The Meaning Of This Mournful Moment

Hello all. It’s a gorgeous mild spring day here in Baton Rouge. It’s a good thing that today is not Holy Saturday for us Orthodox — it is the opposite of mournful outside. But today is a dark day for you Catholics and Protestants, though tonight, you will see the light of Resurrection.

This morning I had a long phone conversation with someone who is thinking hard about religious conversion, but just doesn’t quite know what to do next. After we finished, she told me that this lockdown has forced her to face squarely some difficult questions. A couple of hours later, I heard from an Orthodox friend who said that his unbelieving mother has found the faith. Said my friend, “This pandemic is forcing a lot of people to think hard about their lives.”

No doubt. Ross Douthat writes in his new column, about the need to find meaning in all this:

This need is powerful enough that even people who officially believe that the universe is godless and random will find themselves telling stories about how their own suffering played some crucial role in the pattern of their life, how some important good came from some grave evil. And it’s a need that religious believers must respect and answer: We can acknowledge the mystery, with Martin and Wright, while also insisting that in their own lives people should be looking for glimpses of a pattern, for signs of what a particular trial might mean.

The personal and specific element is crucial here, because the Christian tradition offers not one but many different explanations for how suffering fits into a providential plan. In some cases — the miser growing old alone, the dictator consumed by paranoia — the wicked may suffer as a kind of fitting, self-created punishment for their sins. But then in other cases suffering may be a gift to the righteous, given because their goodness means that they can bear more of its hard medicine, its refining fire. (There is a longstanding Christian tradition that finds it more theologically perplexing when good things happen to good people than when bad things do.)

Then in still other cases, suffering is bound to some purpose beyond the self. Before Jesus heals a blind man, the disciples wonder whose sin made him blind, and their master’s answer is stark: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” There is no retreat to mystery here; the man was born blind just so that the Messiah could heal him.

That is a hard saying of Christ’s, yet I heard something similar in Moscow late last year, from Alexander Ogorodnikov, the anti-Soviet Christian dissident. From my post about that meeting:

[Ogorodnikov said:] The first prison I was in was the most difficult jail you could be in. It was where they sent people who specifically needed to be broken. As one of the employees of the jail who had rank, a colonel or something, said we’re not here to whack you, we’re here to bleed you out, drop by drop.

They sent me to Tver. This was a jail where people were shot. They put me on death row, even though I didn’t have a death sentence. It seems that they told the other prisoners, okay, don’t actually kill him, but if he dies, we will give somebody else their freedom. When I went into the cell and looked at the gusy that was there, I told them, “Listen brothers, I was sent here to help you meet death, not as criminals, but as men with souls that are going to meet their Maker, to go meet God the Father.”

Given that they always took people to go be shot really early in the morning, many of these prisoners spent all night waiting for the knock at the door to see who would be called out. So of course they didn’t sleep. Neither did I. I helped them turn this night of terror into a night of hope. I told them I am a layman, I can hear your confession — they were confessing to me what they had done. I told them I couldn’t absolve them, but when I die and go before the Lord, I will be a witness to your repentance.

If I wanted to describe their confessions, I would need Dostoevsky. I don’t have the words myself. I told them that God is merciful, and the fact that you are expressing what you have done, and that you are denouncing it, that your regret and repentance is washing and purifying. When they would be shot, they would die as purified people.

When my jailers understood that me being in that cell wasn’t breaking me, it was only making things worse, they took me out of death row.

They moved Ogorodnikov to solitary confinement. Then something mystical began to happen.

I felt very clearly someone waking me up in the middle of the night. Very clear, but softly. I had a very, very clear vision when I woke up. I could see the corridor of the jail. I could see a man being taken out of in chains, but I only saw him from behind. Still, I knew exactly who it was. I understood that God sent me an angel to wake me up so I could accompany that man in prayer as he was being taken out to be shot. I understood that if God was showing that to me, that He was asking me to pray a kind of funeral prayer for that condemned prisoner as he was going to his death. I understood that the prayers of this prisoner and I had been heard, and that he was forgiven. I was in tears.

This mystical awakening in the middle of the night didn’t occur with all of those prisoners, only with some of them. I believe it was to show that those prisoners had been forgiven. I would literally feel someone touching me on my skin to awaken me, even though I was all alone in the cell.

He wondered why in these visions he was not allowed to see the faces of the condemned.

The answer came to me in a different prison, in solitary confinement, God revealed why I had been seeing them from behind. In that prison there was an old prison guard. This was a small prison. He was the only one. All the cells were empty. This old man was on duty — he was clearly a pensioner, they let him work at night because he was lonely.

