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Channel: Barbara J. Elliott Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

When Mother Teresa Came to Washington

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mother teresa and reaganIt was utterly ludicrous, stepping out of a chauffeured White House limousine to go hear Mother Teresa. Even then I recognized that, as a twenty-something working at the locus of political power. Her simple sari and sandals were incongruous among the tailored suits and silk ties of the people who styled themselves as Masters of the Universe. The crowd was large, and the photographers and reporters jostled each other aggressively to get near the woman popularly believed to be a living saint. She seemed uncomfortable, not as much from the noise and shoving as from the praise she received. She fixed her glance to the floor as Senator James Buckley introduced her. Mother Teresa spoke quietly to several hundred perfectly still listeners. Every small gesture she made provoked a swarm of photographic clicks like a cloud of gnats around her. But the sound of the milling photographers soon dissipated in a consciousness riveted on her joyous face. Now we know that we were gazing on the face of a saint who would be canonized in September 2016.

She told us of newborn babies that were left in dustbins in Calcutta near the home of the Missionaries of Charity, with the mother’s unspoken hope that they would be found and saved. She and her Sisters found eight aborted fetuses outside an abortion clinic that were still alive. They brought them home, nurtured them; one survived to grow up into a healthy child for whom they found an adoptive home. Mother Teresa and her sisters collected thousands of people from the streets: abandoned children, lepers, the sick, and the dying. Every day in Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity fed 8,000 people and somehow they never had to turn one away because there was nothing to give.

She told us of a man who lay dying in a gutter, half-eaten by worms, rotting. Mother Teresa herself carried him to her home for the sick and dying. She laid him in a bed, washed his entire body using a basin and cloth, picked the maggots out of his open wounds and dressed them with ointment, laid him in fresh sheets and gave him a drink of cold water. He was given what he had not known until then: a clean place to lie, unconditional love, and dignity. “I have lived like an animal all my life,” the man told her, “but I will die like an angel.”

With flashbulbs popping, Members of Congress came to stand by her side, one by one. I waited in line to shake Mother Teresa’s hand, to ask her to sign my copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s biography of her, Something Beautiful for God. The tiny nun, who barely came up to my shoulder, took my hand and pressed it into her rough and calloused one, saying “Love God, Barbara,” which came out sounding more like “Luff Gott, Bahbada.”

As I stood there among the purveyors of political power in the most powerful nation in the world, self-satisfied, puffed up with what we thought was our own importance (and I include myself among them), her presence inserted a slender needle of doubt, deflating my own exalted notions of political prowess. It occurred to me, as I looked around that room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, that one day in Mother Teresa’s life brought more good to the face of the earth than all our efforts combined for a lifetime. The thought shook me to my core. And I can see now retrospectively that she lit a long fuse in me that would ignite the fire of faith in my soul six years later.

The next day, Mother Teresa came to the White House for lunch with President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. A crowd of reporters and many of my colleagues from the White House staff joined them for her farewell. “What did you talk about, Mr. President?” shouted one of the reporters. “We listened,” he replied.

Mother Teresa came to Washington again to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994. More than 3,000 people assembled from virtually all the nations of the world: Prime Ministers, Presidents, Ambassadors, Members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices, and dignitaries from 150 countries. I had traveled there with leaders from nations newly liberated from Soviet domination. President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary were seated on the stage. As I looked around the huge ballroom in the Washington Hilton at the staggering assembly of the world’s political power, the tiny nun entered. The electrifying response made it clear who had the real power. She spoke with a moral and spiritual authority that eclipsed that of the governing officials.

Despite the fact that Mother Teresa had to step up on a footstool to be seen over the podium, her presence filled the ballroom to the rafters. She said boldly, “St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? Jesus makes himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the unwanted one.”[1]

Mother Teresa then threw down the gauntlet on behalf of the unwanted ones, with Bill and Hillary Clinton seated a few feet away. Mother Teresa said in a firm voice, “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion. And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? We are fighting abortion by adoption–by care of the mother and adoption for her baby. We have saved thousands of lives.… Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child.”[2] Give me the child. Her plaintive plea seared the hearts of everyone who heard her. As all of us in the entire crowd rose to our feet in thunderous applause that billowed through the hall. Only two people remained seated: Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Call Within the Call

On my first trip to Europe right after graduating from college, armed with a passport and a Eurail pass but no particular itinerary, I boarded a train in Luxembourg to travel to Greece, hoping it would be warmer than the northern clime where I had landed. As it turned out, this train went through Yugoslavia, stopping at Skopje, where hospitable locals offered me the opportunity to stay overnight and then continue on. I didn’t know that I was making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of a saint who would change the direction of my life. As it turns out, that was the town where Mother Teresa was born of Albanian parents in 1910 as Agnes Bojaxhiu. She entered the Irish order of the Sisters of Loreto at the age of eighteen and bid her family a tearful farewell as she left for Ireland to learn English. She feared that she would never see them again, and that proved to be the case. She had chosen her new name after Theresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower. She was sent to Calcutta in 1929, where she taught geography and catechism at St. Mary’s High School, and later became the principal. There she learned Hindi and Bengali, as she taught in the school that served orphans and poor children as well as more affluent boarding students. On her daily trips to the Loreto school she observed the bone-crushing poverty and squalor of the city. Dead bodies were collected from the streets where the weakest had fallen victim to disease or starvation. It seared the heart of the nun who lived cloistered away in the safety and relative comfort of the convent.

Mother Teresa was on a train Sept. 10, 1946, when she received what she called “the call within the call.” It became quite clear that she was to follow Jesus into the poorest slums of the city, live among the poor, and do his work there. We know that she did that heroically. But what has come to light only recently in the investigation for her canonization is that she had a much more difficult time acting on this call than was known. She struggled first with her own uncertainty, and then with the Church, from which she had to receive permission for this unconventional ministry. The Postulator of the cause, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, has documented her story, based on interviews and correspondence with her spiritual advisor Father Van Exem and Archbishop Perier.

Mother Teresa had made a secret vow in 1942 that she wanted to give as a gift to Jesus, “something very beautiful… something without reserve.” She promised “to give God anything that He may ask–not to refuse Him anything.”[3] She carried this private vow within her four years, not knowing in what way she could give this gift. When she received the “call within a call” to go and live among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, this was what God was asking her to give. He spoke to her in an interior voice she sensed rather than heard. The words that resonated through her were these: You have become my spouse for My love. Will you refuse to do this for me? Refuse me not.[4] She kept a journal of these inner locutions, and wrote,

One day at Holy Communion I heard the same voice very distinctly: I want Indian nuns, victims of my love, who would be Mary and Martha, who would be so very united to me as to radiate my love on souls. I want free nuns covered with my poverty of the Cross. I want obedient nuns covered with my obedience of the cross. I want full of love nuns covered with the charity of the Cross. Wilt thou refuse to do this for me?[5]

In the hope that she could obtain permission to embark on this work among the poor, she wrote to Archbishop Perier in 1947, citing these things God had put in her heart. “These words, or rather, this voice frightened me. The thought of eating, sleeping, living like the Indians filled me with fear. I prayed long–I prayed so much… The more I prayed, the clearer grew the voice in my heart and so I prayed that He would do with me whatever He wanted. He asked again and again.”

Mother Teresa continued to pray, and she kept a journal of what God was impressing on her agitated soul. On another day she recorded:

You have become my spouse for my Love. You have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far. Are you afraid to take one more step for your Spouse, for me, for souls? Is your generosity grown cold?… You have been always saying, ‘Do with me whatever you wish.’ Now I want to act…. Do not fear. I shall be with you always. You will suffer and you suffer now, but if you are my own little Spouse of the Crucified Jesus, you will have to bear these torments on your heart. Let me act. Refuse me not. Trust me lovingly, trust me blindly.[6]

The Lord punctured any potential pride by telling her You are, I know, the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use you for My glory.[7]

When Mother Teresa initially asked to be released from the convent to go onto the streets, she was denied permission and was told to say nothing and go back and pray, which she did obediently. As she waited to act on this fire that was increasingly consuming her, the outlines of what she was to do became more clear. She was to go with other Indian nuns to reach the unwashed children on the streets, bathe them, teach them to read, and feed them. She was to go to the sick and dying, wash and bind their wounds, and give them a place to die with dignity. She was to go to the forgotten ones, the lepers, and be a presence of love and light. She knew that she would need nuns equipped to move about in the city, and even began to make plans for them to learn to drive vehicles, which was outrageously unusual for any women, let alone nuns, in Calcutta in the 1940s. The contours of the ministry became clearer as she prayed, and thought, and planned. When she implored again, her superiors in the church doubted the authenticity of her call. Once again, she went back in obedience to pray further. But still, the permission was not granted from the Church.

In a vision, she saw a crowd with their hands lifted to her in the midst, as they cried out “Come, come, save us. Bring us to Jesus.” She wrote in her prayer journal, “I could see great sorrow and suffering in their faces. I was kneeling near Our Lady who was facing them. I did not see her face but I heard her say, ‘Take care of them. They are mine. Bring them to Jesus. Carry Jesus to them. Fear not….'” Then she could see the crowd in darkness with Christ on the cross before them, as she stood as a little child with Our Lady, facing the cross. Our Lord said, I have asked you. They have asked you and she, my mother, has asked you. Will you refuse to do this for me, to take care of them, to bring them to me? She answered, “You know Jesus, I am ready to go at a moment’s notice.”[8]

Mother Teresa’s perseverance and prayer finally sufficed to persuade Fr. Van Exem of the authenticity of her call. And when Archbishop Perier received Mother Teresa’s letter with the excerpts from her prayer journal cited above, he no longer doubted that it was the will of God, either. She then asked permission to move out of the convent to live among the poor. It was highly unusual to have a nun remain under vows but live in the outside world. But when the permission finally came from Rome to live on the streets among the poor, she was permitted to remain in her order. But her struggles for acceptance were not over. She encountered serious resistance from her fellow believers in Calcutta. “One convent where she stopped by to eat her lunch ordered her to eat under the back stairs like a common beggar. A Yugoslav Jesuit, of the very nationality and order that had first inspired her love for India, commented brusquely, ‘We thought she was cracked.’”[9]

Mother Teresa embarked on the ministry that the world now knows: the outreach to the unloved, the lost, the unwanted, the lepers, the untouchables. She picked up the dying and brought them to the home she founded to give them love and dignity in death. She picked up babies and infants that had been abandoned in the garbage heaps, like human refuse, and nursed them back to life. David Aikman wrote, “Many, perhaps the majority of the babies, had been abandoned almost as soon as they were born, and almost all were suffering from acute malnutrition or tuberculosis. Their eyes were weary and sunken into their skeletal little faces, their limbs often mere sticks, incapable of independent movement. Several were beyond saving even when immediately provided with the proper medicines and nutrition. And, of course, all of them were starving for love.”[10]

The Fruit of a Contemplative Life of Prayer

MT1Mother Teresa always insisted that the work she and the sisters did was not social work, but the fruit of their contemplative life of prayer. There were many people eager to push a label of social activism on her, or engage her in political issues centered on the poor. But she would have none of it. She said, “We are contemplatives in the world.” The work she did was rooted in prayer, and was an outpouring of the love she received in the mystical union with Christ. She saw Him in the destitute people she touched. As she explained it, she served “Christ in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.” In touching their filthy and diseased bodies, she was touching his body. By serving them, she was participating in his love.

There are two words written on a sign that hangs on the walls of the Missionaries of Charity homes all over the world: “I thirst.” These words Christ uttered on the cross are a reminder to the sisters that he thirsts for souls. This thirst motivated Mother Teresa, and became a motivating force for the order she founded. The constitution of the Missionaries of Charities says: “Our aim is to quench the infinite thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for love of souls. We serve Jesus in the poor, we nurse Him, feed Him, clothe Him, visit Him.” It was this profound love, deepened in contemplative prayer, and nourished daily by the Eucharist, that sustained Mother Teresa through what would have been a crushing burden of misery for lesser souls. The ultimate source of this power is Christ Himself.

She warned that it is not possible to do this kind of work “without being a soul of prayer.” Time for silence and contemplative prayer was crucial for her work. “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of the silence,” she said. “We need silence to be able to touch souls…. We must be aware of oneness with Christ, as He was aware of oneness with his Father.” We must “permit Him to work in us and through us, with his power, with His desire, with his love. We must become holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live His life fully in us. We are to be all love, all faith, all purity, for the sake of the poor we serve.”[11]

Mother Teresa set ripples of goodness into motion by her presence. “Our work is to encourage Christians and non-Christians to do works of love,” she sad. “And every work of love, done with a full heart, always brings people closer to God.”[12] When she brought rice to a destitute woman in Calcutta, she found that a Hindu woman gave half of what she received to a Muslim woman who lived nearby, because she too was in need. Rather than giving the first woman more, Mother Teresa let her make the sacrifice, because it had a value to the heart that had been moved to generosity.

Even the very poorest beggars gave Mother Teresa donations for others. She cherished the gift of a beggar who scraped together a few coins by not smoking for several days, and gave her what he had saved. The amount was miniscule, but the sacrifice was great. She loved a young couple that decided not to have a lavish wedding, but instead by wearing simple clothes and having a modest dinner with a few friends, they were able to give a gift to the poor of the money they had saved. These gestures of sacrificial giving touched her heart, because they were evidence of the participation of others in what God was doing. “Give until it hurts,” she often said. She knew the joy that would result. “We must grow in love and to do this we must go on loving and loving and giving and giving until it hurts–the way Jesus did. Do ordinary things with extraordinary love: little things like caring for the sick and the homeless, the lonely and the unwanted, washing and cleaning for them. You must give what will cost you something.”[13] She also often said, “There are no great deeds. Only small deeds done with great love.”

She points us toward the way of what she calls A Simple Path.

The fruit of silence is
prayer.
The fruit of prayer is
faith.
The fruit of faith is
love.
The fruit of love is
service.
The fruit of service is
Peace.[14]

Mother Teresa called herself a pencil in God’s hand. In her faithful yielding to God, she wrote with her life what He intended to demonstrate to a world grown cold. She was able to live and give His transforming love. She also had a winsome but arresting way of enlisting the aid of people to assist her efforts. She would simply ask them: “Would you like to do something beautiful for God?”

Although she had labored in relative obscurity for much of her life, she made the cover of Time magazine in December 1975 with an essay that declared her a living saint. She won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Templeton Prize for Religion. Her story penetrated the conscience of a jaded generation. The respect for her saintliness spread throughout the world, and her order now spans the globe in 139 countries. What began with twelve sisters has grown to 5,600 people, including two orders of brothers and one of priests, who run hospices, homeless shelters, and homes for the mentally ill. It has become one of the largest women’s orders in the Catholic Church worldwide. Although the Missionaries of Charity live in the acute poverty of those they serve, there is no shortage of young women, and now also men, who have joined this order. Their ministry has spread to other countries, including some in the West that did not think of themselves as home to the “poorest of the poor.” But the spread of AIDS, drugs, and the squalor of urban slums in first world countries has spawned pockets of Third-World conditions.

The conditions of poverty in the First World are expressed in two very different ways. Beyond the pockets of material poverty in otherwise affluent cities, there is a quiet, crippling poverty of the soul that is not as visible but every bit as devastating. Spiritual and relational impoverishment are often found in countries that are materially wealthy. Mother Teresa found in First-World countries people who hungered for sustenance at two levels: “the hungry and lonely, not only for food but for the word of God; the thirsty and the ignorant, not only for water but also for knowledge, peace, truth, justice, and love; the naked and unloved, not only for clothes but also for human dignity; the homeless and abandoned, [who yearn] not only for a shelter made of bricks, but for a heart that understands, that covers, that loves.” She expanded the definition of the “least of our brethren” to include “the unwanted, the unborn child, the racially discriminated against.” She reached out to alcoholics and drug addicts, captives “not only in body but also in mind and spirit.” Her heart went out to “all those who have lost all hope and faith in life.”[15]

The Mystery of Spiritual Darkness

One of the greatest mysteries in Mother Teresa’s life is a phenomenon that was almost entirely unknown to others during her lifetime. Only her spiritual directors knew. She suffered from a spiritual darkness that lasted more than forty years, until, as far as we know, her death. This woman whose radiant smile lit up the world around her was in fact walking by faith, and not by sight. Her communication with her spiritual directors in the 1960s, 70s and 80s describe a “darkness and nothingness” that eclipsed her spirit. In her “dark night of the soul” that lasted for nearly four decades, she had an overwhelming thirst for God that caused her great anguish. She likened her suffering to that of souls in Hell, parched for God. She questioned whether He had rejected her. And yet she remained surrendered to Him, and persevered despite all.[16] It was only later that this intense longing for Him became a part of her union with Him. The postulator for her canonization, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, says, “She understood that the darkness she experienced was a mystical participation in Jesus’ sufferings.” She described in her prayer journal the sense of aloneness that Jesus experienced, the pain and darkness that he endured. In being allowed to share in his pain, it gave her a paradoxical joy. She wrote, “Today really I felt a deep joy that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony, but that He wants to go through it in me. More than ever I surrender myself to Him. Yes, more than ever I will be at His disposal.” The interior pain she experienced was acute, and in a moment of unfiltered candor she voiced her cry to God: “When You asked to imprint Your Passion on my heart, is this the answer? If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this, if souls are brought to You, if my suffering satiates Your Thirst–here I am, Lord. With joy I accept all to the end of life and I will smile at Your Hidden Face–always.”[17] In the very deepest sense, she offered up the profound pain of separation from Christ to him as a gift. Fr. Kolodiejchuk concluded, “Seen in this light, the long and painful interior darkness takes on not only new meaning, but also gives the reason for total, even joyful surrender to it.”[18]

Mother Teresa told Malcolm Muggeridge, “Without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. Jesus wanted to help by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony, our death. Only by being one with us has he redeemed us. We are allowed to do the same; all the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed, and we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them, that is, by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.”[19]

Mother Teresa made it a goal of the Missionaries to Charity to “quench the infinite thirst of Jesus on the cross for love and for souls” by doing joy-filled work among the poorest of the poor. One personal hallmark was the undiluted joy that she radiated with a dazzling smile from her whole being. Joy was the one characteristic she insisted on for all those who joined her order. She only wanted women to join her who would radiate joy in their faces and their demeanor, regardless of how trying their circumstances. We know now that the joy she consistently showed was not an easy effervescence. It required an extraordinary resolution of will and a commitment of her whole person to withstand the hardest of trials in extreme poverty, and even a darkness of the spirit, and not to let it show. It is one of the hardest aspects of her life to fathom. And yet she radiated pure joy and the fragrance of Christ wherever she went.

She encourages us to go and do likewise. The Missionaries of Charity often sent a prayer to people by way of thanking them for contributions, however modest. Those that I received in the 1980s came with a hand-typed letter from one of the sisters, obviously written on a manual typewriter. The prayer was this:

Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go.
Flood our souls with your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess our whole being, so utterly,
That our lives may only be a radiance of Yours.
Shine through us, and be so in us,
That every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our soul.
Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus!
Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as You shine;
So to shine as to be a light to others.
The light O Jesus will be all from You, none of it will be ours;
It will be you, shining on others through us.
Let us thus praise You in the way You love best by shining on those around us.
Let us preach You without preaching, not by words but by our example.
By the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do.
The evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to you.

Portions of this essay appeared first in Street Saints: Renewing America’s Cities by Barbara J. Elliott and is republished here with the gracious permission of the author. Books by Barbara J. Elliott and by Mother Teresa may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore

Notes:

[1] Address of Mother Teresa to National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, D.C. February 4, 1994.

[2] Mother Teresa, Ibid.

[3] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Nov. 28, 2002, part 1A. ZE02112820

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “the Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Nov. 29, 2002, part 1, ZE02112920

[8] Ibid.

[9] Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa–The Spirit and the Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday& Co. 1985), 38.

[10] David Aikman, Great Souls: Six Who Changed a Century (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson 1998), 226.

[11] Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 47.

[12] Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street, 357.

[13] Mother Teresa, A Simple Path, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995) 99.

[14] Ibid 1.

[15] Ibid xxx-xxxi.

[16] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Dec. 19, 2002, part 2. ZE02121922.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Dec. 20, 2002, part 2 concluded ZE02122020.

[19] Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, 49.

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The Divine Conspiracy of Dallas Willard

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Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks, “Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own”…

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara Elliott as she invites us to consider the legacy of philosopher Dallas Willard. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

One of the great oaks among us is fallen. Dallas Willard, who died May 8 (2013), was a professor of philosophy, a teacher par excellence, and a great soul, capable of inspiring deep faith. As a young Southern Baptist pastor in the 1960s, he left the ministry to study philosophy because he was convinced he was “abysmally ignorant” of God and the soul, and had concluded that Jesus and the philosophers were addressing the same questions.[1] Willard pushed deep into the intellectual roots of philosophy and Christian theology, while nourishing the spiritual disciplines of silence and prayer. The result was a quietly luminous relationship with Christ himself, which shone forth through Willard’s books on discipleship. The Divine Conspiracy won awards when it was published in 1998, setting off a series of explosions in the church world by causing people who called themselves Christians to evaluate their actual relationship with Christ, if they had one at all.

Christ’s Great Commission was to “go and make disciples” and the church is failing to do that, says Willard, and failing rather miserably. A disciple of Jesus is one who is with Jesus, learning to be like him, but as Willard points out, “one can be a professing Christian and a church member in good standing without being a disciple. There is, apparently, no real connection between being a Christian and being a disciple of Jesus.”[2]

If we are not truly disciples, we are missing the opportunity to step into “the divine conspiracy,” the collaboration with God here and now, where he is at work renewing his creation. He invites us into partnership with him. As Willard explains in The Divine Conspiracy, “God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.”[3] This kingdom is among us, and is accessible now.

“Think of visiting in a home where you have not been before,” said Willard in his mellifluous baritone voice. “It is a fairly large house, and you sit for a while with your host in a living room or on the veranda. Dinner is announced, and he ushers you down a hall, saying at a certain point, ‘Turn, for the dining room is at hand,’ or more likely, ‘Here’s the dining room.’”[4] Jesus invites us to step into his kingdom with the same clear directions. There is no suggestion in scripture that the kingdom hasn’t happened yet or is about to happen or about to be here. “Where God’s will is being accomplished, the kingdom of God is right beside us. It is indeed The Kingdom Among Us.”[5] Christ invites us to take part in it now, as partners with God in the “divine conspiracy.”

