A pretty special chapter (37) from a very cool book; Finding God in Unexpected Places, by Phillip Yancey. I have gained fresh insight into the meaning of faith from an unlikely combination of sources: the writings of political dissidents and an eighteenth-century French mystic. For many years dissidents in Eastern Europe lived under oppressive regimes that tended to promote a sense of paranoia. As the saying goes, Just because youre paranoid doesnt mean theyre not after you, and these dissidents responded appropriately. They met in secret, used code words, avoided public telephones, and published pseudonymous essays in underground papers. In the mid-seventies, however, Polish and Czech intellectuals began to realize that the constant double-life had cost them dearly. Quite simply, they had lost the most basic sense of freedom and human dignity. By working in secret, always with a nervous glance over the shoulder, they had succumbed to fear, the goal of their communist opponents all along. They made a conscious decision to change tactics. We will act as if we are free, at all costs, the Poles, and then the Czechs, decided. The Workers Defense Committee in Poland began holding public meetings, often in church buildings, despite the presence of known informers. They signed articles, sometimes adding an address and a phone number, and distributed newspapers openly on the street corners. In effect, the dissidents agreed to start acting in the way they thought society should become. If you want freedom of speech, speak freely. If you want an open society, act openly. If you love the truth, tell the truth. Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, had led the way by determining to write no longer with an eye on what the authorities might approve, but to write the truth, no matter what. The authorities did not know how to respond. Sometimes they cracked down- nearly all the dissidents spent time in prison- and sometimes they watched with a frustration bordering on helplessness. Meanwhile the dissidents brazen tactics made it far easier for them to connect with one another and the West, and a kind of freedom archipelago took shape, a bright counterpart to the darkling Gulag archipelago. In a sense, they created a free society by acting as if their society was free. Most important, the new approach emboldened the dissidents themselves; they discovered that inner freedom gives sustenance even when external freedom is snatched away. Prison, after all, provides an ideal setting in which to learn to cherish freedom. Against all odds, they clung to belief in fundamental principles of truth and justice even as their governments tried to compel them to believe the opposite. The daring philosophy spread to other places, giving courage to dissidents in China, Latin America, and South Africa. As Richard Steele wrote about his experience in a South African prison: The power of fearlessness is astonishing. I think of those who were giving me orders. They were under a real tyranny and far more the victim of it than I was. When they were yelling their orders at me, I had a vivid image of these tiny creatures assault- ing my feet, wanting to demolish me with orders, while I was way above, not on their level at all. They could threaten me with anything at all and not get me, because I wasnt afraid. This was immensely liberating to me. I could be the person I was without fearing them. They had no power over me. Remarkably, we have lived to see these dissidents triumph. An alternative kingdom of people united by ideas, a kingdom of rags, of prisoners, of poets and philosophers who convey their words in the scrawl of hand-copied samizdat, has toppled what seemed an impregnable fortress in country after country. Even South Africa held free elections without a violent revolution. I vividly remember watching television news reports as the climactic nonviolent revolution took place in the streets of Moscow. Russians who had grown up in the world center of totalitarianism suddenly declared, We will act as if we are free- in front of the KGB building, staring down the mouths of tank cannons. I was traveling in Scandinavia that summer, and as I watched the images, lacking an English translation, I could only guess at the details of what was transpiring just across the border. The contrast between the faces of the coup leaders inside and the masses outside told me all I needed to know, though. With startling clarity, they showed who was really afraid, and who was really free. On this same trip I read The Sacrament of the Present Moment, a remarkable book by the French mystic Jean-Pierre de Caussade, translated by Kitty Muggeridge. Writing to a group of beleaguered nuns in the chaotic decades before the French Revolution, de Caussade set out for them a challenging program of spiritual direction. Faith gives the whole earth a celestial aspect, he said. Each moment is a revelation of God. Regardless of how things appear at a given moment in time, all of history will ultimately serve to accomplish Gods purpose on earth. He advised the nuns to love and accept the present moment as the best, with perfect trust in Gods universal goodness....Everything without exception is an instrument and means of sanctification. Objections immediately sprang to my mind, as probably happened witht the nuns who first read those words. Gods universal goodness in a nation careering toward blood and madness? A celestial aspect in a world growing increasingly pagan? Suffering, violence, persecution- are these, too, instruments and means of sanctification? Watching newsreels from Red Square on Finnish television, reading the hard words from de Caussade, I came up with a new definition of faith: paranoia in reverse. A truly paranoid person organizes his or her life around a common perspective of fear. Whatever happens feeds that fear. Try to comfort a paranoiac, Im here to help you, not hurt you, and you merely increase the fear. (Of course hed say that- hes part of the conspiracy.) Faith works in the reverse. A faithful person organizes his or her life around a common perspective of trust, not fear. Bedrock faith convinces me despite the apparent chaos of the present moment, God does reign; that regardless of how cast off I may feel, I matter, truly matter, to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end. Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of Gods Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest. Faith allows me to live under the reign of God even on a planet ruled by a sinister force known as the god of this world. Centuries ago Gregory of Nicaea called a fellow church leaders faith ambidextrous because he welcomed pleasures with the right hand and afflictions with the left, convinced that both would serve Gods design for him. Gods purpose for us is always what will contribute most to our good, said de Caussade. Tough words. I believe them today, but will I tomorrow? We have seen in our own time what can happen when a group of people band together to live out a truth-we are free- that all around them is being denounced as a lie. Walls and kingdoms crumble. What would happen if we in Gods kingdom acted as if the words of the apostle John are literally true: The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world? What would happen if we started living as if the most-repeated prayer in Christendom has actually been answered, that Gods will be done on earth as it is in heaven?
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 04:10:50 +0000
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