Romaszewska is fierce on the subject of, well, solidarity. She sees the danger of soft totalitarianism coming fast, and urges young people to get off the internet and get together face-to-face to build resistance.
“As I see it, this is the core, this is the essence of everything right now: Forming these communities and networks of communities,” she says. “Whatever kinds of communities you can imagine. The point is that the members of that community must be very supportive of one another, no matter what comes. You don’t have to be prepared to give your life for the other person, but you do have to have something in common, and to do things together.”
See, Judge, Act
The atomization of contemporary life has left most of us vulnerable to demoralization—and therefore, to manipulation. Christians are no different. It’s easy for believers to feel that they are all alone, even when they are gathered at worship. By their indifference to solidarity, and surrendering to social disintegration as the new normal, Christians make it easier for those in power who hate us to control us.
We desperately need to throw off the chains of solitude and find the freedom that awaits us in fellowship. The testimony of anti-communist dissidents is clear: Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist. The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. We must see in our brothers and sisters not a burden of obligation but the blessing of our own freedom from loneliness, suspicion, and defeat.
Discerning the criteria for comradeship is risky business when trusting the wrong person could land you in prison. Some, like Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, remained open to all, but most Christian dissidents learned to be extremely careful. Not only their safety but also the welfare of the entire church movement was at stake. These lines must be drawn according to particular circumstances. As Father Kolaković’s example teaches, Christians should educate themselves about the mechanics of running underground cells and networks while they are still free to do so.
Christians must act to build bonds of brotherhood not just with one another, across denominational and international lines, but also with people of goodwill belonging to other religions, and no religion at all. When their souls are rightly ordered, believers serve not only the good of the church, but are a means of God’s blessing to all people.
Leaders of small groups must be willing and able to carry out catechetical, ministerial, and organizational roles normally performed by institutional church leaders who may be unable to do so under the law, or are too compromised in other ways to serve their proper function.
Finally, small-group fellowship keeps morale high when the contempt and torment of the world lashes hard the backs of believers. The young Christians in Moscow in the 1970s remember their time together, worshipping and praying and building one another up, as the happiest of their lives. They bent under the weight of the Soviet state, but they did not break, because God was with them—and so were their brothers and sisters in Christ.
If love was the mortar that bound their fellowship, then shared suffering is what activated the bond and made it real. Suffering was the proof test. Love, as Paul tells us, endures all things. And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those—even Christians—who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think they love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him.
Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the great lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.
CHAPTER TEN The Gift of Suffering
I am riding on a Budapest tram with a Hungarian friend in her early thirties. We are on our way to interview an older woman who endured real persecution in the communist era. As we bump along the city’s streets, my friend talks about how hard it is to be honest with friends her age about the struggles she faces as a wife and mother of young children.
Her difficulties are completely ordinary for a young woman learning how to be a mom and a wife—yet the prevailing attitude among her generation is that life’s difficulties are a threat to one’s well-being, and should be refused. Do she and her husband argue at times? Then she should leave him. Are her children annoying her? Then she should send them to day care. She worries that her friends don’t grasp that suffering is a normal part of life—even of part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind, and loving. She doesn’t want them to give her advice about how to escape her problems; she just wants them to help her live through them.
I tell my friend that this is the argument that John the Savage has with the World Controller near the end of Huxley’s Brave New World. The Savage, I explain to my friend, is an outcast in a world that sees suffering, even mere unhappiness, as intolerable oppression. He is fighting for his right to be unhappy—“and so,” I tell my friend, “are you.”
As we step off the tram and walk to our meeting, we talk about the irony of the social about-face that has overtaken postcommunist Hungary. The woman I am about to meet, like all the Christians I had been interviewing, allowed the suffering inflicted by the communist regime to deepen her love for God and for her fellow persecuted believers. Now, in liberty and relative prosperity, the children of the last