Co-Conspirators with God

This exhilarating role as co-conspirators with God, agents mixed into the ordinary workings of the world, is the task for which we were born, asserted Willard. But simply showing up to do church-related things is not discipleship, he warned, not by a long shot. We were created to participate in the “kingdom among us” as well as the kingdom of heaven after we die, and that participation should be evidence of God’s life within us.

“The human job description…found in chapter 1 of Genesis indicates that God assigned to us collectively the rule over all living things on earth, animal and plant. We are responsible before God for life on the earth. However unlikely it may seem from our current viewpoint, God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our ‘rule’ only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or co-worker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.”[6]

“God’s desire for us is that we should live in him. He sends among us the Way to himself. That shows what, in his heart of hearts, God is really like – indeed, what reality is really like. In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.”[7]

Dallas Willard devoured books as a child during the Great Depression, while he was schooled in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. “Plato was his companion when he worked as an agricultural laborer after high school.

Willard recalls giving his Baptist Sunday school teachers a ‘very bad time’ as a young teenager. He didn’t think it made sense that you ‘got saved’ and were ‘stuck with it.’”[8] His questions led him to some conclusions that pushed the boundaries of his Southern Baptist upbringing.

After Willard left pastoring to study philosophy, he encountered Richard Foster, a Quaker pastor, forging a friendship and collaboration that would extend across the coming decades into the ecumenical work of Renovarè, a ministry that transcends denominational lines to foster discipleship in Christ. In addition to teaching philosophy to university students and speaking in conferences across the country, Dallas Willard was the author of The Spirit of the Disciplines; Hearing God; Renovation of the Heart; The Great Omission; as well as The Divine Conspiracy; and a book on German philosopher Edmund Husserl, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge.

Willard’s philosophical study of reality in phenomenology led him to probe the results of people’s beliefs. He was troubled by the gap between people professing faith and living it. As he explained in The Divine Conspiracy, “According to Gallup surveys, 94 percent of Americans believe in God and 74 percent claim to have made a commitment to Jesus Christ. About 34 percent confess to a ‘new birth’ experience. These figures are shocking when thoughtfully compared to statistics on the same groups for unethical behavior, crime, mental distress and disorder, family failures, addictions, financial misdealings, and the like.”[9]

Where is the Transformation of Character?

“The understanding of a commitment to Jesus Christ has not penetrated our character deeply enough to influence our behavior,” laments Willard, “transformation of life and character are not a part of the redemptive message offered by the church today.”[10] My experience in working with both protestant and Catholic congregations across the country leads me to conclude that he is correct in his assessment. Far too few people who say they believe in Christ show evidence of becoming more like him.

“The current gospels, left and right, exhibit the very same type of conceptual disconnection from, and practical irrelevance to, the personal integrity of believers – and certainly so, if we put that integrity in terms of biblically specific ‘Christlikeness,’” observes Willard. “And both lack any essential bearing upon the individual’s life as a whole, especially upon the occupations or work time and upon the fine texture or our personal relationships in the home and neighborhood.”[11] The fruits of faith that should be transforming the world and the relationships of Christ’s followers are lacking. “So as things now stand we have, on the one hand, some kind of ‘faith in Christ’ and, on the other, the life of abundance and obedience he is and offers. But we have no effective bridge from the faith to the life. Some do work it out. But when that happens it is looked upon as a fluke or an accident, not a normal and natural part of the regular good news itself.”[12]

The result is that “the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life,” Willard concludes. “To counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”[13]

But we have to cooperate with God’s purposes in our life. We enter into an apprenticeship, a partnership with Christ, learning to listen and walk with him, collaborating with him as he shows us what he is doing in a given situation. “Within his overarching dominion God has created us and has given each of us, like him, a range of will – beginning from our minds and bodies and extending outward, ultimately to a point not wholly predetermined but open to the measure of our faith. His intent is for us to learn to mesh our kingdom with the kingdoms of others. Love of neighbor, rightly understood, will make this happen. But we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rule with God’s. That is why love of neighbor is the second, not the first, commandment and why we are told to seek first the kingdom, or rule, of God.”[14]

The Cosmic Conspiracy to Overcome Evil with Good

If we align our heart and will with God through prayer and honestly seek to cooperate with what he is doing among us now, “as God’s flash point in reigniting eternal life among us, he inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds—deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.”[15] The life of Christ, his love, his wisdom, and his power, flow through us into the lives we touch. “Then we heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good.”[16]

A “major element in this training is experience in waiting for God to move, not leaping ahead and taking things into our own hands. Out of this waiting experience there comes a form of character that is priceless before God, a character that can be empowered to do as one chooses. This explains why James says that patience in trials will make us ‘fully functional’ (teleion), ‘perfect’ (James 1:4).”[17] Doing things with God’s timing is essential. “Sometimes we must wait for God to do as we ask because the answer involves changes in other people, or even ourselves, and that kind of change always takes time. Sometimes, apparently, the changes in question involve conflicts going on in a spiritual realm lying entirely outside human affairs (Dan. 10:13). We always live in a larger context of activities we do not see.”[18]

Becoming a disciple does not mean doing a few religious things once a week and leaving the rest of our life the same. Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. “So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things, either as a part of ‘full-time service’ or as a part of ‘part-time service.’ My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, ‘religious’ or not. Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks, “Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own.”[19]

It’s About the Kind of Person We Become

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives–is simply the person we become. .”[20] Living as a disciple means emulating Jesus. “We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We notice, for example, that he spent extended times in solitude and silence, and we enter solitude and silence with him. We note what a thorough student of the scriptures he was,

and we follow him, the Living Word, into the depths of the written word. We notice how he used worship and prayer, how he served those around him. We have Bibles with red letters to indicate what he said. Might we not make good use of a Bible that has green letters for what he did? Green for ‘go,’ or ‘do it’?”[21] I sometimes wonder if our churches need to measure not how many people they seat, but how many they send.

This is not a call for activism. Instead it is a call for deep inner alignment with God’s purposes. The means by which we align our heart with that of God is prayer, which is the primary means of forming character. It combines our freedom with God’s power, resulting in service through love. Transformed hearts produce transformed persons, through and through, and deeds arise from the heart quickened by faith. “The deeds of the kingdom arise naturally out of a certain quality of life. We cultivate that life in its wholeness by directing our bodies into activities that empower the inner and outer person for God and through God. In this second part of the curriculum for Christlikeness, then the main task is, by engaging in ways of using the body differently, to disrupt and conquer habits of thought, feeling, and action that govern our lives as if we or someone other than God were God and as if his kingdom were irrelevant or inaccessible to us.”[22] Spiritual disciplines forge the unity of mind, body, and soul.

Willard reminds us that this has been true for all souls throughout all ages of Christendom. The great souls “who have made great spiritual progress all seriously engaged with a fairly standard list of disciplines for the spiritual life. There has been abuse and misunderstanding, no doubt, but the power of solitude, silence, meditative study, prayer, sacrificial giving, service, and so forth as disciplines are simply beyond question.”[23] These spiritual disciplines “aim at the heart and its transformation. We want to ‘make the tree good.’ We do not aim just to control behavior, but to change the inner castle of the soul, that God may be worshiped ‘in spirit and in truth’ and right behavior cease to be a performance.”[24] Our inner substance is actually transformed.

Christ makes disciples and when they become genuinely Christlike, he allows us to take responsibility in his kingdom work. “When we submit what and where we are to God, our rule or dominion then increases. In Jesus’ words from the parable of the talents (Mt. 25) our Master says, ‘Well done! You were faithful with a few things, and I will put you in charge of many things.’…For God is unlimited creative will and constantly invites us, even now, into an ever larger share in what he is doing.”[25] Some of those things are quite surprising.

God’s Grubby People

Dallas Willard gives a reading of the Beatitudes that stretched my understanding of who the “blessed” truly are. He claims that the Beatitudes are addressed to the “hopeless blessables” and to the seriously crushed.[26] “The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorces. The HIV-positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant too-many- times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the side of the street, the children with parents not dying in the ‘rest’ home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead.”[27] “Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion in his kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich.”[28] That understanding removes the “them and the “us” from any people we may encounter. “If I, as a recovering sinner myself, accept Jesus’ good news, I can go to the mass murderer and say, ‘You can be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens. There is forgiveness that knows no limits.’ To the pederast and the perpetrator of incest. To the worshiper of Satan. To those who rob the aged and weak. To the cheat and the liar, the bloodsucker and the vengeful: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee into the arms of The Kingdom Among Us. These are God’s grubby people.”[29] Jesus sought them out, and we are called to do the same.

“Any spiritually healthy congregation of believers in Jesus will more or less look like these ‘brands plucked from the burning.’ If the group is totally nice, that is a sure sign something has gone wrong.

For here are the foolish, weak, lowly, and despised of the world, whom God has chosen to cancel out the humanly great (1 Cor. 1:26-31; 6).”[30] We all meet at the foot of the cross. “Speaking to these common people, ‘the multitudes,’ who through him had found blessing in the kingdom, Jesus tells them it is they, not the ‘best and brightest’ on the human scale, who are to make life on earth manageable as they live from the kingdom (Mt. 5: 13-16). God gives them ‘light’- truth, love, and power – that they might be the light for their surroundings. He makes them ‘salt’ to cleanse, preserve, and flavor the times through which they live.”[31]

A Curriculum for Christlikeness

Doctrine is not discipleship, says Willard. To form a “curriculum for Christlikeness,” we need to move away from two objectives “that are often taken as primary goals [and] must not be left in that position….These are external conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific context and profession of perfectly correct doctrine. Historically these are the very things that have obsessed the church visible….We need wait no longer. The results are in. They do not provide a course of personal growth and development that routinely produced people who ‘hear and do.’”[32]

“Much the same can be said of the strategies – rarely taken as primary objectives, to be sure, but much used – of encouraging faithfulness to the activities of a church or other outwardly religious routines and various ‘spiritualities,’ or the seeking out of special states of mind or ecstatic experiences. These are good things. But let it be said once and for all that, like outward conformity and doctrinally perfect profession, they are not to be taken as major objectives in an adequate curriculum for Christlikeness.”[33] These are all secondary. “Special experiences, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. The human heart must be plowed much more deeply.”[34]

The mind and heart must be filled up by the relationship and presence of God, nurtured in an ongoing conversation and partnership. “When the mind is filled with this great and beautiful God, the ‘natural’ response, once all ‘inward’ hindrances are removed, will be to do ‘everything I have told you to do.’”[35]

Training Disciples

How, then, do we teach others to become disciples? First of all, it comes through loving him completely, seeing the magnificence of his person, and allowing his love to fill our lives. Willard tells us, “The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him. For purposes of training disciples, we should divide this into four main aspects. First, we teach his beauty, truth, and power while he lived among us as one human being among others.

“Second, we teach the way he went to execution as a common criminal among other criminals on our behalf….The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a ‘right answer’ to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.”

“Third, we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. We present him in his ecclesia, his motley but glorious crew of called-out ones.…So the continuing incarnation of the divine Son in his gathered people must fill our minds if we are to love him and his Father adequately and thus live on the rock of hearing and doing.

“But fourth, we teach the Jesus who is the master of the created universe and of human history. He is the one in control of all the atoms, particles, quarks, ‘strings,’ and so forth upon which the physical cosmos depends.”[40]

Anyone who truly comes to know Jesus in this way, loving him through and through, will want to obey and serve him, not as a duty but out of an abundance of love for him. “Jesus himself knew that this was the key. The keeping of his commandments was the true sign of love for him, because that love is what made it possible and actual. In this love of Jesus everything comes together: ‘If anyone loves me, my word he will keep, and my Father will love him, and we will move in with him and live there’ (John 14:23).”[42]

“In his ‘commencement address’ (John 14-16) to his first apprentices, he once again gives them the all-inclusive commandment ‘that you love one another just as I have loved you’ (John 15:12) After clarifying that this includes ‘laying down our life for our friends,’ and not least for Jesus himself, he makes the following observation: ‘You are my friends if you keep this commandment.’”[43]

Five Dimensions of The Kingdom Among Us

We enter into a changed relationship with Christ, a basis of “loving cooperation, of shared endeavor, in which his aims are our aims and our understanding and harmony with his kingdom are essential to what he does with and through us.”[44] We step across the threshold into the life of The Kingdom Among Us.

Dallas Willard shows us five dimensions of the eternal kind of life in The Kingdom Among Us:

  1. Confidence in and reliance upon Jesus as the Son of man, the one appointed to save
  2. But this confidence in the person of Jesus naturally leads to a desire to be his apprentice in living in and from the kingdom of God….Our apprenticeship to him means that we live within his word, that is, put his teachings into practice (John 8:31). And this progressively integrates our entire existence into the glorious world of eternal
  3. The abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus, ‘continuing in his word,’ naturally leads to obedience. The teaching we have received and our experience of living with it brings us to love Jesus and the Father with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, and (bodily) strength. And so we love to obey him, even where we do not yet understand or really ‘like’ what that requires.
  4. Obedience, with the life of discipline it requires, both leads to and, then, issues from the pervasive inner transformation of the heart and soul. The abiding condition of the disciple becomes one of ‘love, joy, peace, long-suffering [patience], kindness, goodness, faith to the brim, meekness and self-control.’ (Gal. 5:22)…These are called the ‘fruit of the spirit’ because they are not direct effects of our efforts but are brought about in us as we admire and emulate Jesus and do whatever is necessary to learn how to obey
  5. Finally, there is power to work the works of the kingdom…Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow [46]

What will the kingdom of heaven be like? Willard tells us “[O]ur experience will not be fundamentally different in character from what it is now, though it will change in significant details. The life we now have as the persons we now are will continue, and continue in the universe in which we now exist.

Our experience will be much clearer, richer, and deeper, of course, because it will be unrestrained by the limitations now imposed upon us by our dependence upon our body. It will, instead, be rooted in the broader and more fundamental reality of God’s kingdom and will accordingly have far greater scope and power.”[47]

We are participating in the eternal life now, living in “now” and the “not yet” simultaneously. “The agape love of 1 Corinthians 13 will increasingly become simply a matter of who we are. But the effects of our prayers, words, and deeds – and sometimes of our mere presence – will also increasingly be of a nature and extent that cannot be explained in human terms. Increasingly what we do and say is ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and every part of our life becomes increasingly eternal….We are now co-laborers with God.”[48]

Dallas Willard showed many souls the way to enter the “divine conspiracy” with Christ to overcome evil with good in this realm, while looking toward the next. His wise, warm voice will be missed here, but Heaven most certainly rejoices with his arrival. May he rest in peace.

This essay was originally published here in May 2013.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Books by Dallas Willard

Translations of Works by Edmund Husserl:

Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (1993). Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy of Arithmetic, (2003). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy

• Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge: A Study in Husserl’s Philosophy (Series in Continental Thought, Vol 6) (1984). Ohio University Press.

Christian Books:

The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (1988). San Francisco: Harper and Row.

The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (1998). San Francisco: Harper.

Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God (1999). InterVarsity Press (USA). (formerly titled In Search of Guidance: Understanding How God Changes Lives)

Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (2002). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006). San Francisco: Harper.

• Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (2009).San Francisco: Harper.

• Revolution of Character: Discovering Christ’s Pattern for Spiritual Transformation (2005). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions (2010). IVP Books.

Notes

1. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

2. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1998), page 291.

3. Ibid., page 25.

4. Ibid., page 31.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., page 22.

7. Ibid., page 11.

8. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

9. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, page 38.

10. Ibid., page 41.

11. Ibid., page 54.

12. Ibid., page 55.

13. Ibid., page 58.

14. Ibid., page 26.

15. Ibid., page 27.

16. Ibid., page 90.

17. Ibid., page 250.

18. Ibid., page 251.

19. Ibid., pages 23-24. Cited from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, (Old Tappan, NJ:  Fleming H. Revell, 1974).

20. Ibid., page 250.

21. Ibid., page 352.

22. Ibid., page 354.

23. Ibid., page 355.

24. Ibid., page 364.

25. Ibid., page 24.

26. Ibid., page 122.

27. Ibid., pages 123-124.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., page 320.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., pages 320-321.

35. Ibid., page 321.

36. Ibid., page 334.

37. Ibid., pages 334-335.

38. Ibid., page 335.

39. Ibid., page 336.

40. Ibid. pages 334-336

41. Ibid., note 12.

42. Ibid., page 336.

43. Ibid., page 367.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., page 368.

47. Ibid., page 395.

48. Ibid., page 396.

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Russell Kirk, Sage of Piety Hill: Planting Seeds for Generations to Come

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russell kirk

Russell and Annette Kirk with the author

Driving across the snowy landscape of Michigan the day after Christmas in 1973, I was somewhat apprehensive. I had been invited to take part in the first seminar of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in the ancestral home of Dr. Russell Kirk at Piety Hill. We were to spend the next five days discussing his book, The Roots of American Order, which had just rolled off the presses. I had just been named the new editor of Imprimis at Hillsdale College and had scarcely unpacked before heading up north through the woods to Mecosta, but I had managed to finish reading the book. And what a book! It gives a panoramic view of the ideas on ordered liberty that emerge from Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London to converge in Philadelphia in the founding of the American Republic. The prospect of spending several days in the company of this towering intellect whose wisdom encompassed such breadth and depth was intimidating.

I needn’t have worried. The genuine warmth of Dr. Kirk and his wife Annette made staying at the Kirk home at Piety Hill a mesmerizing experience. It was like stepping back in time at least a century, maybe several, to find oneself in a thoroughly Gothic house, steeped in tradition, rooted in the history of multiple generations, and full of beautiful artifacts. It was a place to discuss big ideas in small circles, continuing the conversation throughout the day and into the night, imbibing while drinking in the stories Dr. Kirk told while seated next to the fireplace. After dinner, guests might play the violin or piano, or recite poetry for our entertainment, just as they did in Jane Austen’s era.

This house was for me a magical place, somehow untethered from modernity, overflowing with books and pictures and stories of bygone eras. It was a house literally untethered from a television set, because Dr. Kirk had found the one his young daughters had smuggled into the house against his orders. He picked up the television and literally threw it out the window. The cord caught on the way down the side of the house, leaving the television set dangling there for several days, much to the amusement of the neighbors (and his daughters).

In preparation for celebrating Dr. Kirk’s centenary, as I have thought about the man who became my friend and mentor over the years, it occurs to me that his house was a metaphor for his life. Like his family’s gothic house at Piety Hill, Russell Kirk was decidedly un-modern. His orientation came from looking across the centuries to cull the wisdom of the ages to share it with other seekers of truth. This is the sense in which he was conservative: He set out to conserve the absolute best in thought from the Western tradition to fill the hungry minds and hearts of the next generation to renew the culture. His house held tangible manifestations of these ideas and it would become a frequent destination for pilgrimages of students in search of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. It still attracts them now.

The Kirk house was full of family portraits, handed down through multiple generations, and cherished because of loyalty to tradition. The family portrait gallery was full of interesting and, well… unusual people, from the grandfather who was a banker to the great-aunt who held séances. Dr. Kirk’s books are full of portraits of the family of great thinkers who span the ages: Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas More, Edmund Burke, and of course Randolph of Roanoke and T.S. Eliot, about whom he wrote illuminating biographies. Dr. Kirk knew Eliot personally as a friend, and the time they shared provided a wealth of insights that found their way onto the pages of Eliot and His Age. The wisdom of the thinkers he chose to write about shaped the intellectual landscape of the world we inhabit. When Dr. Kirk wrote about them in The Conservative Mind, he provided the genealogy for America’s conservative intellectual movement. As their intellectual heirs, we stand in what Edmund Burke called the eternal bond of “the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.” (Since that first seminar, I am acutely aware of moving inexorably closer to the front of that continuum.)

The Kirk house at Piety Hill and Dr. Kirk himself were both venerable and full of quirky eccentricities. The house had steps rounded over the years by thousands of footfalls, odd little passageways, and cubby-holes that make it unique and charming. It is the antithesis of the modern trend that has flattened and streamlined modern homes, making them bland, beige, cloned rows in subdivisions. Dr. Kirk hated ugly architecture and anything that diminished individuality. He found it repugnant and damaging to the human spirit. In a similar way, Dr. Kirk was never bulldozed into becoming a beige bland, modern man. He fiercely maintained his independence, remaining free to write and say what he thought, without having to bulldoze his ideas to make them fit the blueprint of modernity in what he called “Behemoth University.” Although Dr. Kirk spoke at more than three hundred universities in his lifetime, he spent limited time in his career tethered to any single university, except for visiting appointments. He always returned to Piety Hill unaffiliated and unbowed.

The Kirk house was overflowing with books, so many that Dr. Kirk needed a separate building to house his library, where he would sit up late evenings, often working through the night, as he continued the “great conversation” with the greatest minds of the western tradition. He knew them all in the fellowship of ideas, and the books in his library were some of his best friends. With his prodigious, near photographic memory, and a brilliantly impressive mind, Dr. Kirk carried within him a library of the canon of the West.

The front door to the Kirk house was open to visitors from all over the world who wanted to learn. A steady stream of students, professors, and friends in the realm of ideas flowed into Piety Hill for nourishment of mind and spirit. Dr. Kirk not only received hundreds of people in his home, he traveled to speak in hundreds of places throughout the nation and abroad year after year—at universities and conferences, even on television. It’s worth recalling that Dr. Kirk was a national figure who commanded respect from both the political left and the right, one who advised presidents, and who shaped the intellectual landscape of the nation. Both Time and Newsweek called him one of America’s leading thinkers. He would plant the intellectual seeds for renewing America in not only the political and economic realms, but in the moral and spiritual realms, because he knew they are always interconnected.

The seeds Dr. Kirk planted were both metaphorical and literal. The area surrounding Mecosta had been aggressively denuded of trees by lumber companies, so Dr. Kirk made it a personal mission to plant trees. We trudged through the snow with him on walks around Mecosta and he happily pointed out trees he had planted himself. This showed us a side of Dr. Kirk that, despite everything lamentable in an unraveling world, was inherently optimistic. Only a man who cares about the future plants trees he will not sit beneath. He gave the gift of greenness to generations to come because he loved the land and took personal responsibility to leave his corner of the world better than he found it.

Dr. Kirk also left people better than when he found them. On my first visit to Piety Hill, I stayed in the room ordinarily occupied by Clinton, whom the Kirk’s affectionately dubbed their “runaway butler.” He was away on one of his unexplained sojourns, leaving the room free for me. Clinton was a somewhat mentally limited stray the family took in, rescuing him from a life of petty larceny. (His service to the family was a mixed blessing, as he neglected to put out the fire in the fireplace one Ash Wednesday, resulting in a fire that destroyed much of the house. Undeterred, Dr. Kirk and Annette painstakingly rebuilt their beloved house, taking the opportunity to expand and update it a bit.) The Kirks took in a steady procession of unwed mothers, political refugees from places like Vietnam and Ethiopia, and other people in various kinds of need. This was all done quietly, with no fanfare. It was Annette who provided the hands-on care, but the heart of her husband beat in tandem with hers in the commitment to help others by welcoming them into their home.

