Do not stop on your path, but go on, shining and pure, giving the light of that Resurrection on the first of Sabbaths to all. You, my friend, are the unique bearer of your deification in Jesus Christ, and with yourself you raise up the entire Romanian people to the height of its own resurrection. From death to life and from earth to heaven!4
Shortly after giving that sermon, the Romanian dictatorship slapped Father George with a ten-year prison sentence. He served five, was given early release, and then he was expelled to the United States by the regime.
The Miracle of the Cigarettes
If you believe that God exists, then you must also believe that miracles are possible. Christians live by faith, but sometimes, God sends a message to remind us that he exists and has not abandoned us. Drinking tea in the lobby of a Moscow hotel, Alexander Ogorodnikov tells a story about an extremely improbable thing that happened to him upon entering a Soviet prison—something that signaled to him that God led him to that vault of human misery for a higher purpose.
“When they put me in the cell with the other inmates, I said, ‘Peace be with you!’” Ogorodnikov remembers. “One of the prisoners asked if I was a Christian. I said yes. He told me to prove it. Another inmate said, ‘We are the scum of the earth. We don’t even have cigarettes. If your God will give us cigarettes, we’ll all believe in him.’”
Ogorodnikov told his fellow prisoners that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and smoking fouls it. But, he continued, God loves you so much that I believe he would even give you cigarettes as a sign of his mercy. Ogorodnikov asked them all to stand and pray together for this. Everybody laughed, but they stood respectfully as he led them in prayer.
“That cell was very crowded, but it became very quiet,” he recalls. “We prayed for fifteen minutes, then I told them the prayer was over and they could sit down. At just that moment, the guards opened the cell door and threw a bunch of cigarettes into the cell.”
“That really happened?!” I ask, astonished.
“That really happened,” he answers. “It was incredible. There was the sign I had prayed for. The prisoners shouted, ‘God exists! He exists!’ And that is when I knew that God was speaking to me too. He was telling me that he had a mission for me here in this prison.”
Alexander Ogorodnikov thus began his life hidden behind the walls of the Soviet prison system. But he was not hidden from God. And because of that, as the Christian dissident would learn, God manifested through his fidelity to those damned to die before a firing squad who were desperate for a sign of hope. Ogorodnikov’s connection to God would be, to these wretched men, their only lifeline.
See, Judge, Act
A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today’s post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity. We should also see how many of the world’s values have been absorbed into Christian life and practice.
Then we must judge how the ways of the world, and its demands, conflict with what Christ requires of his disciples. Are we admirers, or followers? How will we know?
We will know when we act—or fail to act—as Christians when to be faithful costs us something. It may be a small thing at first—a place on a sports team because we won’t play on Sunday mornings, or the respect of our peers when we will not march in a parade for a political cause. But the demands made on us will grow greater, and the consequences for failing to submit to the world’s demands will grow more severe. Father Kolaković told his Family this—and in a way, he’s telling us the same thing today.
We serve a God who created all things for a purpose. He has shown us in the Bible, especially the Gospels, who we are and how we are to live to be in harmony with the sacred order he created. He does not want admirers; he wants followers. As Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God suffered with humanity to redeem humanity. He calls us to share in his Passion, for our sake and the sake of the world. He promises us nothing but the cross. Not happiness but the joy of blessedness. Not material wealth but richness of spirit. Not sexual freedom as erotic abandon but sexual freedom within loving, mutually sacrificial commitment. Not power but love; not self-sovereignty but obedience.
This is the uncompromising rival religion that the post-Christian world will not long tolerate. If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.
CHAPTER NINE Standing in Solidarity
Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word “we.”
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, ON ARRIVING IN ONE’S FIRST PRISON CELL, IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO1
The house is like every other house on this unremarkable street in suburban Bratislava. We walk through the back garden, past the lawn furniture
