution, including original members of Father Kolaković’s fellowship, the Family. As he made his rounds around his country, Križka was shaken up not by the stories of suffering he heard—these he expected—but by the intense inner peace radiating from these elderly believers.

  These men and women had been around Križka’s age when they had everything taken from them but their faith in God. And yet, over and over, they told their young visitor that in prison they found inner liberation through suffering. One Christian, separated from his wife and five children and cast into solitary confinement, testified that he had moments then that were “like paradise.”

  “It seemed that the less they were able to change the world around them, the stronger they had become,” Križka tells me. “These people completely changed my understanding of freedom. My project changed from looking for victims to finding heroes. I stopped building a monument to the unjust past. I began to look for a message for us, the free people.”

  The message he found was this: The secular liberal ideal of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation, is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts—that is a road that leads to hell. Križka observed that the only force in society standing in the middle of that wide road yelling “Stop!” were the traditional Christian churches.

  And then it hit him.

  “With our eyes fixed intently on the West, we could see how it was
beginning to experience the same things we knew from the time of totalitarianism,” he tells me. “Once again, we are all being told that Christian values stand in the way of the people having a better life. History has already shown us how far this kind of thing can go. We also know what to do now, in terms of making life decisions.”

  From his interviews with former Christian prisoners, Križka also learned something important about himself. He had always thought that suffering was something to be escaped. Yet he never understood why the easier and freer his professional and personal life became, his happiness did not commensurately increase. His generation was the first one since the Second World War to know liberty—so why did he feel so anxious and never satisfied?

  These meetings with elderly dissidents revealed a life-giving truth to the seeker. It was the same truth it took Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a tour through the hell of the Soviet gulag to learn.

  “Accepting suffering is the beginning of our liberation,” he says. “Suffering can be the source of great strength. It gives us the power to resist. It is a gift from God that invites us to change. To start a revolution against the oppression. But for me, the oppressor was no longer the totalitarian communist regime. It’s not even the progressive liberal state. Meeting these hidden heroes started a revolution against the greatest totalitarian ruler of all: myself.”

  Križka discovered a subtle but immensely important truth: We ourselves are the ultimate rulers of our consciences. Hard totalitarianism depends on terrorizing us into surrendering our free consciences; soft totalitarianism uses fear as well, but mostly it bewitches us with therapeutic promises of entertainment, pleasure, and comfort—including, in the phrase of Mustapha Mond, Huxley’s great dictator, “Christianity without tears.”