The willingness to extend a hand to people in need was a natural manifestation of Dr. Kirk’s faith. So were the beautiful religious artifacts that filled the house, some from neighboring churches torn down to be modernized, while others were purchased on travels throughout the world. The house at Piety Hill rested on the foundation of faith in God, and although Russell Kirk never wore his religion on his sleeve, it is clear that his understanding of the world was rooted in reverence for our Creator and the certainty that we will all be judged by Him. He believed that all things in this valley of tears will be perfected in God’s perfect time, and that any lasting order in this world is anchored in the transcendent truth of the world to come.

Sometimes the barrier between the visible and invisible realms is thin. It was very, very thin at the Kirk house, which was, well…. haunted. Various apparitions regularly manifested themselves, especially to visitors. There was a crying baby, a man in a checked coat and lacy cravat, and Dr. Kirk’s grandfather Amos—all of whom appeared to so many people staying at Piety Hill over the years, that it is impossible not to believe that they were in some way real. I was one of those visitors who had an unearthly encounter. So when Russell Kirk wrote ghost stories, it was not always pure fiction, strictly speaking. Although some people chided him for this genre of writing, he sold far many more books of his ghost stories than all his other books together. His tales were published next to stories by Stephen King.

While in Scotland, Dr. Kirk encountered ghostly apparitions. It was also here that after his spiritual awakening from agnosticism, he had an epiphany, in which he was given a clear spiritual sense of his mission, which was to write about the ideas that would inspire the renewal of Western civilization. That is exactly what he did.

In the years since, the life’s work of Russell Kirk has reached people all over he globe, informing their minds, strengthening their spirits, and passing on the fire of Pentecost. I am so grateful to be one of those people in whom the fire ignited. And I am grateful that before he died, I was able to thank Dr. Kirk in person for all that he had taught me and modeled over the years, especially the seamless integration of what he wrote and how he lived: wisdom rooted in faith, imagination, and love. Now one hundred years after his birth, may Russell Kirk rest in the mansions of peace and hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And may his legacy endure forever.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

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John With Jesus: From Passover to the Garden of Gethsemane

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Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara Elliott, as she portrays the events of the Last Supper to Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane from the perspective of the Apostle John. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

I went with Peter to make the arrangements for the Passover supper. When we arrived in Jerusalem, Jesus had told us to look for a man carrying a pitcher of water. We were to follow him into the house he entered, ask to speak to the owner, and say: “The master asks you where is the room for him to eat the Passover with his disciples?” Jesus was always giving us assignments like this, which always worked out, much to our amazement. This was no exception. The owner took us upstairs and showed us a nice, large furnished room, that opened to a beautiful view of the city. We thanked him and purchased the food and wine for the evening: unleavened bread, lamb, and bitter herbs, just like those Moses and the Israelites had eaten on the night the angel of death passed over them on their Exodus from slavery in Egypt.

When the twelve disciples gathered around Jesus that night, as he gave us bread, he said something we didn’t understand. “I have longed to eat this Pasch with you before I suffer, because I shall not eat it until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.” What could that mean? He took the cup, and said, “This is my blood. Take this—share it—because I shall never drink wine again until the Kingdom of God comes.” We had been a festive mood since the hosannas on Sunday as Jesus entered Jerusalem to the waving of palms, but he was now sober and reflective as he uttered these words. He took the bread and broke it, handing it to each of us, saying, “This is my body,” and he asked us to partake of his body in the new covenant. The image of his body broken for us stopped me completely with the realization that this was no mere metaphor. The body of Jesus would be broken. He talked about many more things that puzzled us. Then He prayed for us long and fervently that we would be one, as he and the Father are one. He prayed for those who would believe through us in the days to come, that they too would be one in the Father, united as Jesus is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

 

During the Transfiguration, Peter, James, and I had heard the voice of the Father and had gotten a glimpse of the dove of the Holy Spirit on the mountaintop, as Jesus hovered above us in dazzling white, conversing with Elijah and Moses. It was overwhelming to the senses and the mind. Just as Peter, James, and I thought we could take in no more, suddenly only Jesus was with us, clothed in ordinary garb, as if nothing unusual had happened. But we had seen it! Had he shared this glimpse to prepare us for what was to come? If so, what did it all mean? Years later, looking back, I wondered if we had just seen the intersection of the heavenly and earthly realms.

We walked with Jesus to the Mount of Olives, where we had gone with him other evenings when we were in Jerusalem. Jesus seemed to feel at home there, perhaps closer to his father somehow, as he looked out across the city to the valley, and beyond into the desert. Cicadas hummed in the blue velvet night. A dog yapped in the distance, answered by the howl of another. Several of the disciples had been singing psalms as we walked over from dinner in the upper room, psalms we always sang for Passover. These words recalled the mighty deeds of God the night that the blood of the lamb above the doors of the Israelites marked the homes that would be spared by the angel of death. I hummed along as we settled into chosen spots in the garden, watching Jesus intently. He was deeply focused in his thoughts, which were impenetrable, even though I knew him so well.

Jesus asked Peter, James, and me to come with him as he walked a few steps away from the others. We settled into the soft grass, which was already wet with evening dew. It was as if the garden wept. Jesus knelt down and began to pray to his Father, as we had seen him do so many times before. But this time it was different, somehow. He opened his palms and turned his face up to the starry heaven in the night sky, imploring his Father with words we could barely hear. I moved a little closer to listen, my spirit drawn to his. I sensed an urgency I had never seen in Jesus. The was the same man who had commanded the waves of the storm to be calm, who had healed the sick and made a blind man see, who brought our friend Lazarus out of his tomb four days dead, trailing his grave clothes behind him.  This same man was imploring God the Father in anguished words I moved in to hear. In a groan from his depths, Jesus spoke: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me.” He stopped, and the silence was deafening. I held my breath, and so did he. Seconds passed. Finally, Jesus spoke again, plaintively: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by.” As we waited for an answer, a snake slithered through the blue-green grass. Still, no sound came from heaven or from the lips of Jesus.

The other disciples had drifted off to sleep and I struggled to keep my eyes open. Jesus walked back to the others, disappointed that they did not keep vigil with him. “Did you not find the strength to stay awake one hour with me?” he asked, pained Jesus returned to pray again with increasing fervor. “Father, if it is within your will, I beg you, take this cup from me.” He prayed so intensely that he sweated. As he prayed even longer, his sweat turned to blood and his body began to sway. He was shaking. From the thin blue night air, two angels suddenly materialized next to him. One held Jesus, propping up his swaying body against his own, while the other angel soothed the furrowed, sweating brow with a cooling ointment, perfumed with wildflowers and frankincense. I watched in wonder, my eyes growing heavier from the scent, which was intoxicating, sweet, and pungent. I would have succumbed completely to sleep had I not heard the sharp, urgent tone of Jesus, as he prayed to his Father again.

Once more, Jesus spread open his arms, palms up, outstretched to heaven. In anguish, he cried, “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup away from me.” He paused. Surely a loving father would not want his son to suffer, I thought. Surely he has the power to stop the Pharisees with one mighty blow and annihilate the enemies of Jesus. He could send lightning bolts to incinerate the Roman occupying forces. Surely God the Father could unleash a mighty show of power in defense of his perfect and beloved son, demonstrating his victorious right hand! But no sign came. The silence was perfect, deafening in its oppressiveness. On this pause would hinge all of salvation history, I later thought, remembering this scene.

Finally, Jesus spoke, slowly and deliberately: “Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.” He continued to pray, still producing profuse sweat mingled with blood. He wrestled in agony with the burden of his mission, his love for the men and women whose lives he had touched. He had formed us as apprentices, apostles, to be sent to the far reaches of the world. Three long years he had done intensive training with us, and yet it was clear that we comprehended so little. Another wave of bloody sweat cascaded from the brow of Jesus. And as he wrestled with the future of his precarious mission to the world, he walked back to his sleeping disciples and chastised them for abandoning him. Despite my best efforts, it was then that I succumbed to sleep along with them.

Jesus spoke: “Look at them now, every one of them is asleep, even my beloved John, as I am about to enter into the struggle of my life, even with death itself, the fulfillment of all the prophecies, the realization of the plan of salvation history. Everything we planned since the beginning of time—the Father and the Holy Spirit and I together—hinges on what happens now. And my men, my hand-picked ambassadors to the world, are all out. Unconscious. Unable to muster enough commitment to stay with me while I pray. The desolation of their abandonment is a desert to my soul. How is it that the people I have come to save cannot muster a modicum of commitment to stay with me? Have I not taught you well enough? My anguish only intensifies in the silence. Yet this battle is far from over. The worst is yet to come. And I feel utterly alone.”

The serpent hissed at Jesus, then spoke, mocking him: “Where are your followers now? How can you save a world where not even these straggling human beings care enough to stay awake with you? It is futile. You should give up now. It is over.”

In one swift move, the foot of Jesus came down on the head of the serpent, crushing it. In one swift move, he fulfilled the prophecy made in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s fateful bite of the apple and her “no” to God had been reversed by Mary, who said “yes” to God. And Jesus, as the new Adam, would reverse the curse of original sin: “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers; He will bruise your head and you will strike his heel.”

But the suffering Jesus would endure—to pay the overwhelming price of all man’s sin—had just begun, and it was about to become much worse, as he entered into the terrible Friday we call Good.

This essay in our series of “Timeless Essays” was first published here in March 2018.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now

Editor’s Note: The featured image is “Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane” (c. 1650) by Giacinto Brandi (1621-1691), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When Mother Teresa Came to Washington

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As I looked around that room in Washington, filled with so many powerful people, I realized that one day in Mother Teresa’s life brought more good to the face of the earth than all our efforts combined for a lifetime.

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara J. Elliott, as she remembers the life of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, known popularly as “Mother Teresa.” —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

It was utterly ludicrous, stepping out of a chauffeured White House limousine to go hear Mother Teresa. Even then I recognized that, as a twenty-something working at the locus of political power. Her simple sari and sandals were incongruous among the tailored suits and silk ties of the people who styled themselves as Masters of the Universe. The crowd was large, and the photographers and reporters jostled each other aggressively to get near the woman popularly believed to be a living saint. She seemed uncomfortable, not as much from the noise and shoving as from the praise she received. She fixed her glance to the floor as Senator James Buckley introduced her. Mother Teresa spoke quietly to several hundred perfectly still listeners. Every small gesture she made provoked a swarm of photographic clicks like a cloud of gnats around her. But the sound of the milling photographers soon dissipated in a consciousness riveted on her joyous face. Now we know that we were gazing on the face of a saint who would be canonized in September 2016.

She told us of newborn babies that were left in dustbins in Calcutta near the home of the Missionaries of Charity, with the mother’s unspoken hope that they would be found and saved. She and her Sisters found eight aborted fetuses outside an abortion clinic that were still alive. They brought them home, nurtured them; one survived to grow up into a healthy child for whom they found an adoptive home. Mother Teresa and her sisters collected thousands of people from the streets: abandoned children, lepers, the sick, and the dying. Every day in Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity fed 8,000 people and somehow they never had to turn one away because there was nothing to give.

She told us of a man who lay dying in a gutter, half-eaten by worms, rotting. Mother Teresa herself carried him to her home for the sick and dying. She laid him in a bed, washed his entire body using a basin and cloth, picked the maggots out of his open wounds and dressed them with ointment, laid him in fresh sheets and gave him a drink of cold water. He was given what he had not known until then: a clean place to lie, unconditional love, and dignity. “I have lived like an animal all my life,” the man told her, “but I will die like an angel.”

With flashbulbs popping, Members of Congress came to stand by her side, one by one. I waited in line to shake Mother Teresa’s hand, to ask her to sign my copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s biography of her, Something Beautiful for God. The tiny nun, who barely came up to my shoulder, took my hand and pressed it into her rough and calloused one, saying “Love God, Barbara,” which came out sounding more like “Luff Gott, Bahbada.”

As I stood there among the purveyors of political power in the most powerful nation in the world, self-satisfied, puffed up with what we thought was our own importance (and I include myself among them), her presence inserted a slender needle of doubt, deflating my own exalted notions of political prowess. It occurred to me, as I looked around that room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, that one day in Mother Teresa’s life brought more good to the face of the earth than all our efforts combined for a lifetime. The thought shook me to my core. And I can see now retrospectively that she lit a long fuse in me that would ignite the fire of faith in my soul six years later.

The next day, Mother Teresa came to the White House for lunch with President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. A crowd of reporters and many of my colleagues from the White House staff joined them for her farewell. “What did you talk about, Mr. President?” shouted one of the reporters. “We listened,” he replied.

Mother Teresa came to Washington again to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994. More than 3,000 people assembled from virtually all the nations of the world: Prime Ministers, Presidents, Ambassadors, Members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices, and dignitaries from 150 countries. I had traveled there with leaders from nations newly liberated from Soviet domination. President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary were seated on the stage. As I looked around the huge ballroom in the Washington Hilton at the staggering assembly of the world’s political power, the tiny nun entered. The electrifying response made it clear who had the real power. She spoke with a moral and spiritual authority that eclipsed that of the governing officials.

Despite the fact that Mother Teresa had to step up on a footstool to be seen over the podium, her presence filled the ballroom to the rafters. She said boldly, “St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? Jesus makes himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the unwanted one.”[1]

Mother Teresa then threw down the gauntlet on behalf of the unwanted ones, with Bill and Hillary Clinton seated a few feet away. Mother Teresa said in a firm voice, “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion. And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? We are fighting abortion by adoption–by care of the mother and adoption for her baby. We have saved thousands of lives. . . . Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child.”[2] Give me the child. Her plaintive plea seared the hearts of everyone who heard her. As all of us in the entire crowd rose to our feet in thunderous applause that billowed through the hall. Only two people remained seated: Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Call Within the Call

On my first trip to Europe right after graduating from college, armed with a passport and a Eurail pass but no particular itinerary, I boarded a train in Luxembourg to travel to Greece, hoping it would be warmer than the northern clime where I had landed. As it turned out, this train went through Yugoslavia, stopping at Skopje, where hospitable locals offered me the opportunity to stay overnight and then continue on. I didn’t know that I was making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of a saint who would change the direction of my life. As it turns out, that was the town where Mother Teresa was born of Albanian parents in 1910 as Agnes Bojaxhiu. She entered the Irish order of the Sisters of Loreto at the age of eighteen and bid her family a tearful farewell as she left for Ireland to learn English. She feared that she would never see them again, and that proved to be the case. She had chosen her new name after Theresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower. She was sent to Calcutta in 1929, where she taught geography and catechism at St. Mary’s High School, and later became the principal. There she learned Hindi and Bengali, as she taught in the school that served orphans and poor children as well as more affluent boarding students. On her daily trips to the Loreto school she observed the bone-crushing poverty and squalor of the city. Dead bodies were collected from the streets where the weakest had fallen victim to disease or starvation. It seared the heart of the nun who lived cloistered away in the safety and relative comfort of the convent.

Mother Teresa was on a train Sept. 10, 1946, when she received what she called “the call within the call.” It became quite clear that she was to follow Jesus into the poorest slums of the city, live among the poor, and do his work there. We know that she did that heroically. But what has come to light only recently in the investigation for her canonization is that she had a much more difficult time acting on this call than was known. She struggled first with her own uncertainty, and then with the Church, from which she had to receive permission for this unconventional ministry. The Postulator of the cause, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, has documented her story, based on interviews and correspondence with her spiritual advisor Father Van Exem and Archbishop Perier.

Mother Teresa had made a secret vow in 1942 that she wanted to give as a gift to Jesus, “something very beautiful . . . something without reserve.” She promised “to give God anything that He may ask–not to refuse Him anything.”[3] She carried this private vow within her four years, not knowing in what way she could give this gift. When she received the “call within a call” to go and live among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, this was what God was asking her to give. He spoke to her in an interior voice she sensed rather than heard. The words that resonated through her were these: You have become my spouse for My love. Will you refuse to do this for me? Refuse me not.[4] She kept a journal of these inner locutions, and wrote,

One day at Holy Communion I heard the same voice very distinctly: I want Indian nuns, victims of my love, who would be Mary and Martha, who would be so very united to me as to radiate my love on souls. I want free nuns covered with my poverty of the Cross. I want obedient nuns covered with my obedience of the cross. I want full of love nuns covered with the charity of the Cross. Wilt thou refuse to do this for me?[5]

In the hope that she could obtain permission to embark on this work among the poor, she wrote to Archbishop Perier in 1947, citing these things God had put in her heart. “These words, or rather, this voice frightened me. The thought of eating, sleeping, living like the Indians filled me with fear. I prayed long–I prayed so much . . . The more I prayed, the clearer grew the voice in my heart and so I prayed that He would do with me whatever He wanted. He asked again and again.”

Mother Teresa continued to pray, and she kept a journal of what God was impressing on her agitated soul. On another day she recorded:

You have become my spouse for my Love. You have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far. Are you afraid to take one more step for your Spouse, for me, for souls? Is your generosity grown cold?… You have been always saying, ‘Do with me whatever you wish.’ Now I want to act…. Do not fear. I shall be with you always. You will suffer and you suffer now, but if you are my own little Spouse of the Crucified Jesus, you will have to bear these torments on your heart. Let me act. Refuse me not. Trust me lovingly, trust me blindly.[6]

The Lord punctured any potential pride by telling her You are, I know, the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use you for My glory.[7]

When Mother Teresa initially asked to be released from the convent to go onto the streets, she was denied permission and was told to say nothing and go back and pray, which she did obediently. As she waited to act on this fire that was increasingly consuming her, the outlines of what she was to do became more clear. She was to go with other Indian nuns to reach the unwashed children on the streets, bathe them, teach them to read, and feed them. She was to go to the sick and dying, wash and bind their wounds, and give them a place to die with dignity. She was to go to the forgotten ones, the lepers, and be a presence of love and light. She knew that she would need nuns equipped to move about in the city, and even began to make plans for them to learn to drive vehicles, which was outrageously unusual for any women, let alone nuns, in Calcutta in the 1940s. The contours of the ministry became clearer as she prayed, and thought, and planned. When she implored again, her superiors in the church doubted the authenticity of her call. Once again, she went back in obedience to pray further. But still, the permission was not granted from the Church.

In a vision, she saw a crowd with their hands lifted to her in the midst, as they cried out “Come, come, save us. Bring us to Jesus.” She wrote in her prayer journal, “I could see great sorrow and suffering in their faces. I was kneeling near Our Lady who was facing them. I did not see her face but I heard her say, ‘Take care of them. They are mine. Bring them to Jesus. Carry Jesus to them. Fear not.’” Then she could see the crowd in darkness with Christ on the cross before them, as she stood as a little child with Our Lady, facing the cross. Our Lord said, I have asked you. They have asked you and she, my mother, has asked you. Will you refuse to do this for me, to take care of them, to bring them to me? She answered, “You know Jesus, I am ready to go at a moment’s notice.”[8]

Mother Teresa’s perseverance and prayer finally sufficed to persuade Fr. Van Exem of the authenticity of her call. And when Archbishop Perier received Mother Teresa’s letter with the excerpts from her prayer journal cited above, he no longer doubted that it was the will of God, either. She then asked permission to move out of the convent to live among the poor. It was highly unusual to have a nun remain under vows but live in the outside world. But when the permission finally came from Rome to live on the streets among the poor, she was permitted to remain in her order. But her struggles for acceptance were not over. She encountered serious resistance from her fellow believers in Calcutta. “One convent where she stopped by to eat her lunch ordered her to eat under the back stairs like a common beggar. A Yugoslav Jesuit, of the very nationality and order that had first inspired her love for India, commented brusquely, ‘We thought she was cracked.’”[9]

Mother Teresa embarked on the ministry that the world now knows: the outreach to the unloved, the lost, the unwanted, the lepers, the untouchables. She picked up the dying and brought them to the home she founded to give them love and dignity in death. She picked up babies and infants that had been abandoned in the garbage heaps, like human refuse, and nursed them back to life. David Aikman wrote, “Many, perhaps the majority of the babies, had been abandoned almost as soon as they were born, and almost all were suffering from acute malnutrition or tuberculosis. Their eyes were weary and sunken into their skeletal little faces, their limbs often mere sticks, incapable of independent movement. Several were beyond saving even when immediately provided with the proper medicines and nutrition. And, of course, all of them were starving for love.”[10]

The Fruit of a Contemplative Life of Prayer

Mother Teresa always insisted that the work she and the sisters did was not social work, but the fruit of their contemplative life of prayer. There were many people eager to push a label of social activism on her, or engage her in political issues centered on the poor. But she would have none of it. She said, “We are contemplatives in the world.” The work she did was rooted in prayer, and was an outpouring of the love she received in the mystical union with Christ. She saw Him in the destitute people she touched. As she explained it, she served “Christ in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.” In touching their filthy and diseased bodies, she was touching his body. By serving them, she was participating in his love.

There are two words written on a sign that hangs on the walls of the Missionaries of Charity homes all over the world: “I thirst.” These words Christ uttered on the cross are a reminder to the sisters that he thirsts for souls. This thirst motivated Mother Teresa, and became a motivating force for the order she founded. The constitution of the Missionaries of Charities says: “Our aim is to quench the infinite thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for love of souls. We serve Jesus in the poor, we nurse Him, feed Him, clothe Him, visit Him.” It was this profound love, deepened in contemplative prayer, and nourished daily by the Eucharist, that sustained Mother Teresa through what would have been a crushing burden of misery for lesser souls. The ultimate source of this power is Christ Himself.

She warned that it is not possible to do this kind of work “without being a soul of prayer.” Time for silence and contemplative prayer was crucial for her work. “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of the silence,” she said. “We need silence to be able to touch souls. . . . We must be aware of oneness with Christ, as He was aware of oneness with his Father.” We must “permit Him to work in us and through us, with his power, with His desire, with his love. We must become holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live His life fully in us. We are to be all love, all faith, all purity, for the sake of the poor we serve.”[11]

Mother Teresa set ripples of goodness into motion by her presence. “Our work is to encourage Christians and non-Christians to do works of love,” she said. “And every work of love, done with a full heart, always brings people closer to God.”[12] When she brought rice to a destitute woman in Calcutta, she found that a Hindu woman gave half of what she received to a Muslim woman who lived nearby, because she too was in need. Rather than giving the first woman more, Mother Teresa let her make the sacrifice, because it had a value to the heart that had been moved to generosity.

