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.”
But truth cannot be separated