One night, he opened the door and came into my cell, which was forbidden. He had absolutely crazy eyes. The guard said to me, ‘They come at night!’ And I understood. I said to the guard, you need to tell me this now, you need to confess.

He said that when he was a young guard, they would gather 20 or 30 priests who had been in this prison, take them out of the prison, then bind them to a sled so they would be pulling it, like a horse team. The guards made the captive priests pull the sled into the forest, running all day until they found a swamp.

Then they organized the priests into two columns of men standing single file. The old man back then was one of the guards that formed a perimeter around the priests to prevent them escaping. One of 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. The KGB man shot him in the forehead in such a way that his brains covered the priest behind. He calmly loaded his pistol, went to next priest, asked, “Does God exist?”

“Yes, he exists.”

The KGB man shot him in the same way. Not one of those priests denied Christ.

Meaning they all died. Ogorodnikov fought back tears telling me this.

When he composed himself, Ogorodnikov said the old prison guard said that the KGB had not blinded the priest before shooting them. Memory of the eyes of the men facing execution that night tormented the old guard. He asked for the night shift at the prison because in his mind, he was visited by those he saw murdered that night in the forest. He was clearly going insane.

Here’s what Ogorodnikov learned from that half-crazy old man’s testimony: that the eyes of the men being led to be shot were full of horror. In his mystical vision of them going to their execution, “God didn’t let me see their faces because I couldn’t bear the terror there.”

“You learned that you weren’t suffering in vain,” I told him. “If you had not been in that prison to witness to those men, and to pray with them and for them, what would have happened to their eternal lives?”

This is indeed what Ogorodnikov learned. That story, by the way, will be in my new book. Now, you may ask yourself: was Ogorodnikov like the blind man of the Gospel, whom God allowed to be born blind so that he could be healed, and God’s glory be thereby made manifest? Yes, it sounds like it. How fair is that? Well, if you ask that question, it won’t be long before you get to the question of why it was necessary for God to take the form of a mortal man and suffer death, then rise from the dead, for the salvation of mankind? These are great mysteries — saving mysteries, in fact. They are not mysteries that can be satisfactorily solved by logic. They can only be lived.

Douthat points to this excellent First Things essay by the Dominican Father Thomas Joseph White, which talks of the mystery of this moment. I applaud the FT editor Rusty Reno for publishing this essay, which, as Father White notes in his opening lines, runs in stark contrast to the views of the crisis that Reno has been advocating. Excerpt:

Christians ought to treat this pandemic as an opportunity to learn more about God. What does it mean that God has permitted (or willed) temporary conditions in which our elite lifestyle of international travel is grounded, our consumption is cut to a minimum, our days are occupied with basic responsibilities toward our families and immediate communities, our resources and economic hopes are reduced, and we are made more dependent upon one another? What does it mean that our nation-states suddenly seem less potent and our armies are infected by an invisible contagion they cannot eradicate, and that the most technologically advanced countries face the humility of their limits? Our powerful economies are suddenly enfeebled, and our future more uncertain. Priests and bishops are confronted with a new obligation to seek interiority over activism as their sacramental ministry is rendered less potent, and laypeople have to find God outside the sacraments in their own interior lives, discovering new ways to be grateful for what they have rather than disdainful in the face of what they lack. We might think none of this tells us anything about ourselves, or about God’s compassion and justice. But if we simply seek to pass through all this in hasty expectation of a return to normal, perhaps we are missing the fundamental point of the exercise.

Finally, what can Christians do to console both their religious and secular neighbors? What about the people heroically risking their own lives to serve others at this time, or those who are ill and afraid, especially those who do not have a religious recourse or perspective? What about those grieving, or those who are isolated? How can we be creative in our hope and empathy? Bishops, priests, and laity alike should work together in the coming months to discern how we can safely return progressively to the public celebration of sacraments, and have interim steps of public worship in limited ways. But we should also be thinking about how to communicate Christian hope and basic human friendship and compassion to people who suffer, in our words and gestures, both individually and collectively. The life of the heart is as real as the life of the mind, and in our current moment, for however long it should last, charity is itself the most basic prophetic activity. “By this they will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). I’m citing him because in this and in every other case, his authority comes first.

Read it all. It’s terrific. The best thing I’ve read about the meaning of this moment anywhere.

I wish you all a profound journey to resurrection. There’s no way to it that does not pass through Golgotha. This is a time of testing for us all. Let the pain and suffering purify and strengthen you, not destroy you. None of us has chosen this pandemic, but we do have the power to decide how we will respond to it.

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