Even the very poorest beggars gave Mother Teresa donations for others. She cherished the gift of a beggar who scraped together a few coins by not smoking for several days, and gave her what he had saved. The amount was miniscule, but the sacrifice was great. She loved a young couple that decided not to have a lavish wedding, but instead by wearing simple clothes and having a modest dinner with a few friends, they were able to give a gift to the poor of the money they had saved. These gestures of sacrificial giving touched her heart, because they were evidence of the participation of others in what God was doing. “Give until it hurts,” she often said. She knew the joy that would result. “We must grow in love and to do this we must go on loving and loving and giving and giving until it hurts–the way Jesus did. Do ordinary things with extraordinary love: little things like caring for the sick and the homeless, the lonely and the unwanted, washing and cleaning for them. You must give what will cost you something.”[13] She also often said, “There are no great deeds. Only small deeds done with great love.”

She points us toward the way of what she calls A Simple Path.

The fruit of silence is
prayer.
The fruit of prayer is
faith.
The fruit of faith is
love.
The fruit of love is
service.
The fruit of service is
Peace.[14]

Mother Teresa called herself a pencil in God’s hand. In her faithful yielding to God, she wrote with her life what He intended to demonstrate to a world grown cold. She was able to live and give His transforming love. She also had a winsome but arresting way of enlisting the aid of people to assist her efforts. She would simply ask them: “Would you like to do something beautiful for God?”

Although she had labored in relative obscurity for much of her life, she made the cover of Time magazine in December 1975 with an essay that declared her a living saint. She won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Templeton Prize for Religion. Her story penetrated the conscience of a jaded generation. The respect for her saintliness spread throughout the world, and her order now spans the globe in 139 countries. What began with twelve sisters has grown to 5,600 people, including two orders of brothers and one of priests, who run hospices, homeless shelters, and homes for the mentally ill. It has become one of the largest women’s orders in the Catholic Church worldwide. Although the Missionaries of Charity live in the acute poverty of those they serve, there is no shortage of young women, and now also men, who have joined this order. Their ministry has spread to other countries, including some in the West that did not think of themselves as home to the “poorest of the poor.” But the spread of AIDS, drugs, and the squalor of urban slums in first world countries has spawned pockets of Third-World conditions.

The conditions of poverty in the First World are expressed in two very different ways. Beyond the pockets of material poverty in otherwise affluent cities, there is a quiet, crippling poverty of the soul that is not as visible but every bit as devastating. Spiritual and relational impoverishment are often found in countries that are materially wealthy. Mother Teresa found in First-World countries people who hungered for sustenance at two levels: “the hungry and lonely, not only for food but for the word of God; the thirsty and the ignorant, not only for water but also for knowledge, peace, truth, justice, and love; the naked and unloved, not only for clothes but also for human dignity; the homeless and abandoned, [who yearn] not only for a shelter made of bricks, but for a heart that understands, that covers, that loves.” She expanded the definition of the “least of our brethren” to include “the unwanted, the unborn child, the racially discriminated against.” She reached out to alcoholics and drug addicts, captives “not only in body but also in mind and spirit.” Her heart went out to “all those who have lost all hope and faith in life.”[15]

The Mystery of Spiritual Darkness

One of the greatest mysteries in Mother Teresa’s life is a phenomenon that was almost entirely unknown to others during her lifetime. Only her spiritual directors knew. She suffered from a spiritual darkness that lasted more than forty years, until, as far as we know, her death. This woman whose radiant smile lit up the world around her was in fact walking by faith, and not by sight. Her communication with her spiritual directors in the 1960s, 70s and 80s describe a “darkness and nothingness” that eclipsed her spirit. In her “dark night of the soul” that lasted for nearly four decades, she had an overwhelming thirst for God that caused her great anguish. She likened her suffering to that of souls in Hell, parched for God. She questioned whether He had rejected her. And yet she remained surrendered to Him, and persevered despite all.[16] It was only later that this intense longing for Him became a part of her union with Him. The postulator for her canonization, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, says, “She understood that the darkness she experienced was a mystical participation in Jesus’ sufferings.” She described in her prayer journal the sense of aloneness that Jesus experienced, the pain and darkness that he endured. In being allowed to share in his pain, it gave her a paradoxical joy. She wrote, “Today really I felt a deep joy that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony, but that He wants to go through it in me. More than ever I surrender myself to Him. Yes, more than ever I will be at His disposal.” The interior pain she experienced was acute, and in a moment of unfiltered candor she voiced her cry to God: “When You asked to imprint Your Passion on my heart, is this the answer? If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this, if souls are brought to You, if my suffering satiates Your Thirst–here I am, Lord. With joy I accept all to the end of life and I will smile at Your Hidden Face–always.”[17] In the very deepest sense, she offered up the profound pain of separation from Christ to him as a gift. Fr. Kolodiejchuk concluded, “Seen in this light, the long and painful interior darkness takes on not only new meaning, but also gives the reason for total, even joyful surrender to it.”[18]

Mother Teresa told Malcolm Muggeridge, “Without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. Jesus wanted to help by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony, our death. Only by being one with us has he redeemed us. We are allowed to do the same; all the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed, and we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them, that is, by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.”[19]

Mother Teresa made it a goal of the Missionaries to Charity to “quench the infinite thirst of Jesus on the cross for love and for souls” by doing joy-filled work among the poorest of the poor. One personal hallmark was the undiluted joy that she radiated with a dazzling smile from her whole being. Joy was the one characteristic she insisted on for all those who joined her order. She only wanted women to join her who would radiate joy in their faces and their demeanor, regardless of how trying their circumstances. We know now that the joy she consistently showed was not an easy effervescence. It required an extraordinary resolution of will and a commitment of her whole person to withstand the hardest of trials in extreme poverty, and even a darkness of the spirit, and not to let it show. It is one of the hardest aspects of her life to fathom. And yet she radiated pure joy and the fragrance of Christ wherever she went.

She encourages us to go and do likewise. The Missionaries of Charity often sent a prayer to people by way of thanking them for contributions, however modest. Those that I received in the 1980s came with a hand-typed letter from one of the sisters, obviously written on a manual typewriter. The prayer was this:

Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go.
Flood our souls with your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess our whole being, so utterly,
That our lives may only be a radiance of Yours.
Shine through us, and be so in us,
That every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our soul.
Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus!
Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as You shine;
So to shine as to be a light to others.
The light O Jesus will be all from You, none of it will be ours;
It will be you, shining on others through us.
Let us thus praise You in the way You love best by shining on those around us.
Let us preach You without preaching, not by words but by our example.
By the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do.
The evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to you.

Mother Teresa (now St. Teresa of Calcutta) was canonized by Pope Francis on September 4, 2016. Portions of this essay appeared first in Street Saints: Renewing America’s Cities by Barbara J. Elliott and is republished here with the gracious permission of the author.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Endnotes:

[1] Address of Mother Teresa to National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, D.C. February 4, 1994.

[2] Mother Teresa, Ibid.

[3] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Nov. 28, 2002, part 1A. ZE02112820

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “the Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Nov. 29, 2002, part 1, ZE02112920

[8] Ibid.

[9] Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa–The Spirit and the Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday& Co. 1985), 38.

[10] David Aikman, Great Souls: Six Who Changed a Century (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson 1998), 226.

[11] Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 47.

[12] Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street, 357.

[13] Mother Teresa, A Simple Path, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995) 99.

[14] Ibid 1.

[15] Ibid xxx-xxxi.

[16] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Dec. 19, 2002, part 2. ZE02121922.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Dec. 20, 2002, part 2 concluded ZE02122020.

[19] Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, 49.

Editor’s Note: The featured image is  a photo of President Ronald Reagan presenting Mother Teresa with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony as First Lady Nancy Reagan looks on, 20 June 1985, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Conservative Credo

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The conservative believes that that the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are interrelated, and that all things are measured against these three transcendentals.

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara J. Elliott, as she considers and outlines the framework of Conservatism. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

Conservatism seeks the Truth that has emerged over time, drawing from the deep wellsprings of human experience, and builds anew on foundations that have withstood the tests of time. It fosters order and the flourishing of human beings as they live in relationship with one another. We are united in the eternal contract between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.

Conservatism is rooted in the acknowledgement that God is our Creator and that the human soul sojourns through this realm toward its eternal transcendent fulfillment. We are all flawed human beings in need of redemption, capable of great evil as well as great good.

Because man is fallible by nature, the conservative seeks to limit the damage that can be done through the abuse of power by limiting its concentration.

The conservative fosters the fullness of human potential by protecting the freedom and dignity of each person, acknowledging that responsibility comes with freedom. Rights and duties are always linked.

For the conservative, each man and woman is equal in dignity and equal before the law, but gloriously individual and unequal in talents, aptitudes, and outcomes. The conservative celebrates the uniqueness of individuals and does not level to eliminate differences.

The conservative honors the family as the essential building block of civilization, the house of worship as the locus for forming culture, and the community as the matrix for human interaction. Culture and community grow from relationships and affinities over time, rooted in place. Conservatives value the rich diversity of relationships, organizations, and private associations that make up civil society and intermediary institutions.

The conservative values subsidiarity because we know many of the best solutions to human problems are found at the level closest to the individual person. We foster personal, local care for persons in need, preferably face-to-face with someone whose name we know. We believe that human transformation occurs best in the context of a personal, loving relationship, with accountability, over time.

The conservative is more concerned with the culture than politics, because the political realm is a derivative one, not primary, in human existence. Political problems are at their root moral and spiritual problems, which blend into the economic realm. Political change is rooted in cultural change.

Conservatives believe that caring for our neighbor is so important that it should not be left to the government. The one thing government cannot do is love. That is what we are called to do in the private sector, with our own time, talent, and treasure.

The conservative believes that that the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are interrelated, and that all things are measured against these three transcendentals.

We believe that there is Truth, that it is knowable, and that it is our duty to seek Truth and live it throughout our lives. The conservative believes that the virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance should be practiced in both private and public life. We believe that virtues, not values, define the human soul.

We believe that Love is the highest motivation of the human person and that the purpose of life itself is to know God, to love Him and serve Him, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our ultimate fulfillment is in the transcendence of love.

This was was presented April 15, 2013 in a debate between conservatives and progressives, co-sponsored by the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies of Grand Valley State University and the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

This essay in our series of “Timeless Essays” was first published here in April 2013.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is ” ‘Vanitas’ Still Life” (c. 1665) by Adam Bernaert, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Candles Behind the Wall

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Dr. Barbara J. Elliott remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall, and draws attention to the individuals who, through faith and love, made this momentous event possible. Having interviewed many of those who were imprisoned, beaten, ostracized, and forced underground during the rule of the communist East German regime, Dr. Elliott tells with passion the stories of the triumph of these tireless souls. They were the ones who chased away the darkness with the light of their hope. They were, as Dr. Elliott so aptly puts it, the candles behind the wall.

This address was originally delivered at the Free Enterprise Institute’s 43rd Annual Founders’ Day Breakfast (October 2019).

We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Paul Elmer More and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is a photograph of East Germany students sitting atop the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in front of border guards. The photo belongs to the University of Minnesota Institute of Advanced Studies, and is in the Public Domain.

Why Did the Berlin Wall Fall?

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Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara J. Elliott, as she recounts the series of events and the stories of the faithful souls that were necessary to bring down the Berlin Wall and communist tyranny in Eastern Europe. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic license, one could claim that what took ten years in Poland took ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany, ten days in Czechoslovakia, and ten hours in Romania. A peaceful revolution of unprecedented magnitude rippled across the continent throughout 1989 in a political, moral, and spiritual earthquake that changed the course of history. The rest of the Soviet Union would tumble two years later in the aftershocks. Nearly 400 million people were freed and scarcely a shot was fired. But why?

As it turns out, I was an eyewitness to much of this chapter of history. I experienced East Germany when it was under grim, deadly communist domination in the 1980s. I was an international television correspondent in Europe reporting on Germany and Russia, and stood at the Berlin Wall on the spot where the first victim was killed trying to flee to freedom in the West. I was there in Germany when the Berlin Wall opened up in November 1989 to great jubilation, and I helped people who fled communism start a new life in the West. After the communist regime imploded in Moscow in 1991, I went to Russia to join western efforts to build order in the ashes of the collapsed empire.

Why did communism collapse in the peaceful revolution of 1989-91? If Herodotus were writing the history, he would give several different reports from a variety of sources. In 1989-1991, most people reporting the events gave the accounts listed below. I know these arguments well because I also made them before doing my own research:

1) The economic system of the Soviet Union was breaking down, leading to an implosion.

2) The military buildup of the United States and NATO countries during the Cold War effectively backed down the Soviets, bankrupting them.

3) The extended empire of the Soviets became too large to govern effectively, and it collapsed from its excessive weight and dysfunctionality.

4) It was the triumph of free markets over the command economy: people in Eastern Europe rebelled because they wanted a Western standard of living.

Some people subscribe to the great man theory of history, claiming:

5) Mikhail Gorbachev did it, by allowing new freedoms, which whetted the appetite for more freedoms, which got out of hand.

6) Ronald Reagan did it, by combining forces with Margaret Thatcher.

7) Pope John Paul II did it.

Or there is the explanation that it was all a mistake:

8) The opening of the Berlin Wall was the result of a bungled press conference Günther Schabowski gave on Nov. 9, as he attempted to explain the new travel policy of the very new East German regime.

Or for those who contend great historic events are seldom, if ever, monocausal, we have the answer:

9) All of the above.

The best answer is 9) because all of these factors played a part. But none of these answers explain why tens of thousands of ordinary people suddenly took to their streets in the fall of 1989 to face down armed troops under orders to shoot them. The economic argument falls short because people do not typically risk their lives for a bigger refrigerator or a vacation visa. Nor do any of these theories explain why this revolution, unlike almost all others in history, remained peaceful. Nearly 400 million people were freed, and scarcely a shot was fired. That is definitely not normal. People rose up in rebellion in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary and Poland in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Each time, the uprising was met with Soviet tanks and bullets, as the people seeking freedom were beaten, imprisoned, or killed. These quashed rebellions that ended in bloodshed make the success of the peaceful revolution of 1989 even more astonishing.

I missed the most important part of the story when I was reporting from Europe for American television throughout the mid-80s. But I got a second chance after I got to know people from communist countries by serving them. When the first wave of 300,000 political refugees escaped from the Soviet Union in the late summer of 1989, they surged into West Germany, where I was living at the time. With the opening of the Berlin Wall in November, people from all the East bloc countries flooded into West Germany, far exceeding the capacity of the government or the Red Cross to care for all of them.

It became clear in prayer that I was to go and serve these refugees who had escaped from communism. So one friend and I launched a small private initiative to try to help people arriving near Cologne, who were in thirteen emergency shelters throughout the city. We brought them blankets, coats, and food, tutored their children, and helped parents find a job and a place to live. And we listened. We heard hundreds of stories from people who fled Poland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Many of them had dodged bullets, while carrying their children on their shoulders through the forests, as they fled.

A year later, with the same spiritual clarity, it became clear to me that I was to go to the countries the refugees had fled, to find men and women who had resisted communism, and that I should write about their experiences. So in blind obedience, and I do mean utterly blind, I went to Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and later Russia. Eventually I interviewed 150 people from throughout all the nations of the former Soviet Union, to ask them why they had resisted communism. I listened to people who had been imprisoned, beaten, and tortured, because their convictions did not align with communist ideology. I met the widow and children of Alexander Men, the great Russian Orthodox priest called the “C.S. Lewis of Russia,” who was murdered in 1990. These remarkable people explained to me why they had resisted communism with every fiber of their being.

Many of the political prisoners and leaders of the “peaceful revolution” throughout the former Soviet Union told me that at its core, the resistance to communism went beyond political, economic, and military confrontation to its roots in a moral and spiritual dimension. While certainly not all, or even very many, people who resisted communism were religiously motivated, Christians in significant positions of leadership throughout the entire East Bloc were crucial in keeping this revolution peaceful. Their moral authority had a disproportionate influence on people around them.

The people I interviewed told me that the events of 1989 began a decade earlier in Poland, when the newly elected Pope John Paul II visited his homeland in the sunny summer of 1979. His message was not a political one. Instead, he reminded his countrymen that they were children of God with dignity, rights, and duties that transcended the state. John Paul II reminded the Polish people that their identity was not primarily political, but spiritual. He rose above the political realm to address the Permanent Things. Again and again, Pope John Paul repeated a phrase that was to echo throughout his papacy: “Be not afraid!” Millions of people who crowded the streets grew stronger as they listened. He ignited their courage in such a powerful way that it sent seismic shocks throughout not only Poland, but all the neighboring countries as well. Through the words of Pope John Paul II, people under the communist yoke began to rediscover the source of Truth, reclaiming their courage to give witness to it in their lives.

A handful of moral leaders emerged in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany who, over the coming years, would develop small cells of civil society and a “second culture.” Karol Wojtyla (before he became Pope John Paul II) was certain that the culture was the most important realm to change, and that a healthy culture was the fruit of human souls rooted in faith. He spent his young years as an actor, playwright, and poet, performing Poland’s traditional works to keep the culture alive. As a young priest, he took kayak trips with young couples to talk candidly with them about living their faith vibrantly in a marriage and family. These couples were to become lifelong friends of the future pontiff, while providing him with authentic lifelong friendships with lay people whose spirituality he understood and admired.

To live out the “second culture,” sometimes it was necessary to keep it hidden below the surface. Its members in Poland founded underground newspapers, wrote and performed plays, just as Intellectuals organized a “flying university” to teach in people’s homes, and launched new organizations to focus on about civil liberties. Similar movements sprang up in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany, as well as the Baltic countries. Artists painted and exhibited works of art in traveling shows in private homes, while playwrights like Vaclav Havel talked for hours over littered ashtrays and endless cups of coffee. The goal shared by all of these various people was life free of the communist constraints, free from the “culture of the lie,” a life devoted to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The work of the peaceful revolution was not primarily political in its intention. Instead, the focus was on the pre-political realm, the culture, the human soul and mind. The character that was formed in these cells of civic order began a process of transformation from the inside out in each person, and from the bottom up in the culture in which they lived. They sought Truth in a culture where everyone said something other than what they meant as a matter of survival. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel said communism fostered “the culture of the lie.” These two men spoke the truth, even if the cost was incarceration. Their “no” was a response to a higher and more compelling “yes.”

The Polish theologian Josef Tischner described Solidarnocz as “a huge forest of awakened consciences.” It was an apt metaphor for the entire peaceful revolution that would awaken consciences and summon forth courage across Eastern Europe over the next decade, building cells of civil society and strengthening the character of people with a willingness to stand erect, despite threats and opposition. The leaders who emerged shared the conviction that God exists, that “the culture of the lie” must end, and that there are some things worth dying for.

The collapse of communism came in the Soviet Union because, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “men forgot God.” The central promise of communism was to build an earthly paradise through human efforts, while denying the existence of God. Communism was rooted in Rousseau’s proposition that man’s nature can be changed by his material circumstances to bring about his perfected state. Marx and Engels inhaled the Hegelian vapors of three ascending ages, which were to bring about the perfected state of man. Lenin and Stalin put steel behind the intoxicating vision. If violence was necessary to bring down the upper classes and abolish private property, so be it. The gulag silenced voices of dissent, as did psychiatric prisons and firing squads. In the end, the Soviets killed at least 62 million of their own citizens to quash all resistance. Stalin alone is responsible for at least 40 million of those deaths.

As a former communist who disavowed his earlier convictions, Whittaker Chambers explained: “There were two faiths on trial in the twentieth century: faith in God and faith in man. The communist vision is the vision of man without God.” Many of the people whose faith was in God were exterminated, including the 40,000 priests in Russia who were killed between 1918 and 1940.[1] On a single night in October 1929, three hundred political prisoners were executed in the Solovky camp, many of them bishops who had contributed to the Solovky Memorandum, which articulated their beliefs:

The Church recognizes spiritual principles of existence; communism rejects them. The Church believes in the living God, the Creator of the world, the leader of its life and destinies; communism denies his existence. . . . Such a deep contradiction in the very basis of their Weltanshauungen precludes any intrinsic approximation of reconciliation between the Church and state, as there cannot be any between affirmation and negation  . . . because the very soul of the Church, the condition of her existence and the sense of her being, is that which is categorically denied by communism.[2]

While the first phase of the Russian Revolution killed the country’s aristocracy, the next phase attempted to eradicate the spiritual nobility. The Cheka, the predecessor of the KGB, in a 1921 document spelled out its intentions to “corrupt the church from within,” because the communists knew that resistance fed by religious faith posed a genuine threat to them.[3]

Citizens were imprisoned for owning books such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the possession of which merited a one-year in prison sentence in East Germany. In Russia, writing poetry that mentioned God, as in the poems of Irina Ratushinskaya, resulted in seven years of imprisonment that nearly killed her before she was released in a prisoner exchange before the Reykjavik arms talks between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Nikolai Saburov cheerfully went to prison in Russia for smuggling Bibles from the West and printing copies on homemade samizdat (self-made) presses made from parts of washing machines and bicycles. Each time he was released from his three-year prison term, he printed more Bibles, only to be arrested and imprisoned again.

Merely declining to swear allegiance to the communist party was dangerous. A brilliant student of economics, Anatoly Rudenko, was sent to a psychiatric prison after he refused to join Komsomol, the communist youth organization, at two universities. Anatoly would not swear allegiance to the communist party because it was atheistic, and he had become a Christian. By Soviet logic, he must have been “insane” because he did not believe the communist ideology he had been taught in their schools. Anatoly was arrested and put into a psychiatric prison where perfectly sane people entered and were filled with drugs that made them drool, roll imaginary balls with their fingers, and hallucinate. Some were injected with a solution that would instantly and painfully raise the body temperature to 105 degrees, damaging brain tissue irrevocably. It was only because the Baptist Union of the USA insisted on the release of a fellow Baptist that Anatoly was spared the fate of the other prisoners unraveling all around him.

In Leipzig, East Germany, in October, 1989, armed with nothing but small candles and prayer, courageous people faced down armed troops under orders to shoot them. Beginning seven years earlier, Lutheran Pastor Christian Führer had invited people to the Nikolaikirche for the Friedensgebete Monday afternoon at five to pray for peaceful change in East Germany. What began with a handful of people sometimes dwindled to one or two, but Pastor Führer continued undeterred for the next seven years. In 1989, the group began to swell, gaining strength of hundreds in the spring, then thousands in the summer, until the communist officials were apoplectic in September. They asked each other “How many people can we shoot at once?”

On October 9, 1989, tanks rolled into Leipzig, along with water cannons, attack dogs, and several thousand soldiers and military police in riot gear. The Leipzig newspaper had warned the day before that any insurrection would be put down “if necessary, with a weapon in hand.” Thousands of pints of blood were flown into Leipzig’s hospitals and surgeons were put on alert to treat the expected shooting victims. Parents were urged to pick up their young children from school early, to avoid a bloodbath in the city. Despite these ominous preparations, 70,000 ashen-faced people took to the streets on that Monday. Leipzig threatened to erupt into civil war. Hundreds of members of the communist party squeezed into the pews to prevent legitimate protesters from being seated in the Nikolaikirche. Outside the walls of the church, ashen-faced people filled the streets for blocks in all directions. Despite panicked warnings, Pastor Christian Führer began the service at the stroke of five with the church packed to overflowing and opened with the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

As the final benediction was given, Christian Führer says that a palpable presence of the Holy Spirit descended on this fearful mass of people, most of whom were not practicing Christians. The pastor described it this way: ”The spirit of Christ, the spirit of non-violence and renewal fell on the masses, moved the people deeply and became a tangible force of peace. It was like the Book of Acts when the Holy Spirit fell on Cornelius and his household. This is something quite remarkable because these people were mostly not Christians. And yet the people behaved then as if they had grown up with the Sermon on the Mount.”[4]

In this spirit of peace and courage, the people grabbed each other’s elbows and held small candles as they walked out of the church. The power was contagious and what had been an amorphous mass of frightened people became a purposeful phalanx walking out of the church into the city. The young military draftees outside nervously held their weapons, hoping they would not be ordered to fire into the crowd, knowing that if they refused, they themselves would be shot from behind. The demonstrators looked the soldiers in the eye and began the march on the wide street that ringed the center of Leipzig.

Nineteen-year-old Raphaela Russ remembers, “With amazing composure the mass began to move, past the curious onlookers who hemmed the edges of the streets, past the mobilized security forces, past the barking dogs in the narrow streets and alleyways.”[5] As they marched past tanks and water cannons, some chanted “keine Gewalt” (no violence) while others thwarted provocateurs planted by the Stasi, encircling them to remove stones from their hands. A human chain protected the Stasi building and no one smashed even one window of their headquarters. Despite justified frustration at forty years of repression, no one so much as knocked the hat off a soldier. Although the troops had live ammunition, not one of the 70,000 people demonstrating provided provocation for the soldiers to open fire. At the end of this very tense evening, the forces for peaceful change had won. Christian Führer said, “The soldiers were prepared for everything except candles and prayer.” He was astonished at the outcome, saying “We were just grateful for the role God let us play in this amazing drama. It certainly was not the few Christians among us. God wrote history that night.”

After the television coverage of this extraordinary event, demonstrations like the one in Leipzig spread to cities all across East Germany. The East German communist party unceremoniously dumped Erich Honecker as its standard bearer, replacing him with Egon Krenz. Committees scrambled to meet the demands of hundreds of thousands on the streets, who spoke through the banners they carried. They wanted the freedom to refuse military service with a weapon aimed at fellow Germans. They wanted the freedom to travel, to speak freely, and to buy goods from the West. And hundreds of thousands of them took to the streets all over East Germany throughout October and early November. The evening of November 9, Günther Schabowski came out of a meeting and read a statement about new policies for granting visas to cross the wall, which journalists pounced on. “When does that take effect?” one asked. Schabowski fumbled and said he guessed it meant immediately. The journalists went into a frenzy and immediately began broadcasting.

Anyone who heard the radio reports that any East German could get a travel visa the same day ran out of their house in their pajamas and headed for the Berlin Wall. Wild lines of Trabis, the little unreliable cars made in East Germany, snaked up to the border honking in a chaotic chorus. Hordes of people on foot mobbed the cross-points, where the border guards were overwhelmed and uncertain what to do. Their superiors didn’t believe what they were being told on the phone. More people swarmed the gates. Finally the border guards just shoved their caps back and lifted the barriers to let the tidal wave of people pass through. Families that had been separated for forty years ran to embrace each other, showered in champagne, flowers, and tears. Young people scaled the wall and danced on it. No one, I repeat no one, knew or even suspected that the Berlin Wall would open then. The East German regime didn’t even intend to open it.

That is the natural explanation. Here is the supernatural one. That same night, November 9th, people gathered at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig once again. This time it was a silent march through the city to commemorate the 51st anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of violence against the Jews before World War II began. As these Germans walked through Leipzig, they asked God’s forgiveness for the violence the Nazis had committed against the Jewish people. As they prayed and walked around the city of Leipzig for the seventh time, the Berlin Wall opened unexpectedly and the communist regime fell with a crash as resounding as that of the walls of Jericho.

Throughout 1989, the people once dominated by the Soviets were throwing off their shackles, daring to live as if they were free. Poland had already held its first free elections in June, while Hungary had literally snipped the barbed wire on the border in May, asserting its independence from Moscow. Czechoslovakia staged its fantastic Velvet Revolution later in November, ejecting communist leaders with swift dispatch in merely two weeks. Romanians toppled Ceausescu in December, in a swift revolt that lasted only hours. Theirs was the only violent chapter of the otherwise peaceful revolution of 1989. In October, 1990, East and West Germany were reunited, cementing the new relationship of sovereignty free from the Russians. All the former Soviet satellites were exploring alliances with the West.

Disappointed Soviet hardliners concluded Mr. Gorbachev had been too soft, and they attempted a coup in Moscow in August of 1991. The natural explanation is that they failed to convince enough others. The supernatural explanation is more complicated. Here is what several people who were participants in the resistance told me. Three Christians took a shipment of Bibles they had received the previous night from America. Leading them was Fr. Alexander Borisov, who had recently been elected to the Moscow City Council, a man of proven character who had been blocked from ordination for fifteen years because he refused to share information about his congregation with the KGB. Anatoly Rudenko, who had been released from the psychiatric prison, was passing out Bibles to the tank drivers sent to put down the demonstrations. He was joined by Shirinai Dossova, a Muslim convert to Christianity, who went right up to the tanks and pounded on the sides of them until a baffled driver popped open the top of the tank in exasperation to say “What?” She handed the tank driver a Bible and said, “It says here not to kill. Are you going to kill me?” And she put herself squarely in front of the tank and looked him in the eye. Her courage overcame the tank driver’s willingness to fire. Another Christian dissident met them there. Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Christian dissident who had been incarcerated for eight and a half years in Soviet prisons, formed a human chain around the Russian White House, where the beleaguered parliament was locked in, expecting to be crushed by tanks and bullets any moment. Alexander, Anatoly, Shirinai, and Fr. Borisov mustered the courage to stand and resist the tanks and military forces, inspiring others to join them. They stood vigil, praying through the night. People were being baptized, kneeling to pray. The members of the newly elected Russian Parliament, the Duma, waited tensely inside the Russian “White House,” defended only with a handful of pistols among them. Those I interviewed told me they were certain that they would be crushed by the military any moment. But as the night wore on, a strangely opaque fog settled in, shrouding the Parliament’s building from visibility. The helicopters intending to attack could not see to land. And at the same time, the military personnel on the ground refused orders to roll their tanks over the bodies of the human chain of private citizens defending the Russian parliament. When the morning finally dawned, much to everyone’s surprise, the forces of peace had won this battle, too. Four people had been killed. The choir from Fr. Boris’s church sang to mourn their deaths and celebrate the victory. He preached from a balcony above the square.

After the failure of the attempted coup in Russia, the aftershocks of the political and moral earthquake shattered the remaining shell of the communist hierarchy. The desire for freedom had been swelling in Ukraine and the Baltic countries as well, drawing people to the streets of Estonia to sing traditional songs from their pre-communist past in what came to be called the “Singing Revolution.” Citizens of Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine had all staged demonstrations by this time, and there were no consequences for protesters. By December, the remaining hull of the Soviet empire heaved, groaned, and crashed. Aside from a few fossilized hardliners, it seemed there were no more true believers in the utopia communism had promised. Of course, the old communists just got new business cards and started doing business with the West. The difficulties in Russia since indicate that its people may have entered their “wilderness years,” just as the Israelites were forced to wander forty years in the desert to unlearn the traits of slavery from Egypt.

The college students I teach now were all born after the Berlin Wall fell. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union was so recent that most students have not covered that era in world history. They do not know that the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was real. But considering the magnitude of the communist menace, which dominated US and European foreign policy for half a century, it is a dangerous blind spot when students conclude today that “communism is a good idea, as a concept,” as two blithely remarked to me not long ago. Many of the people who lived under communist regimes would vehemently disagree with them.

The bloodiest century ever proved that modern totalitarian governments are utterly deadly killing machines. But big numbers tend to wash over us with little impact—millions, billions, whatever. Perhaps this will put the numbers in perspective. Starting as far back as humans have kept records, in 4000 BC, and tallying up to 1987, some 133 million people were killed worldwide. But in one century, the 20th century alone, 207.5 million people were killed, well beyond all the people killed in all previous centuries together.[6] But the truly stunning number is this: 169 million people were killed by their own governments.[7] Let that sink in for a moment. These people who died were ordinary citizens, not soldiers fighting other soldiers in wars, but 169 million victims of totalitarian regimes that systematically killed their own people.[8]

  • The Nazis killed 21 million
  • Communist China killed at least 35 million
  • The Soviet Union killed approximately 62 million

Stalin alone was responsible for 42 million of those deaths, making him the biggest killer of all time.

Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago gives some of the best inside reporting on Soviet prisons. There were executions by firing squads, freezing isolated prison cells, beatings with truncheons, water hoses, rapes, and mass graves. And to flesh out the story, anyone can now check the massive records compiled by the Stasi, Securitate, KGB, and the secret police in every communist country. Nothing worked very well under communism, except the secret police, who amassed detailed information from neighbors, relatives, co-workers, and informants in every neighborhood and organization. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that someone isn’t out to get you.

The bloodbath in China’s Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989, where tanks rolled and bullets hailed down on protesters, was a grim reminder that there was nothing inevitable about success in resisting communism. It almost always ends in massive bloodshed. The uprisings in the “Arab Spring” toppled leaders but failed to produce lasting order. Why was 1989 in Eastern Europe different? I think the answer lies in the response of the Solidarnosc priest, Jerzy Popiełuszko, who was murdered in 1984 by Polish security officials. They beat him to death, bound his body with chains, and dragged his body to dump it into the Vistula River. Before he died, this priest and martyr preached to his countrymen, “We must overcome evil with good.”

No other response to the evil of communism could be sufficient. But if we take this hard-won legacy so lightly that we do not teach our own young people about these events that took place in 1989, we are not worthy of the sacrifice of 169 million innocent lives taken by totalitarianism. We in the West should not be too self-congratulatory, Solzhenitsyn warned us, because we are none too healthy ourselves. To the extent that the West has lost the moral core necessary for self-governance, we are at risk of losing everything. As one astute young East German woman put it shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, “We knew that Marx was a false god. But we don’t want to worship the golden calf of the West, either.” The danger we face in America is the golden calf we have made for ourselves, which we worship in our modern temples of consumerism. We, too, must overcome evil with good. No other response will be adequate.

I only hope in moments of trial to remember the remarkable courage and integrity of the unsung heroes whose faith shattered communism. Their souls were luminous– and as uncompromising as diamonds.

This essay in our series of “Timeless Essays” was first published here in July 2019.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics as we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Notes:

[1] Hill, Kent The Soviet Union on the Brink: An Inside Look at Christianity and Glasnost, Multnomah Press, 1991, 84.

[2] Quoted in The Soviet Union on the Brink, 76-77.

[3] Vyacheslav Polosin, “The Eternal Slave of the Cheka,” Izvestiia, Jan. 22, 1992.

[4] Author’s interview with Christian Führer in Leipzig Feb. 28, 1991.

[5] Raphaela Russ “…wenn es sein muss, mit der Waffe in der Hand!” Die Revolution der Kerzen: Christen in den Umwälzungen der DDR, ed. Jörg Swoboda (Wuppertal: Oncken Verlag, 1990) 144.

[6] These numbers are drawn from The Black Book of Communism, Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and R.J. Rummel’s Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH, which aggregates all of these sources.

[7] Some estimates put this total at 262 million.

[8] These numbers are drawn from The Black Book of Communism, Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. R.J. Rummel at Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH puts the number of killings by the Chinese in the 20th century at 76 million.

The featured image is a photograph of East and West Germans converging at the newly created opening in the Berlin Wall beside the Brandenburg Gate, taken on December 21, 1989, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.


John Paul II & the Spiritual Victory Over Communism

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It might be tempting to characterize Pope John Paul II as the political foe who vanquished communism. But that would be untrue. His position challenged communism in the metaphysical realm, not in the political arena. He understood that the error of communism lay in its fundamental understanding of man, who is not merely a unit of labor engaged in a perpetual class struggle, but a creature made in the image of God, with a soul and an eternal destiny.

With a soul forged in the crucible of conflict, St. John Paul II was uniquely prepared to confront communism. Poland lost World War II twice, first to the Nazis, and then to the communists; as a boy, Karol Wojtyła lived under the oppression of both. Long before he became Pope, Karol Wojtyła had concluded that the conflict with communism was ultimately a conflict in the realm of the spirit. Communism is unambiguously atheistic. Its premise is that man is a unit of labor, engaged in a class struggle which, after a bloody revolution, promises to produce a new man, perfected by political means. It promises the Beatific Vision, stripped of transcendence. Karol Wojtyła knew that man is made in the image of God, created for a purposeful life on earth, with an eternal destiny. Pope John Paul II lit a long spiritual fuse in Poland in 1979 which would burn for ten years across central and eastern Europe, exploding beneath the Berlin Wall in 1989. The aftershocks of this spiritual, moral, and political earthquake toppled the remaining shell of the Soviet Union in 1991.[1] While Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia and President Ronald Reagan in America played crucial political and military roles in these events, Pope John Paul II was the spiritual leader of this Peaceful Revolution that shattered communism, freeing 400 million people.

From an early age, Karol Wojtyła learned that heroic courage was necessary to survive totalitarianism. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, his friends, both Jewish and Christian, disappeared as they stole through the dark streets of Warsaw to perform plays, Wojtyła had written. To become a priest, the only option was to join a clandestine seminary. Wojtyła experienced the personal courage of Archbishop Adam Sapieha, who at great risk to himself concealed his seminarians in his own residence. If any had been discovered, both he and they would have been shot on the spot. In fact, several of Wojtyła’s classmates were gunned down on the streets of Warsaw. Primate Stefan Wyszyński, another pillar of courage, refused to yield the authority to select priests for ordination, when the communists attempted to wrest this away from the Catholic Church in Poland. All the other communist countries had capitulated. Wyszyński was imprisoned for three years, rather than yield an inch. These demonstrations of spiritual fortitude shaped Wojtyła as a young priest. But he could not have imagined that he would be chosen in 1978 to head the Catholic Church as the Vicar of Christ. His election as Pope surprised everyone, including himself.

Pope John Paul II’s first visit to his homeland Poland in June of 1979 was a pivotal event: nine days that would change the world.[2] Victory Square in Warsaw was transformed from a secular space to a sacred one when the people erected a fifty-foot cross and constructed a raised altar where the Pope would celebrate Mass. Colored bunting waved above the square and festooned nearly every window in the city. Warsaw was filled to overflowing with three million people pressing in from every street to try to get a glimpse of the Pope. From a hotel window high above the square, the Polish Communist Party leader Edward Gierek looked on nervously. What would the Pope say? What could he say?

Pope John Paul II told the people that his pilgrimage honored St. Stanislaus, who had died defending the Church in Poland. His death and their lives are all part of the pilgrimage that Poles were making through the history of the Church, the Pope explained. Just as Christ sent the apostles to be witnesses, has not “Poland become now a land of particularly responsible witness?” he asked the people.[3] They all knew that for 123 years, Poland had vanished from the maps of Europe, carved up by her aggressive neighbors. The Polish people had clung to their Catholic faith as the sole source of their identity, and they had been resurrected as a nation. The Pope asked them now: Is this not a fitting place “to proclaim Christ with singular humility but also with conviction? . . . To read again the witness of his Cross and his Resurrection?”[4] Then he challenged them: “But if we accept all that I have dared to affirm in this moment, how many great duties and obligations arise? Are we capable of them?”[5]

The implications of what the Pope was saying began to sink in. The people grasped the importance of this moment in history, in this nation of Poland, as a witness to Christ. The Pope was challenging them to affirm their faith, here and now. A ripple of applause swept through the square, then another even stronger—then applause erupted into waves that grew thunderous, as hundreds of thousands of witnesses gave this sign of their faith. The Pope did not attempt to continue with his message but stood with his hand upheld as an affirmation of the people. Together they recognized the significance of this cathartic expression in a country where the communist regime had prohibited any overt public manifestation of their faith in Christ. For a full fourteen minutes, the people applauded and cheered. Some chanted, “We want God! We want God in our schools! We want God in the family! We want God in books! We want God! We want God!”[6]

“The people are preaching with me,” said the Pope, with a smile. “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe,” he continued. “The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland. And the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ. In Him it becomes the history of salvation.”[7] As the Pope concluded, he prayed:

I cry from all the depths of this Millennium,
I cry on the vigil of Pentecost:
Let your Spirit descend,
Let your Spirit descend,
And renew the face of the earth,
The face of this land.[8]

The Holy Spirit descended on Poland at that moment as a palpable fire that would ignite the nation.

***

During that evening’s visit with President Henryk Jabłoński and party leader Edward Gierek, the Pope told them that a nation has the right to formation of its own culture and civilization and that he would be watching them for any infringement on the autonomy of the Polish people and their culture. He warned them that he would report any violations of human rights. It was only the first day of the Pope’s homecoming, and it was already clear who had the upper hand. The Polish people were now remembering their identity as a Catholic nation at the core, with a communist government that had strapped itself on their back.[9]

John Paul II could not visit Poland without returning to visit his beloved “Black Madonna of Częstochowa,” the icon of the Virgin Mary in the Jasna Góra Monastery, whose protective powers were credited with thwarting military attacks and providing gifts of healing and solace to pilgrims. The name “Black Madonna” came from the tempera and wax with which this icon of Mary was painted in the first century, now mingled with centuries of soot from candles burned beneath her, which had rendered the image inextricably blackened by the loving homage. Karol Wojtyła’s father had brought his nine-year-old son to her when the boy’s mother died, telling Karol, “Your earthly mother has left you, but this mother will never leave you.”[10] The boy had returned often to pray fervently for direction in his life.

On this visit, the newly elected Pope met at Jasna Góra Monastery with all the Polish bishops, to whom he pointed out Poland’s unique place in modern history, as an example of extreme suffering inflicted by ideological aggression. As a bishop, Karol Wojtyła had seen the problems of modern Church and their universal dimensions.[11] But Poland had been unique in its response: “Faced with that crisis of humanism in an acute form, Poland had responded by intensifying its Christian faith. This was a lesson with resonance beyond Poland’s borders.”[12] At the deepest level, the source of ethics is what binds a culture together, he told them, and the shared “spiritual genealogy” is what makes Europe cohesive, not economic or political systems. Without ever mentioning the word “Yalta,” the Pope soared above the post-1945 division of Europe and the Iron Curtain, affirming the transcendent unity of all Europeans in the Christian heritage they share. This affirmation of the spiritual unity that transcends borders and political authority was bold.

On the final day of the Pope’s first pilgrimage to Poland, he addressed more than one million of his countrymen who had gathered across the open plain of the Krakow Commons. To this wildly enthusiastic crowd he preached on the Great Commission that Christ gave his disciples. “You are receiving a new anointing of the Holy Spirit” the Pope told them, “and are being sent out to make disciples in your country.”[13] He cautioned his countrymen to temper their enthusiasm with prudence. “[T]he future of Poland will depend on how many people are mature enough to be nonconformist,” he said, emphasizing the word “mature.”[14] In every talk throughout his pilgrimage, the Pope had emphasized dignity and restraint as necessary qualities for followers of Christ. This message was received and understood.

As the Pope reluctantly said goodbye, he wiped away tears. Many of his countrymen did the same.

***

For nine days, the entire nation of Poland had suspended its normal life to be spiritually taught and transformed. One third of the nation, thirteen million people, saw the Pope in person and virtually everyone else saw him on television or heard him on the radio. His message lifted up the people of Poland and called forth the memory of their authentic history, culture, and identity. The Polish people heard and remembered who they really were. By bringing millions of these people together publicly, the Pope gave them courage and dispersed the rule of fear and terror. Bogdan Szajkowski, a Polish political scientist, described the phenomenon of the Pope’s visit as a “psychological earthquake, an opportunity for mass political catharsis.”[15] Adam Michnik, a prominent dissident and non-Catholic, characterized the experience as “a great lesson in dignity.”[16] He was struck by the way the Pope had spoken compellingly to believers and nonbelievers alike, appealing to their “ethos of sacrifice, in whose name our grandfathers never stopped fighting for national human dignity.”[17] John Paul II had called for a thoroughgoing moral renewal without even mentioning the communists. Instead, he pointed the people toward a deeper moral level to recognize that they would be culpable if they were to allow their country to continue as it was.[18]

The Polish theologian Józef Tischner declared that “revolution is an occurrence in the realm of the spirit.”[19] This was indeed the first hour of the Peaceful Revolution. After scarcely seven months in the Holy See, John Paul II’s message of truth, dignity, and restraint lit a long fuse in Poland that would burn brightly, igniting neighboring countries to spread throughout the entire East Bloc. In ten years, it would detonate beneath the Berlin Wall. As George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II put it, “These nine days in June 1979 were when the twentieth century turned.”[20]

***

Word of the Pope’s remarkable visit traveled around the globe, to the delight of many people and the dismay of others. People in the neighboring communist countries watched in astonishment as the enormous crowds gathered in Poland and were not dispersed by Soviet bullets and tanks. The 1953 protests in East Germany, uprisings in Hungary in 1956, and the Czechoslovakia in 1968, had all ended in bloodshed when the Russians crushed the resistance. But if millions of Polish people could gather openly like this in 1979, could it be possible in other countries as well? Since these events in Poland were religious gatherings and not political protests, and because they had remained peaceful, the communist leaders had not found sufficient provocation to crush them. But the Russians uneasily watched for any signs of losing their grip across the East Bloc, especially in Poland, where unwelcome change had been unleashed.

One of the manifestations of this change in Poland was the birth of Solidarność, or Solidarity, the labor movement that galvanized workers across the nation. In August 1980, shipyard workers in Gdansk rallied behind a handful of workers unfairly dismissed from their jobs and went on strike. This sparked resistance that blazed into brushfires across Poland, quickly growing into a popular movement that called for rights for workers and limitation on the communist powers. The Pope’s visit had brought together workers, intellectuals and theologians in the Catholic Church, who discovered they were all committed to the higher vision John Paul II had articulated. After being tutored in the language of civil discourse by the Pope, they found that they could speak to one another across class differences and sustain disagreements in opinion without becoming disagreeable. The workers of Solidarity invited in these intellectuals and theologians to help them articulate their demands in the Gdansk strike and think through a broader vision of a just society. They also invited priests to come and celebrate Mass and hear confessions, nurturing the religious roots of their movement.

As the strikes spread across the country, the scope of the demands by the strike committee broadened as well, becoming a veritable Bill of Rights for workers. By its own definition, Solidarity’s vision was primarily a moral one. As Lech Wałesa, the leader of Solidarity put it, “What we had in mind was not only bread, butter, and sausage but also justice, democracy, truth, legality, human dignity, freedom of convictions, and the repair of the republic.”[21] When it appeared that the Polish regime was deadlocked with Solidarity, John Paul II gently but firmly intervened, speaking on Vatican Radio to support responsible efforts of the workers to bring peace and justice to Poland. After an 18-day standoff, Solidarity won agreement in Gdansk for their demands: freedom of speech, freedom of the press and independent publications, religious freedom, access to mass media, release of political prisoners, prohibition of reprisals for religious beliefs, transparent public information on the socio-economic situation, and the right for all groups to participate in discussions on reform. With this agreement, they blew a hole in the Iron Curtain. In September, delegates from throughout Poland streamed into the organizational meeting of the new national union, which signed up three million members in the first three days. As Solidarity’s numbers and influence blazed high, the communists were truly alarmed—not only in Poland, but also in Russia.

In December 1980, Moscow called for “radical steps” to end the “anti-Soviet activity” in Poland.[22] The Kremlin was fed up with the Polish insurrection and was prepared to put it down by force. American satellite images from above showed clearly the tanks and troops massing on Poland’s eastern border. A mole conveyed crucial information to the Americans: Col. Ryszard Kukliński, a high-ranking member of the Polish Defense Ministry who served as an aide to Gen. Jaruzelski in Poland and liaison to the Soviet commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact Joint Command, was incensed by what the Russians had done to his country. At great personal danger, he had been conveying information to the American leadership, confirming now that a massive invasion was meticulously planned. He reported that a “two-day campaign was to move into Poland with more than a dozen Soviet divisions, two Czech divisions, and an East German division, followed by nine more Soviet divisions the next day.”[23] Solidarity’s leadership was to be court martialed and executed by firing squad.

The Pope was well informed on these plans by a number of sources, and he immediately took action, writing a personal letter to Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, imploring him not to invade. The Pope also contacted Solidarity and urged them to show restraint. The United States factored into the equation, with newly elected Ronald Reagan, a staunch anti-communist, taking office as President in a month. According to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, outgoing President Jimmy Carter sent a message to the Russians through the hotline that an invasion of Poland would evoke a strong response from the United States. India’s Indira Gandhi, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and French President Giscard d’Estaing all joined the US in strongly urging the Soviets not to invade Poland. At the brink of the Warsaw Pact invasion planned for December 8, 1980, Russia backed down, presumably because of these voices. So the Russians decided to use other means.

***

In Rome on May 13, 1981, while riding through St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Bulgarian operative. The trained assassin had been waiting all day for his chance. He used a semiautomatic handgun, firing four bullets at close range, hitting the Pope in his hand and abdomen. The Pope collapsed into the arms of his aides, while a tough nun tackled the assassin, thwarting his attempted escape. As the ambulance rushed through Rome’s crowded streets, Fr. Stanisław Dziwsz administered last rites to the bleeding Pope. The attending physician said the bullet that cut through the abdomen missed his main abdominal vein by five or six millimeters. Had that vein been severed, the Pope would have bled to death in five minutes. When the bullet hit the Pope’s finger, its trajectory was deflected, so that it narrowly missed damaging his spinal cord and paralyzing him from the waist down. The Pope later said, “One hand aimed the bullet, and another guided it.”[24]

It is inconceivable that a Bulgarian assassin would have dared to undertake such a crime alone. Several subsequent investigations unearthed trails of evidence leading back to the Kremlin. George Weigel, the biographer of the Pope, writes:

By fall of 1979, Yuri Andropov, the highly intelligent, ruthless head of the KGB had concluded that John Paul II was a grave threat to the Soviet system both internally and in the external Soviet empire. And we know that the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party issued a decree on November 13, 1979 authorizing the use of all available means to forestall the effects of John Paul’s policy of challenging Soviet human rights violations.[25]

The KGB was given a written directive to embark on active measures in the West to counteract the effects of John Paul II.[26] Shortly after that November decree, the assassin Mehmet Ali Agca somehow escaped from a Turkish military prison and showed up for training in a Syrian camp run by Soviet bloc intelligence services. After meeting with a Soviet intelligence officer, he was taken to a luxury hotel in Bulgaria, courtesy of Bulgarian secret services. He later went to Zurich, apparently to work out the final details for the assassination, which was planned for May 13, 1981.[27] According to historian Andrzej Grajewski, the decree of November 1979, together with the directive to the KGB, indicate “the Soviet political leadership and the Soviet intelligence considered the Pope the single greatest threat to their position.”[28]

Did the Russians give the order to murder the Pope? James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, says there was an “extraordinarily high” likelihood that the Bulgarians took their orders from Moscow. “That they would undertake it on their own is almost unimaginable,” he says.[29] As CIA Director, William Casey authorized an investigation which produced a highly classified report. According to a person who has read it, the report concludes that the Soviets ordered the assassination of the Pope.[30] In 2006, a special commission of the Italian Parliament concluded “beyond any reasonable doubt” that “the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope John Paul II.”[31] Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning author on communism, agrees without reservation. “Of course, they tried to assassinate him,” she says. “They understood exactly how dangerous he was as an ideological force.”[32] Applebaum concludes, “The fact that the Soviet Union tried to assassinate John Paul II through the mechanism of a Bulgarian assassin tells you exactly how frightened of him they were.”[33]

***

Having failed to decapitate the spiritual leader of the Polish resistance, the Soviet leaders put the screws to Poland’s leader to put down Solidarity with force. If he would not, they would, the Russians threatened. General Wojciech Jaruzelski began making plans in the summer of 1981 to declare martial law.[34] The plan was to liquidate Solidarity in a swift clampdown, imprisoning or executing all the leaders of the movement throughout the country. In the middle of the icy, frozen night of December 13, 1981, Polish military forces were turned on their own citizens. Military troops sealed the country’s borders, cut all communication with the outside world, and put up roadblocks on all major thoroughfares. Soldiers swooped in to arrest Solidarity activists, imprisoning 5,000 of them in one night.

The next day, President Ronald Reagan called Pope John Paul II to ask him how the US could best help. Because the communists controlled all the communications networks and printing presses throughout Poland, Solidarity members needed ways to communicate with each other and to inform the people of Poland. Facilitating communication was one tangible thing the US could do for the Polish people. Through clandestine means, US fax machines began to turn up all over Poland, which in the early 80s were a breakthrough in technology. These allowed the members of Solidarity communicate with each other quickly, without interference. Solidarity sympathizers in the US sent copiers to the Vatican, which could get them to the Polish people. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz tells the story that William Casey stepped in to provide $90,000 from his personal bank account to buy printing presses for Poland via a bank transfer in London.[35] Although Casey headed the CIA and the Reagan Administration was committed to helping Solidarity, the institutional drag was impeding progress to supply these through the agency. So Casey provided the funds from his own bank account and asked his son-in-law Owen Smith to arrange to have the printing presses delivered to the Vatican. “The Holy Father will know exactly what to do with them,” he told Smith.[36]

Solidarity was forced to go underground. Activists who had escaped imprisonment assumed new names and identities and wore disguises when they went out. Between December 13, 1981 and March 1985, seventy-eight people reportedly died at the hands of the Polish police and secret service. One of them was a priest—Father Jerzy Popiełuszko—who had become the spiritual face of the Solidarity movement. The workers thronged to hear him and to attend Masses he offered in their shipyards. He fearlessly told crowds that when the authorities were in the wrong, “defiance of authority was an obligation of the heart, of religion, manhood, and nationhood.”[37] But he advocated nonviolent resistance, urging the people to “overcome evil with good.” He was monitored, interrogated, and threatened with violence, but he continued. “Stand fast to the end,” he preached, “just as the apostles did—even unto death.” In his last Mass, Fr. Popiełuszko prayed for the people to be free from fear but also from the desire for revenge.[38] That night, Polish secret police stopped his car, beat him to death, bound his body in chains, and dumped it into the Vistula River.

Father Popiełuzsko’s body was recovered eleven days later. His funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. There, the weeping crowd repeated with the priests, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And then again: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Three times they spontaneously repeated that line, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive. . . .”[39] This response to the murderers was one manifestation of the spiritual maturity the people of Poland had achieved.
When Pope John Paul II came to Poland for the burial of Father Popiełuzsko, he knelt at the marble slab marking the grave of this new martyr and wept.

***

From the exuberant first visit of John Paul II as Pope to the violent murder of Fr. Popiełuszko, the people of Poland had experienced the joyful mysteries and the sorrowful mysteries of Our Lady of Częstochowa, but their journey was not over yet. In this confrontation with communism, the character of the Polish people was being forged. Just as the young Karol Wojtyła was shaped by his experience of totalitarianism under the Nazi occupation and then under the iron fist of the communists, his countrymen were now developing fortitude in their faith. Pope John Paul II visited Poland several more times during the time of martial law. The harsh clampdown prevented huge crowds like those of his first visit. But his love and encouragement bolstered up his people, nevertheless. He raised his voice on violations of human rights, shining the bright light of inquiry on people who had been silenced. Together, the Pope and international leaders successfully obtained the freedom of a significant number of political prisoners.

The Polish people kept the vision alive, producing clandestine journals, newspapers, books, plays, and works of art. They cheerfully exchanged their works across the borders with their neighbors. Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Polish, and East German intellectuals and theologians continued the conversation about creating a free and just society, with a commitment to nonviolent resistance. They eagerly read the samizdat [40] copies of Solzhenitsyn’s books and Václav Havel’s plays, as well as the encyclicals of John Paul II. In each of these countries, a small group of people served as a spiritual sparkplug for nonviolent resistance to communism. In Czechoslovakia, the Catholic Church had been particularly brutally persecuted, but Václav Benda and Fr. Václav Maly spearheaded the movement that included the playwright Václav Havel, and Augustin Návratil, who collected thousands of signatures to petition for religious freedom.

In East Germany, a Lutheran pastor named Christian Führer began in 1983 to gather people in the Nikolaikirche (Nicholas Church) in Leipzig every Monday at five o’clock to pray for peaceful change in their country. For the next seven years, people gathered here for Friedensgebete, Prayers for Peace, becoming the spiritual sparkplug of the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany.[41] This group grew from a handful of people to 70,000 on October 9, 1989, when they marched on the streets armed only with candles and prayer to face down armed troops under orders to shoot them. Thousands of units of blood had been flown in to treat the expected shooting victims. Parents were warned to pick up their children early from school because gunfire was expected. Ashen-faced people begged Pastor Führer to cancel the prayer service to avoid civil war. Leipzig was a powder keg ready to ignite with a spark. Forty thousand troops were deployed throughout the city, as well as tanks, water cannons, and attack dogs. But Pastor Führer did not back down. He began the service promptly at five o’clock. The crowd overflowed into the streets, where through speakers, the people heard the Beatitudes—“Blessed are the peacemakers”—followed by the petitions of the people, and prayers for all the countries struggling under communism. Then the people in the Nikolaikirche received the benediction.

Something remarkable happened at that moment. Pastor Führer says the Holy Spirit descended on all the people as a tangible presence of peace. “This was extraordinary, because not many of these people were Christians,” he says. “But they behaved as if they had grown up with the Sermon on the Mount.”[42] They linked each other’s arms, lit small candles to carry, and walked out between the soldiers lining the street, purposefully and peacefully. Although the soldiers’ guns were loaded and the tank motors were running, this march proceeded peacefully around the ring of Leipzig for three whole hours. No one so much as threw a stone through a window. No one knocked off the cap of a policeman. Not one person gave the soldiers any reason to open fire. And at the end of that night, the forces of peace had won. Thousands of people followed their example all over the East Bloc in the next days and weeks. One month later, the people of Leipzig assembled to walk again, this time to commemorate the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of violence against the Jews leading up to WWII. That night as the people walked through Leipzig, they prayed asking forgiveness for what the Germans did to the Jews in the Second World War. That night, November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

Throughout his papacy, Pope John Paul II proclaimed, “Be not afraid! Be not afraid! Open wide the doors to Christ!” He advocated restraint, maturity, and wisdom to resist communism with Christ-like behavior. In every nation across the East Bloc, a small nucleus of leaders, motivated by their faith in Christ, led the resistance to communism by example, making this the Peaceful Revolution. Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agreed on a non-negotiable strategy of peaceful resistance. The people they led adopted peaceful means to effect change, facing down oppressive regimes that had held people captive through terror and fear. An unforeseeable sequence of events began unraveling the power of the Soviet Union. But there was nothing inevitable about a peaceful outcome, as the slaughter in Tiananmen Square of China in June of 1989 demonstrated.

Poland was the first country to break away in 1989, the annus mirabilis, holding its first free elections in June. Solidarity candidates swept the slate for election to the newly formed Senate, as well as all the available seats in the Sejm, the lower house. Hungary proclaimed their independence by snipping the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain in August of 1989, letting people from the East Bloc cross into freedom in the West. After the showdown in Leipzig in October, demonstrators across East Germany peacefully deposed Communist leader Erich Honecker. The Berlin Wall opened November 9, 1989. Czechoslovakia won its freedom in a series of events so smooth they earned the name the Velvet Revolution. On December 29, Václav Havel could tell his people that only six months before, he had been in prison, but through events he could only call miraculous, he had become the President of Czechoslovakia. Romania was the only exception in this otherwise peaceful sequence. The Romanians took Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, put them up against a wall, and shot them.

Using a little poetic license, one could say that what took ten years in Poland, took ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany, ten days in Czechoslovakia,[43] and ten hours in Romania. This moral, spiritual, and political earthquake would continue to rumble throughout the rest of the Soviet Union, freeing the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine, ultimately shaking the foundations of Russia as well. In 1991, the Soviet Union creaked, heaved a last gasp, and collapsed. On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union.

***

It might be tempting to characterize Pope John Paul II as the political foe who vanquished communism. But that would be untrue. His position challenged communism in the metaphysical realm, not in the political arena. His message was never one advocating political positioning. Rather, he understood that the error of communism lay in its fundamental understanding of man, who is not merely a unit of labor engaged in a perpetual class struggle, as Marx claimed, but a creature made in the image of God, with a soul and an eternal destiny. John Paul II never took his eyes off God, his heart and mind like a compass pointing to true North. He encouraged people to love God more deeply, to cherish relationships with the people they love, and to obey God with abandon. He challenged communism on his knees, praying to God, “Thy will be done.”

Whittaker Chambers was once a communist agent but changed his mind and returned his allegiance to America. He said the attraction of communism was as old as Eden, the promise that “Ye shall be as gods.” There have been two faiths on trial on the twentieth century, said Chambers: “faith in man” and “faith in God.” Communism is the vision of man without God. John Paul II knew this was true, deep in his bones, having lived under the lash of totalitarianism. His answer to communism was to overcome evil with good, to answer its threats and violence with faith and nonviolence. By going straight to the deepest truth about the nature of man, his intrinsic dignity, and his capacity for good, John Paul II inspired the better angels of every person who was honestly seeking Truth. And in so doing, he sparked the Peaceful Revolution that shattered communism by transcending it.

This essay first appeared in the St. Austin Review (May/June 2020). 

Please visit the Candles Behind the Wall website for the author’s video interviews of those who risked their freedom and their lives to resist Communism.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Notes:

[1] This is George Weigel’s appraisal in his masterful description of these events in Central Eastern Europe: The Final Revolution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).

[2] For an excellent overview, see the film “Nine Days that Changed the World,” Citizens United Productions.

[3] Quotes are taken from the text of the Pope’s sermon, which is at www.vatican.va., “Homily in Victory Square, Warsaw,” June 2, 1979.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Alexander Tomsky, “John Paul in Poland,” Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 7, no.3, autumn 1979; Radio Free Europe Research, The Pope in Poland; reports by Neal Ascherson and Peter Hebblethwaite in the Spectator, 9 and 16 June 1979. Quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, Solidarity: The Polish Revolution, 3rd ed., (London: Granta Books, 1983), 32.

[7] Pope’s sermon, which is at www.vatican.va., “Homily in Victory Square, Warsaw,” June 2, 1979.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Stalin is said to have remarked that trying to make Poland a communist nation was like trying to put a saddle on a cow.

[10] Quoted in film, “Liberating a Continent: John Paul II and the Fall of Communism.”

[11] Quoted in Weigel, George, Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999), 311.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 319.

[14] Ibid., 321.

[15] Bogdan Szajkowski, Next to God—Poland: Politics and Religion in Contemporary Poland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 72.

[16] Adam Michnik, “A Lesson in Dignity,” in Letters from Prison and Other Essays, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 160.

[17] Ibid., 164.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarność (London: Granta Books, 1983), 292.

[20] George Weigel in film, Nine Days that Changed the World, Citizens United Productions.

[21] Ash, The Polish Revolution, 232.

[22] Peter Finn, “Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist leader, dies at 90,” The Washington Post, 25 May 2014.

[23] Weigel, Witness to Hope, 405.

[24] Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, A Life with Karol: My Forty-Year Friendship with the Man Who Became Pope, (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 135.

[25] George Weigel, “The Quiet Hours of Leonid Brezhnev,” Catholic World Report, July 17, 2019.

[26] A photocopy of the decree and accompanying documents in the original Russian were given to George Weigel by Andrzej Paczkowski, who obtained them from Andrzej Paczkowski. Translation by Ashley Morrow. Quoted in Weigel, The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (New York: Crown Publishing, 2010), 115.

[27] Weigel, “The Quiet Hours of Leonid Brezhnev.”

[28] Quoted by George Weigel in The End and the Beginning, (New York: Crown Publishing, 2010), 115.

[29] Quoted in interview in the film “Nine Days That Changed the World,” Citizens United Productions.

[30] Paul Kengor and Robert Orlando, The Divine Plan: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Dramatic End of the Cold War (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2019), 163.

[31] See Philip Pullella, “Soviet Union Ordered Shooting: Italy Commission,” Reuters March 2, 2006. Also Edward Pentin, “Soviets Wanted Pope Killed,” National Catholic Register, March 12-18, 2006, A1.

[32] Kengor and Orlando, The Divine Plan, 168.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Weigel, End and Beginning, 129.

[35] Kengor and Orlando, 157.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Michael Kaufman, Mad Dreams, Saving Graces: Poland: A Nation in Conspiracy (New York: Random House, 1989), 141.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Antonin Lewek, “New Sanctuary of Poles: The Grave of Martyr—Father Jerzy Popieluszko” (Warsaw, 1986), 2-3. Quoted in Weigel, The Final Revolution.

[40] Self-published in the East Bloc, typically with home-made presses.

[41] This story of Leipzig comes from the author’s interviews in 1990-92 in Leipzig. Their stories, along with more than one hundred others from throughout the former Soviet Union, have been compiled in the book, Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution that Shattered Communism (Eerdmans, 1993). A new edition is soon to be published.

[42] Author’s interview with Pastor Christian Führer in Leipzig.

[43] Timothy Garton Ash said it first, when he was in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.

Ronald Reagan: Confronting an Evil Empire

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When Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet regime as the “evil empire,” he was echoing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who said the USSR was “the concentration of world evil.”

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the ContinentBehind that line lie all the capitols of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. — Winston Churchill

Before  World War II was over in Europe, the Allied leaders had met at Yalta in February of 1945 to make a plan for reorganizing the territories occupied by the Nazis.  Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt sat down to redraw the maps of Europe.  Central and Eastern Europe were left under the control of Russia, as were sections of the capitols, Berlin and Vienna. Winston Churchill saw the danger of that division and in his address of March 6, 1946 he gave it the name it would retain: The Iron Curtain.

Of course, when the Russian promises vaporized, along with the sovereignty of these citizens, the dividing line between countries and the West became a more literal curtain of iron, barbed wire and explosives.  When the Berlin Wall went up in the night between August 12 and 13, 1961, to keep East bloc subjects from fleeing to freedom via West Berlin, the Western nations stood by, unable to prevent it.  Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old boy, tried to sprint to the other side one year later, and as he clambered over the barbed wire after his friend, he was shot by East German border guards who let him bleed to death, tangled in the barbs before horrified onlookers from both sides. He was the first of hundreds to die in the attempt. I know the East German conscript who soon after that incident was given the assignment to stand guard at that very spot, under orders to shoot any other countrymen trying to escape to freedom in the West. When Rüdiger Knechtel refused to shoot and convinced other soldiers to do the same, he was imprisoned for more than two years.

The Berlin Wall stood unchallenged so long that people on both sides in Europe had come to think of it as a permanent fact of life.  East German 8th grade textbooks stated that the Wall had been built for protection against invasion from the West on an unspecified “Day X.” Parents who dared to tell their children the truth knew it was like handing them a stick of lit dynamite. Not much worked efficiently under communism, except the informants of the secret police. Most people on eastern side of the Iron Curtain eventually lost hope that their fate could ever be anything other than subjugation, and it seemed that no one in the West dared to challenge the Soviet empire, other than Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher.

I know these things because I had a ring-side seat as these events unfolded, having served President Reagan in The White House, then moving to Germany, where I was an international television correspondent covering Europe, while living among families with members on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

An Evil Empire

President Ronald Reagan met with Pope John Paul II in 1982 and they both reflected on the chilling near-brush with death they had both experienced in 1981. The attempt on the Pope’s life at the hand of the Bulgarian assassin was most likely sanctioned by the highest communist officials to decapitate the moral leadership of what they perceived to be one of their biggest threats: the Church. Both Reagan and the Pope believed they had been granted more years in life to fulfill a destiny ordained by God. Reagan listened carefully to the Pope’s words on the deep sources of purpose that transcend the political realm. When President Reagan spoke on March 8, 1983, he reflected on the spiritual nature of the conflict with communism:

I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

When Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet regime as an “evil empire,” he voiced what Russian dissident and political prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn would confirm in his 1986 speech, in which he called the USSR “the concentration of world evil.” Reagan was outraged when President Ford snubbed Solzhenitsyn and refused to meet with him. Solzhenitsyn and Reagan admired each other, and in 1981 the Russian wrote to the President saying: “I rejoice that the United States at last has a president such as you and I unceasingly thank God that you were not killed by that villainous bullet.” When Reagan spoke of the “evil empire,” he was stating a metaphysical truth that every dissident in Stasi, Securitate or KGB prison cells knew to be true. They cheered when they heard what he said. I know this because more than 150 of these dissidents later told me their own stories from the “evil empire.” Although the sophisticated Europeans, and pundits in America, ridiculed him, President Reagan understood that the conflict with communism had a spiritual dimension, as well as military, political and economic ramifications.

President Reagan responded quickly to the flicker of movement in Poland as Solidarnosz solidified, and his administration equipped their leaders with the means to communicate with each other—FAX machines, which in that pre-internet time offered a breakthrough means of free communication in a lock-down regime. Quiet moves were made to strengthen the roots of civil society in the countries where citizens were finding their own conscience and courage.

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down this Wall

When Ronald Reagan stood at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and boldly proclaimed, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” it took our breath away. Germans had been separated from their relatives since 1961 by the jagged barbed wire of the wall, built in an act of desperation to keep East Germans from fleeing to freedom, and both sides had come to accept this monstrosity as unchanging. I had crossed the border into the East and listened to their stories of despair in 1983. (I was tailed and they were later interrogated.) The willingness of communists to shoot and imprison their own citizens rather than let them escape was justifiable cause for their subjects’ gloomy resignation. Totalitarian regimes killed 169 million of thier own people.  Not everyone is born to be a martyr.

President Reagan knew that more than strong rhetoric was necessary to back down the Soviets. He was convinced that by strengthening the West’s military might, the Soviets would have to loosen their grip. The Reykjavik Summit in 1986 was criticized as a failure, but Reagan’s resolve pushed Gorbachev on arms reduction and human rights violations. Reagan left no doubt in Gorbachev’s mind of America’s fortitude in defending freedom. President Reagan also managed to secure the release of one of Russia’s political prisoners on the eve of that summit: Irina Ratushinskaya, a poet whose crime had been to write verse that alluded to God. For her “dissemination of anti-Soviet agitation in poetic form” she had been sentenced to seven years in a hard labor camp, where she was desperately ill with ailments of the heart, liver and kidneys. She was stripped and beaten, suffered two concussions, spent 39 days in an unheated cell and contracted pneumonia. When President Reagan secured her release from the Soviets, it was a whiff of oxygen to other imprisoned dissidents, I learned in later interviews with them.

Meanwhile, Reagan stood unflinchingly in his military resistance, while quietly working back channels to secure freedom for political prisoners and encourage the pockets of resistance throughout the East Bloc. Small cells of leaders in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states were committed to seeking a peaceful resistance to communism, growing in influence as they nurtured the seeds of a “second culture” in civil society, in the church, and in the realm of the mind. The spiritual leadership of Pope John Paul II spoke straight to their hearts with his clarion call, “Be not afraid!” The Pope reminded people, first in Poland and later throughout the entire Soviet empire, that each of them had eternal value and dignity as children of God, with an identity that transcends the state. This spiritual revolution that rippled across the entire East Bloc preceded, and in important ways made possible, the political revolution that followed. Pastor Christian Führer assembled people to pray each week in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, and his church was a spiritual sparkplug  for the peaceful revolution in East Germany. Citizens with nothing but small candles walked out of his church and faced down armed troops under orders to shoot them. Christian leaders who emerged throughout Eastern Europe and the entire Soviet Union at the critical junctures of these events were a major factor in keeping the resistance peaceful. This is not the usual course of revolutions.

Awakened Consciences

The Polish theologian, Josef Tischner, described Solidarnosc as “a forest of awakened consciences.” When one person finds the courage to stand in the light, another is inspired by his courage.  At the same time a moral awakening was beginning to ignite Czechoslovakia through the plays of Vaclav Havel, Russians and many others were reading the novels of Solzhenitsyn. Both authors had been imprisoned for their literary works. Just owning one of Solzhenitsyn’s books could earn you one year in an East German prison, I learned from one man who suffered that fate. Both Solzhenitsyn and Havel excoriated the “culture of the lie” that all subjects of communism lived in, where everyone thought one thing and said another, as a matter of survival. Philosophers who dared to challenge communist ideology in Czechoslovakia ended up shoveling coal into the furnaces of hotels on the night shift. But a few courageous souls still dared to stand and speak the truth, even if the price was losing their job or even going to prison. They stood straight and unbowed behind the Wall, like candles on a darkened landscape. And as the darkness receded from the light they bore, a few more people dared to stand with them.

But the willingness of the communists to crack the heads of demonstrators or imprison them continued. Soviet President Gorbachev wanted changes,  but he had no intention of turning the Soviet Union into a western style republic or a free market economy. He only wanted enough internal reform – perestroika — to get the failing economy moving, while continuing to feed the military machine.

President Reagan’s resolve eventually backed the Russians down. I interviewed one of Gorbachev’s top economic advisers, Alexander Zaichenko. In 1986, as an adviser to Gorbachev’s Council of Ministers, Zaichenko co-authored with two other analysts a 13-page report that laid out the state of the flagging economy in Russia and her satellites. The Soviet Union was already spending 20 percent of its GNP on military research and materials, compared to 6 percent in the US. Zaichenko’s report concluded that further Soviet expenditures to counter western strength, particularly SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative) would bankrupt them by the year 2000. Gorbachev read the report somberly, according to Zaichenko, then called his closest advisers together and told them in so many words ‘We have to put an end to the Cold War and especially the arms race. There is no way out.’

As the subjects of communism found their conscience and their voice, they stood up one at a time and faced down troops under orders to shoot them in Leipzig, Berlin, Prague and Warsaw. During the attempted coup of 1991 in Moscow, Shirinai Dossova, a Muslim convert to Christianity, walked up to the tanks rolling into the streets and knocked on the side until one of the drivers popped open the top to see what the ruckus was. She held up a Bible and handed it to one of the drivers saying, “It says here not to kill. Are you going to kill me?” She stood in front of his tank, overcoming his will to obey orders to roll over her. Her courage was contagious, and it galvanized the wills of others who put their bodies between the tanks and the newly elected members of the Duma inside.

The long fuse was lit in Poland in 1979 when newly elected Pope John Paul II visited his homeland. His message was not a political one. He reminded the millions of people who flooded the streets to see him that they had rights and responsibilities that transcended the political order. He reminded them who they were, as faithful Poles. And they responded spontaneously, “We want God!  We want God in our families!  We want God in our schools! We want God!” That long-burning fuse detonated ten years later, ultimately toppling the Berlin Wall. What took ten years in Poland took ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany, ten days in Czechoslovakia, and ten hours in Romania. The aftershocks of the spiritual and political earthquake toppled the rest of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Ash-Heap of Communism

There were multiple causes and numerous players in bringing about the end of communism. I interviewed 150 people who resisted in far-flung corners of the entire Soviet Union. But it became clear to me, as I wrote Candles Behind the Wall (and it has since been validated by many others) that President Reagan and Pope John Paul II were crucial in shaping the events that led up to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. In the end, one of the greatest powers on earth groaned, staggered, and collapsed. Nearly 400 million people were freed and scarcely a shot was fired. Reagan deserves accolades for his irreplaceable role in this remarkable chapter of history.

When President Reagan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, sophisticated Europeans sniffed that he was being melodramatic, and that he had watched too many Star Wars movies. But President Reagan was one of the few people who grasped that the conflict was not only a military one, although stationing the Pershing Missile to counter the Soviet SS-20’s was crucial. And it was not only an economic conflict, although outspending the Soviets eventually forced Gorbachev to admit he could not continue. Ronald Reagan understood that at its heart, the conflict with communism had a moral and even a spiritual component. The ideology of Marxism-Leninism was a false religion that demanded a response in the realm of the spirit. And President Reagan was not afraid to call evil by its name.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a leader not known for his public piety, said in a speech shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “When empires topple, they usually do so with a bang and not with a whimper. That this did not happen with a bang is practically a miracle.” He went on to quote Otto von Bismarck, who remarked that there are moments when you “grasp the cloak of God, as he strides through history.”

Ronald Reagan was truly a great president who led our nation through a critical period in our history, demonstrating tenacity, courage, and faith. He faced down an enemy and never blinked. He inspired us as Americans to look to our better angels beyond the merely political realm, and reminded us that we hold the potential within us to do great things with God’s help. I miss him.

This essay first appeared here in March 2013.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now

The featured image is a photograph of President Ronald Reagan Making His Berlin Wall Speech at Brandenburg Gate West Berlin, on June 12, 1987, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

D-Day and a Decadent French Wedding

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Brave young men, overcoming terror with their willingness to fight, came from the corn-fed plains of America to do battle with tyranny. Many of them gave the ultimate sacrifice, as they bled out into the sand below me. Was the blood-spattered sacrifice of lives on D-Day commensurate with the soft, effete, and self-indulgent lives of Europeans like those at the Count’s wedding bash?

Still slightly hung over from too much French champagne and cognac at the wedding of a French Count, I was driving from France to Germany on June 6, 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. The perfunctory wedding ceremony had been a sad affair, and no one expected the marriage to last. It was his third marriage, her second, with twenty-seven years of difference in their age. The bride showed an inordinate amount of skin and the bloom was clearly off the rose. But on to the party – uncork the champagne! At least the evening at the count’s castle in Normandy promised to be amusing.

Servants with white gloves served champagne in the twilight just after a torrential drenching from the Atlantic clouds necessitated an impromptu bridge to the party tent. The ladies hoisted their hems gingerly as they crossed the boards with an uncertain silken sway. Ample amounts of champagne, caviar, and foie gras transformed the soggy mood into one more bubbly. The guests, many of them nobility, were then escorted across the soaked field to the castle, much of which had lain in ruins for years. We descended into the cellar, the only sound part of the structure that offered cover from the persistent rain, while providing a perfect party setting. Counts and barons commiserated good-naturedly about the beastly cost of keeping up family castles. The aristocratic guests obligingly toasted the newlyweds, despite everyone’s doubts about the match.

Ancestral tables groaned under the weight of seven courses of rich fare. We maneuvered through the flotilla of wine glasses at each place and the strategic battlefield of silver place settings, each piece monogrammed with the family crest.  First we used the oyster knife and a small fork and chased the slithery appetizer down with a glass of a Pouilly-Fuisse.  Dover sole topped with langouste was eaten with the fish knife and the next fork, accompanied with a glass of Sancerre. Then came lemon sorbet to cleanse the palette, along with a sip of champagne. Medallions of lamb and potatoes au gratin followed with white asparagus (next fork from the left, the next knife from the right) and a red Beaujolais in the larger glass toward the center. Then entrecôte with a reduced red wine sauce and green peppercorns, Grenaille pommes de terre, with a rich red Burgundy in the largest goblet (next fork in from the left, serrated knife to the right). Then salad of field greens, next fork to the left. Then a pause.

Smoke wafted up from the tables as guests lit up and tried to digest the orgiastic fare. More wine flowed, inducing toasts that grew more ribald as the evening progressed. The wine loosened tongues and made it easier for people who spoke different languages to find a common one. (Predominantly French and German, a sprinkling of English, and some Italian thrown in for seasoning.) No one discussed the celebrations of D-Day, a subject that might prove uncomfortable for the German and French guests assembled. Laughter bubbled up into the night sky above the ruin.  Tarte de Pommes a la Normande was served for dessert (eaten with the fork perpendicular across the top of each setting), followed by a cheese platter of French delicacies complemented by cognac and Calvados. Our host explained that the triple-cream cheese was named after Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate who wrote in his book on gastronomy, that “dessert without cheese is like a pretty woman with only one eye.”

After finally finishing dinner and discretely loosening belts, the guests staggered up the cellar stairs of the castle to go outside for the evening’s entertainment. The count had arranged for a jousting match, a real one, with teams of horseback riders in the heraldic colors of their noble ancestors from that region of Normandy. These young noblemen regularly suit up in full armor to compete in such jousting tournaments for the sheer sport of it. Trumpets announced the beginning of each match. Majestic horses thundered across the field, pell-mell toward each other, as each of their riders extended a lance at the armor-clad opponent in an attempt to unseat him. Wild cheers erupted for the victors, while the defeated riders took a wet pratfall as their steeds snorted and whirled to retrieve them. It seemed hard to believe that such ancient combat was practiced anywhere at all, let alone for a wedding’s entertainment. Fireworks concluded the evening with a spectacular display that lit up the sky over Normandy.

The next morning after this lavish display of opulent decadence, somewhat chastened by over-indulgence, I was driving back along the coast of Normandy past the very same beaches where American troops had landed exactly fifty years earlier on D-Day, when Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy. I was acutely aware of the contrast between their lives, so many of them cut short on the sands below as they came to liberate Europeans from the Nazis, and my life, living amidst the luxury of the next generation of Germans and French. The fireworks our soldiers experienced on D-Day were real bombs, and these men didn’t give a damn about which fork to use, if they lived to have another meal.

I had a commemorative map of D-Day and as we sped through the towns, I plotted our progress in the footsteps of the Allied troops. Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juneau, Sword. The code names given those beaches echoed with the cries of the men who died there. The images from the movie The Longest Day flashed through my memory, as I attempted to reconstruct the invasion. As we passed Ste-Mère-Église, I could envision the tangled parachute caught on the church steeple, from one of the many paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne, who had parachuted in the night before.

Brave young men, overcoming terror with their willingness to fight, came from the corn-fed plains of America to do battle with tyranny, confronting a totalitarian regime they knew was evil.  Many of them gave the ultimate sacrifice, as they bled out into the sand below me. All told, 100,000 lives were lost in the invasion. Was the blood-spattered sacrifice of lives on D-Day commensurate with the soft, effete, and self-indulgent lives of Europeans like those at the Count’s wedding bash? I wondered where the family of my French host had been then. Had they dared to resist?

“Veterans who were here then…will surely all agree that it was the longest day of our lives,” said Walter Ehlers, the last surviving recipient of the Medal of Honor among those who fought on D-Day. Paul Wolfowitz writes in the The Wall Street Journal that when Ehlers spoke at the fiftieth anniversary ceremonies in Normandy to an audience including Queen Elizabeth and President Clinton, his message was powerful:

While we braved these then-fortified beaches to beat back Hitler and to liberate Europe … we fought for much more than that. We fought to preserve what our forefathers had died for…to   protect our faith, to preserve our liberty…. I pray that the price we paid on this beach will never be mortgaged, that my grandsons and granddaughters will never face the terror and horror that we faced here. But they must know that without freedom, there is no life and, that the things most worth living for, may sometimes demand dying for.

On the evening that D-Day’s invasion had begun on those beaches, Americans huddled around their radios to hear from President Roosevelt. He was not known as a particularly religious man, but he did something that evening that seems surprising to our modern sensibilities. On the radio live, with all of America hanging on his every word, he prayed:

Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering  humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest until victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and by flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, thy heroic servants, into thy kingdom.

With unabashed fervor, Roosevelt continued,

Oh Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our      united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. With thy blessing we shall prevail   over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances.   Thy will be done, Almighty God.  Amen.

As Warren Kozak wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “This was an American president unafraid to embrace God and to define an enemy that clearly rejected the norms of humanity. And if the nature of the enemy was not clear to everyone that night, it would be made resoundingly clear as the armies advanced into Germany 10 months later.” Roosevelt’s prayer was an appeal to God to help our forces defeat the apostles of a kind of false religion, the triumphalist Aryan ideology.

In 1944 there was a clarity of conviction in a battle between good and evil that necessitated a bold and unambiguous response, and to ask God’s help. The western culture of today makes it much more difficult to do either publicly. There is no lack of evil in the world, but our ability to respond clearly is being slowly suffocated.

2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the celebration will have to be explained to a lot of younger people who have no memory or understanding of these events. “Communism? You’ll have to unpack that a little for me,” said one clueless journalist recently. “That was before my time,” she offered as a lame excuse. Well gee… so was most of history.

When the Berlin Wall fell, everyone on both sides of it was astonished. After the Russian regime toppled, more than 300 million people were freed and scarcely a shot was fired. This is unprecedented in all of human history. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, another leader not known for his public piety, said in a speech after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “When empires topple, they usually do so with a bang and not with a whimper. That this did not happen with a bang is practically a miracle.” There are moments when you “grasp the cloak of God, as he strides through history.” This astonishing turn of events was not the inevitable outcome of clever political strategy.

But there is nothing inevitable about the success of resisting communism. Now twenty-five years after the bloodbath in China’s Tianenman Square, we see that resistance did not always result in freedom, even in that extraordinary year of 1989. The regime in China has attempted to squelch any commemoration of the Tianenmen Square, while silencing the voices of those who would teach the young the truth about the heroic resistance.

Does this generation have the moral courage to resist evil, whatever guise it takes? Too many people would rather celebrate weddings in the decadent style of my French friends. We in the West have grown soft, ambiguous, and tentative, unwilling to take a stand lest we offend. God help us in our time of trial. We would do well to remember the courage of those whose blood is mingled with the sand on Normandy’s beaches, the blood of resisters washed from the pavement of Tianenmen Square, and the blood of prisoners who died in the Gulag and on the streets in Eastern Europe. There is nothing inevitable about the success of any civilization, and ours is in great peril if we lose the capacity for courage and sacrifice that made the victory of D-Day possible.

This essay first appeared here in June 2014.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

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Remembering Ronald Reagan’s Compassion

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Ronald Reagan had a deep and abiding faith in the prudence and wisdom of people at the grass roots level to manage their own lives well, if left free from government intrusion. Is the government an appropriate venue for compassion and charity? Reagan’s answer was no. He believed the private sector does a better job.

For the past 15 years, I have been involved with philanthropy in America—as a philanthropic advisor to donors, as a social entrepreneur, a nonprofit leader, and advisor to leaders of faith-based organizations that serve the homeless, prisoners, recovering addicts, and at-risk children. I also collaborated with the efforts of the Bush Administration’s Faith-Based Initiative.

In a previous phase of my life, I had the honor of being appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve in The White House in the Office of Public Liaison, where I was responsible for the White House briefings on the economic program for the business community. From that vantage point, I got a bird’s eye view of the Administration’s efforts to revitalize the America’s public and private sectors. I was in the thick of it, putting on briefings day in and day out, with cabinet secretaries and their deputies as spokesmen, as well as key White House staff. In the first year everybody wanted to meet with the President—and everybody had an agenda, as we discovered.

Ronald Reagan came to the presidency with a body of knowledge and convictions honed during his years as a spokesman for General Electric, where he gave hundreds of talks on all manner of subjects, long before he entered the political arena. He had a deep and abiding faith in the prudence and wisdom of people at the grass roots level to manage their own lives well, if left free from government intrusion. We know a lot of his thoughts from the handwritten commentaries he wrote in preparation for his radio broadcasts in the 1970s, published in the book: Reagan In His Own Hand. For his critics who claimed he was a “great communicator” because Peggy Noonan and others put great words in his mouth, this book is a rebuke. These are vintage Reagan talks—all written in his longhand—and they tell us a lot about the contours of the heart and mind of Ronald Reagan long before he became president.

In one of these broadcasts in 1977, he tells the story of Alexis de Tocqueville who came to America in the 1830s to try to understand what makes the nation great. Tocqueville discovered that it wasn’t America’s ample rivers or her vast commerce that made her great, but her goodness and her ingenuity. Reagan loved what Tocqueville discovered as one of the greatest strengths of American citizens: the ability to solve problems themselves. Reagan said in his broadcast, Tocqueville “told his countrymen how in America a citizen would see a problem that needed solving; that he wouldn’t call on the government but would cross the street and talk to a neighbor. They would talk to others and soon a committee would be formed, the problem would be solved and,” as Reagan relates the story,” Tocqueville said, ‘You won’t believe this but no government bureau will be involved at all.’”

What Tocqueville grasped, and what Reagan knew from his own experience, is that Americans have remarkable good will, generosity, and ingenuity in caring for one another’s needs.

In the famous passage Reagan references from Democracy in America, Tocqueville marvels at the sweep of intellectual, moral, religious, and social activity:

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons and schools take shape in that way…. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association. [1]

The thing Ronald Reagan liked best about this story is that the people didn’t go to the government for a solution. They stepped up to create a solution themselves. And they did it in the private sector.

In President Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981—and I was there when he gave it—he said “It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

He went on to say “We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, not reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?”

President Reagan meant that—and he was a genuinely compassionate man himself. But as he explained later that same year to the National Alliance of Business: “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.” (Oct. 5, 1981)

With that statement, Ronald Reagan drew the line in the sand that constitutes the Great Divide. This is where conservatives and liberals part ways. Is the government an appropriate venue for compassion and charity or not? Reagan’s answer was no. He believed the private sector does a better job.

President Reagan was never convinced that the government best understood the needs of individuals, and he was firmly convinced that nonprofit groups should be less dependent on government grants so they could be free to pursue their own visions and strategies. In his words, “We who live in free market societies believe that growth prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success—only then can society remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people.”

He believed that the people in their own communities had better solutions caring for their neighbors in distress. He trusted their compassion as well as their prudence in serving people face-to-face—people whose names they knew, and whose problems they could help them solve in the context of a relationship.

That’s something Washington can’t do.

President Reagan’s economic plan was to reduce tax rates, reduce the rate of growth of the money supply, reduce unnecessary regulations, and cut spending. I gave months of briefings on that four-point plan. He was able to do all of those things except cut as much spending as he wanted—Congress had other priorities—and the battle was not pretty. I experienced the wisdom of Otto von Bismarck when he said if you have any respect for law or sausages, you should never see them being made. It was messy.

As President Reagan sought to cut government programs, he looked to private nonprofits to take on some of the responsibilities. The President appointed a Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives, headed by William Verity, a steel executive and corporate philanthropist. They were to find ways to transfer responsibilities from federal agencies to nonprofits and reduce impediments for charities as they served the common good. What President Reagan did instead of redistributing tax dollars was to revitalize the economy and unleash a period of sustained economic growth, which in turn fostered more charitable giving.

The policy changes paid off. As we came “out of the 81-82 recession, the nation had five straight quarters of 7-9% GDP growth and six years of strong, sustained prosperity,” as former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal.[2] By making a 24% reduction in marginal tax rates, the economy was unshackled in the private sector.

As the economy flourished, so did philanthropy. “In the Reagan years, charitable giving rose by more than 25 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, twice the rate of the previous decade.” New foundations sprang up “and corporate giving as a percentage of pretax profits, reached an all time high,” as Les Lenkowsky has pointed out. The effect continued after Reagan left office. “In the 1990s, tax rates…remained below their pre-Reagan levels, and philanthropy grew even more rapidly as the economy picked up speed.” [3]

Although the 1980s were slammed as the “decade of greed,” the annual rate of growth in total charitable giving in the 1980s was nearly 55 per cent higher than in the previous 25 years, according to Richard McKenzie. As he wrote, “No matter how the records of giving is measured, the 1980s were in fact a decade of renewed charity and generosity.” [4]

By their fruits you can tell the difference between conservatives and liberals, when it comes to charitable giving. President Reagan was called heartless, but he took it upon himself to give charitably, at the same time as he was cutting government spending. Although he was not a wealthy man when he became president, he donated more than four times as much to charity—both in actual amounts and as a percentage—than Senator Ted Kennedy. (Kennedy, whose net worth was $8 million, gave barely 1 percent.) Reagan gave more to charities than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is hailed as the great man of compassion. In the midst of the Depression, when people really could have used the help, Roosevelt gave only 2 percent of his income. In 1985, Reagan gave away 6 percent of his income.[5]

The patterns of giving in America are fascinating. Arthur Brooks wrote a book a few years ago that I reviewed for Philanthropy magazine, called Who Really Cares? Brooks is a consummate number cruncher and did not believe the results when they came out, so he ran them again. He had assumed that people who are the most vociferous about socioeconomic inequality would give the most to alleviate it. He discovered that despite their reputation as “caring,” political liberals give less of their income to charitable causes than conservatives.

Actually, conservative households donate 30 percent more money to charity than liberal households. What’s more, they are also more likely to volunteer to take care of the poor themselves. Why the difference? Brooks found that liberals view government redistribution as a “form of charity,” which they believe exonerates them from further giving.

It is possible to shame liberals into giving, however, using the spotlight. Presidential candidate Al Gore was embarrassed by the release of his tax return that indicated he had given only $353 (or ZERO POINT TWO) percent of his income to charity. His giving jumped to 6.8 percent the following year. Just for the record, President Obama gives about 1 percent to charity. George W. Bush regularly gives more than 10 percent. Dick Cheney in 2005 gave away 77% of his income to charity.[6]

Arthur Brooks found in his research that the most generous donors have four key traits: religious faith, skepticism about the government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepreneurism. Where these converge, dollars flow toward charity. The faith factor is far and away the greatest indicator for charitable giving.

Brooks also discovered one disturbing trend: government funding to nonprofits crowds out private giving. Brooks writes that “numerous studies have demonstrated that a dollar in government spending on nonprofit activities displaces up to 50 cents in private giving,” and the “highest level of crowding out occurs in assistance to the poor and other kinds of social welfare services.” Brooks found that FDR’s New Deal put a 30 percent dent in church-based giving in the 1930’s, just as TANF welfare payments 60 years later crowded out private dollars.

President Reagan’s strategy to invigorate the economy and move more human care to the private sector was an economically effective one. But there’s another aspect of this shift that goes beyond the numbers. Tocqueville discovered something else about America that Ronald Reagan also understood. As people give their own time and money, it encourages people toward virtue. Tocqueville said, “its discipline shapes a lot of orderly, temperate, moderate, careful, and self-controlled citizens. If it does not lead the will directly to virtue, it establishes habits which unconsciously turn it that way.”[7] This is the acquisition of civic virtue. In caring for one another voluntarily, Americans foster their own character development.

Tocqueville dubbed these little units of interaction “voluntary associations.” He wrote in the tradition of Edmund Burke, who called them “little platoons.” Others today call this sector “civil society.” It is expressed in all the many ways people come together freely, in families, neighborhoods, schools, clubs, and communities. Burke and Tocqueville agreed that human beings interact best with each other when they engage in small civic units. To love mankind is abstract, but you can love particular people.

Tocqueville saw that this voluntary, charitable activity counterbalances a competing tendency in the American character—the tendency toward self-absorption, toward materialism, and the tendency to isolate one’s self in a little circle of family and friends and leave the rest of society to look after itself.[8] Tocqueville said as long as the impulse to give and serve balances out these tendencies, America can remain healthy. But if the charitable tendency that fosters virtue is overcome by egoism, materialism, and indifference, the soul of the nation is in peril.

Tocqueville’s words have proven prophetic for our 21st century American culture. The balance has tipped, and the health of our nation’s soul is hanging in the balance.

It is an odd paradox, but the success of America depends on these private virtues, and the theological truths that shape them, for its very existence. But it is outside the realm of the government to provide character formation that is necessary for the survival of the republic. The private virtue necessary for the survival of the public and civic order must be shaped in the private realm. Virtue depends on faith for its sustenance, and it is learned in families, in churches, in parochial schools, in the armies of compassion, and in the little platoons of street saints. And they depend on philanthropy to accomplish their mission. Ronald Reagan always believed in America as a shining city on a hill. And his faith in the potential for inherent goodness of Americans was unshakeable. In his speech to the Republican National Convention in 1984, he said, “The poet called Miss Liberty’s torch ‘the lamp beside the golden door.’ Well, that was the entrance to America, and it still is….The glistening hope of that lamp is still ours. Every promise, every opportunity, is still golden in this land. And through that golden door our children can walk into tomorrow with the knowledge that no one can be denied the promise that is America. Her heart is full; her torch is still golden, her future bright. She has arms big enough to comfort and strong enough to support, for the strength in her arms is the strength of her people. She will carry on …unafraid, unashamed, and unsurpassed. In this springtime of hope, some lights seem eternal. America’s is.”

Maybe it’s because of Ronald Reagan’s vision that despite everything, I can see glimmerings of hope on the streets of our inner cities. Something is stirring the hearts of people who converge here to serve. Republicans and Democrats are rolling up their sleeves together to renew bullet-pocked neighborhoods. Social entrepreneurs are pairing up with business entrepreneurs to tackle stubborn social maladies. African-Americans and Anglos, Latinos and Asians, Baptists and Jews, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics are discovering that what unites us transcends our differences. Passion and conviction are bringing people together to restore dignity to shattered lives. We share hope, and even love. The needs are great, the time is now, and we need to do this together. The spark of greatness is still an ember in America’s soul, waiting to be re-ignited. We need an heir to Reagan to light the blaze.

This essay is based on a lecture given by the author at The Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies on September 17, 2010. 

This essay was first published here in September 2010.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Notes:

1. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 513.

2. Elaine Chao, “Another Unhappy Labor Day,” Sept. 2, 2010, The Wall Street Journal.
3. Leslie Lenkowsky, “Ronald Reagan Helped Philanthropy, Despite how Much Nonprofit World Objected to His Policies,” Chronicle of Philanthropy, June 10,2004.
4. Richard B. McKenzie, “Decade of Greed?” National Review, Aug. 31, 1992.
5. These comparisons come from Peter Schweizer, “Liberal Scrooges,” American Spectator, June 15, 2008.
6. Schweizer, op. cit.
7. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 527.

8. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 506.

The featured image is a photograph of President Reagan and Nancy Reagan holding a Cabbage Patch doll during a trip to Santa Barbara California and a visit to Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times at Rancho La Scherpa (4/18/1987 ), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Divine Conspiracy of Dallas Willard

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Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it.

Willard

Dallas Willard

One of the great oaks among us is fallen. Dallas Willard, who died May 8 (2013), was a professor of philosophy, a teacher par excellence, and a great soul, capable of inspiring deep faith. As a young Southern Baptist pastor in the 1960s, he left the ministry to study philosophy because he was convinced he was “abysmally ignorant” of God and the soul, and had concluded that Jesus and the philosophers were addressing the same questions.[1] Willard pushed deep into the intellectual roots of philosophy and Christian theology, while nourishing the spiritual disciplines of silence and prayer. The result was a quietly luminous relationship with Christ himself, which shone forth through Willard’s books on discipleship. The Divine Conspiracy won awards when it was published in 1998, setting off a series of explosions in the church world by causing people who called themselves Christians to evaluate their actual relationship with Christ, if they had one at all.

Christ’s Great Commission was to “go and make disciples” and the church is failing to do that, says Willard, and failing rather miserably. A disciple of Jesus is one who is with Jesus, learning to be like him, but as Willard points out, “one can be a professing Christian and a church member in good standing without being a disciple. There is, apparently, no real connection between being a Christian and being a disciple of Jesus.”[2]

If we are not truly disciples, we are missing the opportunity to step into “the divine conspiracy,” the collaboration with God here and now, where he is at work renewing his creation. He invites us into partnership with him. As Willard explains in The Divine Conspiracy, “God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.”[3] This kingdom is among us, and is accessible now.

“Think of visiting in a home where you have not been before,” said Willard in his mellifluous baritone voice. “It is a fairly large house, and you sit for a while with your host in a living room or on the veranda. Dinner is announced, and he ushers you down a hall, saying at a certain point, ‘Turn, for the dining room is at hand,’ or more likely, ‘Here’s the dining room.’”[4] Jesus invites us to step into his kingdom with the same clear directions. There is no suggestion in scripture that the kingdom hasn’t happened yet or is about to happen or about to be here. “Where God’s will is being accomplished, the kingdom of God is right beside us. It is indeed The Kingdom Among Us.”[5] Christ invites us to take part in it now, as partners with God in the “divine conspiracy.”

Co-Conspirators with God

This exhilarating role as co-conspirators with God, agents mixed into the ordinary workings of the world, is the task for which we were born, asserted Willard. But simply showing up to do church-related things is not discipleship, he warned, not by a long shot. We were created to participate in the “kingdom among us” as well as the kingdom of heaven after we die, and that participation should be evidence of God’s life within us.

“The human job description…found in chapter 1 of Genesis indicates that God assigned to us collectively the rule over all living things on earth, animal and plant. We are responsible before God for life on the earth. However unlikely it may seem from our current viewpoint, God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our ‘rule’ only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or co-worker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.”[6]

“God’s desire for us is that we should live in him. He sends among us the Way to himself. That shows what, in his heart of hearts, God is really like – indeed, what reality is really like. In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.”[7]

Dallas Willard devoured books as a child during the Great Depression, while he was schooled in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. “Plato was his companion when he worked as an agricultural laborer after high school. Willard recalls giving his Baptist Sunday school teachers a ‘very bad time’ as a young teenager. He didn’t think it made sense that you ‘got saved’ and were ‘stuck with it.’”[8] His questions led him to some conclusions that pushed the boundaries of his Southern Baptist upbringing.

imagesAfter Willard left pastoring to study philosophy, he encountered Richard Foster, a Quaker pastor, forging a friendship and collaboration that would extend across the coming decades into the ecumenical work of Renovarè, a ministry that transcends denominational lines to foster discipleship in Christ. In addition to teaching philosophy to university students and speaking in conferences across the country, Dallas Willard was the author of The Spirit of the Disciplines; Hearing God; Renovation of the Heart; The Great Omission; as well as The Divine Conspiracy; and a book on German philosopher Edmund Husserl, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge.

Willard’s philosophical study of reality in phenomenology led him to probe the results of people’s beliefs. He was troubled by the gap between people professing faith and living it. As he explained in The Divine Conspiracy, “According to Gallup surveys, 94 percent of Americans believe in God and 74 percent claim to have made a commitment to Jesus Christ. About 34 percent confess to a ‘new birth’ experience. These figures are shocking when thoughtfully compared to statistics on the same groups for unethical behavior, crime, mental distress and disorder, family failures, addictions, financial misdealings, and the like.”[9]

Where is the Transformation of Character?

“The understanding of a commitment to Jesus Christ has not penetrated our character deeply enough to influence our behavior,” laments Willard, “transformation of life and character are not a part of the redemptive message offered by the church today.”[10] My experience in working with both protestant and Catholic congregations across the country leads me to conclude that he is correct in his assessment. Far too few people who say they believe in Christ show evidence of becoming more like him.

“The current gospels, left and right, exhibit the very same type of conceptual disconnection from, and practical irrelevance to, the personal integrity of believers – and certainly so, if we put that integrity in terms of biblically specific ‘Christlikeness,’” observes Willard. “And both lack any essential bearing upon the individual’s life as a whole, especially upon the occupations or work time and upon the fine texture or our personal relationships in the home and neighborhood.”[11] The fruits of faith that should be transforming the world and the relationships of Christ’s followers are lacking. “So as things now stand we have, on the one hand, some kind of ‘faith in Christ’ and, on the other, the life of abundance and obedience he is and offers. But we have no effective bridge from the faith to the life. Some do work it out. But when that happens it is looked upon as a fluke or an accident, not a normal and natural part of the regular good news itself.”[12]

The result is that “the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life,” Willard concludes. “To counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”[13]

But we have to cooperate with God’s purposes in our life. We enter into an apprenticeship, a partnership with Christ, learning to listen and walk with him, collaborating with him as he shows us what he is doing in a given situation. “Within his overarching dominion God has created us and has given each of us, like him, a range of will – beginning from our minds and bodies and extending outward, ultimately to a point not wholly predetermined but open to the measure of our faith. His intent is for us to learn to mesh our kingdom with the kingdoms of others. Love of neighbor, rightly understood, will make this happen. But we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rule with God’s. That is why love of neighbor is the second, not the first, commandment and why we are told to seek first the kingdom, or rule, of God.”[14]

The Cosmic Conspiracy to Overcome Evil with Good

If we align our heart and will with God through prayer and honestly seek to cooperate with what he is doing among us now, “as God’s flash point in reigniting eternal life among us, he inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds—deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.”[15] The life of Christ, his love, his wisdom, and his power, flow through us into the lives we touch. “Then we heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good.”[16]

A “major element in this training is experience in waiting for God to move, not leaping ahead and taking things into our own hands. Out of this waiting experience there comes a form of character that is priceless before God, a character that can be empowered to do as one chooses. This explains why James says that patience in trials will make us ‘fully functional’ (teleion), ‘perfect’ (James 1:4).”[17] Doing things with God’s timing is essential. “Sometimes we must wait for God to do as we ask because the answer involves changes in other people, or even ourselves, and that kind of change always takes time. Sometimes, apparently, the changes in question involve conflicts going on in a spiritual realm lying entirely outside human affairs (Dan. 10:13). We always live in a larger context of activities we do not see.”[18]

Becoming a disciple does not mean doing a few religious things once a week and leaving the rest of our life the same. Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. “So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things, either as a part of ‘full-time service’ or as a part of ‘part-time service.’ My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, ‘religious’ or not. Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks, “Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own.”[19]

It’s About the Kind of Person We Become

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives–is simply the person we become. .”[20] Living as a disciple means emulating Jesus.  “We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We notice, for example, that he spent extended times in solitude and silence, and we enter solitude and silence with him. We note what a thorough student of the scriptures he was, and we follow him, the Living Word, into the depths of the written word. We notice how he used worship and prayer, how he served those around him. We have Bibles with red letters to indicate what he said. Might we not make good use of a Bible that has green letters for what he did? Green for ‘go,’ or ‘do it’?”[21] I sometimes wonder if our churches need to measure not how many people they seat, but how many they send.

This is not a call for activism. Instead it is a call for deep inner alignment with God’s purposes. The means by which we align our heart with that of God is prayer, which is the primary means of forming character. It combines our freedom with God’s power, resulting in service through love. Transformed hearts produce transformed persons, through and through, and deeds arise from the heart quickened by faith. “The deeds of the kingdom arise naturally out of a certain quality of life. We cultivate that life in its wholeness by directing our bodies into activities that empower the inner and outer person for God and through God. In this second part of the curriculum for Christlikeness, then the main task is, by engaging in ways of using the body differently, to disrupt and conquer habits of thought, feeling, and action that govern our lives as if we or someone other than God were God and as if his kingdom were irrelevant or inaccessible to us.”[22] Spiritual disciplines forge the unity of mind, body, and soul.

Willard reminds us that this has been true for all souls throughout all ages of Christendom. The great souls “who have made great spiritual progress all seriously engaged with a fairly standard list of disciplines for the spiritual life. There has been abuse and misunderstanding, no doubt, but the power of solitude, silence, meditative study, prayer, sacrificial giving, service, and so forth as disciplines are simply beyond question.”[23] These spiritual disciplines “aim at the heart and its transformation. We want to ‘make the tree good.’ We do not aim just to control behavior, but to change the inner castle of the soul, that God may be worshiped ‘in spirit and in truth’ and right behavior cease to be a performance.”[24] Our inner substance is actually transformed.

Christ makes disciples and when they become genuinely Christlike, he allows us to take responsibility in his kingdom work. “When we submit what and where we are to God, our rule or dominion then increases. In Jesus’ words from the parable of the talents (Mt. 25) our Master says, ‘Well done! You were faithful with a few things, and I will put you in charge of many things.’…For God is unlimited creative will and constantly invites us, even now, into an ever larger share in what he is doing.”[25] Some of those things are quite surprising.

God’s Grubby People

Dallas Willard gives a reading of the Beatitudes that stretched my understanding of who the “blessed” truly are. He claims that the Beatitudes are addressed to the “hopeless blessables” and to the seriously crushed.[26] “The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorces. The HIV-positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant too-many-times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the side of the street, the children with parents not dying in the ‘rest’ home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead.”[27] “Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion in his kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich.”[28]

RenovationOfTheHeartThat understanding removes the “them and the “us” from any people we may encounter. “If I, as a recovering sinner myself, accept Jesus’ good news, I can go to the mass murderer and say, ‘You can be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens. There is forgiveness that knows no limits.’ To the pederast and the perpetrator of incest. To the worshiper of Satan. To those who rob the aged and weak. To the cheat and the liar, the bloodsucker and the vengeful: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee into the arms of The Kingdom Among Us. These are God’s grubby people.”[29] Jesus sought them out, and we are called to do the same.

“Any spiritually healthy congregation of believers in Jesus will more or less look like these ‘brands plucked from the burning.’ If the group is totally nice, that is a sure sign something has gone wrong. For here are the foolish, weak, lowly, and despised of the world, whom God has chosen to cancel out the humanly great (1 Cor. 1:26-31; 6).”[30] We all meet at the foot of the cross.  “Speaking to these common people, ‘the multitudes,’ who through him had found blessing in the kingdom, Jesus tells them it is they, not the ‘best and brightest’ on the human scale, who are to make life on earth manageable as they live from the kingdom (Mt. 5: 13-16). God gives them ‘light’- truth, love, and power – that they might be the light for their surroundings. He makes them ‘salt’ to cleanse, preserve, and flavor the times through which they live.”[31]

A Curriculum for Christlikeness

Doctrine is not discipleship, says Willard.  To form a “curriculum for Christlikeness,” we need to move away from two objectives “that are often taken as primary goals [and] must not be left in that position….These are external conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific context and profession of perfectly correct doctrine. Historically these are the very things that have obsessed the church visible….We need wait no longer. The results are in. They do not provide a course of personal growth and development that routinely produced people who ‘hear and do.’”[32]

“Much the same can be said of the strategies – rarely taken as primary objectives, to be sure, but much used – of encouraging faithfulness to the activities of a church or other outwardly religious routines and various ‘spiritualities,’ or the seeking out of special states of mind or ecstatic experiences. These are good things. But let it be said once and for all that, like outward conformity and doctrinally perfect profession, they are not to be taken as major objectives in an adequate curriculum for Christlikeness.”[33] These are all secondary. “Special experiences, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. The human heart must be plowed much more deeply.”[34]

The mind and heart must be filled up by the relationship and presence of God, nurtured in an ongoing conversation and partnership. “When the mind is filled with this great and beautiful God, the ‘natural’ response, once all ‘inward’ hindrances are removed, will be to do ‘everything I have told you to do.’”[35]

Training Disciples

How, then, do we teach others to become disciples?  First of all, it comes through loving him completely, seeing the magnificence of his person, and allowing his love to fill our lives. Willard tells us, “The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him. For purposes of training disciples, we should divide this into four main aspects. First, we teach his beauty, truth, and power while he lived among us as one human being among others.

“Second, we teach the way he went to execution as a common criminal among other criminals on our behalf…. The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a ‘right answer’ to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.”

“Third, we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. We present him in his ecclesia, his motley but glorious crew of called-out ones.…So the continuing incarnation of the divine Son in his gathered people must fill our minds if we are to love him and his Father adequately and thus live on the rock of hearing and doing.

“But fourth, we teach the Jesus who is the master of the created universe and of human history. He is the one in control of all the atoms, particles, quarks, ‘strings,’ and so forth upon which the physical cosmos depends.”[40]

Anyone who truly comes to know Jesus in this way, loving him through and through, will want to obey and serve him, not as a duty but out of an abundance of love for him.  “Jesus himself knew that this was the key. The keeping of his commandments was the true sign of love for him, because that love is what made it possible and actual. In this love of Jesus everything comes together: ‘If anyone loves me, my word he will keep, and my Father will love him, and we will move in with him and live there’ (John 14:23).”[42]

“In his ‘commencement address’ (John 14-16) to his first apprentices, he once again gives them the all-inclusive commandment ‘that you love one another just as I have loved you’ (John 15:12) After clarifying that this includes ‘laying down our life for our friends,’ and not least for Jesus himself, he makes the following observation: ‘You are my friends if you keep this commandment.’”[43]

Five Dimensions of The Kingdom Among Us

We enter into a changed relationship with Christ, a basis of “loving cooperation, of shared endeavor, in which his aims are our aims and our understanding and harmony with his kingdom are essential to what he does with and through us.”[44] We step across the threshold into the life of The Kingdom Among Us.

Dallas Willard shows us five dimensions of the eternal kind of life in The Kingdom Among Us:

1. Confidence in and reliance upon Jesus as the Son of man, the one appointed to save us.

2. But this confidence in the person of Jesus naturally leads to a desire to be his apprentice in living in and from the kingdom of God….Our apprenticeship to him means that we live within his word, that is, put his teachings into practice (John 8:31). And this progressively integrates our entire existence into the glorious world of eternal living.

3. The abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus, ‘continuing in his word,’ naturally leads to obedience. The teaching we have received and our experience off living with it brings us to love Jesus and the Father with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, and (bodily) strength. And so we love to obey him, even where we do not yet understand or really ‘like’ what that requires.

4. Obedience, with the life of discipline it requires, both leads to and, then, issues from the pervasive inner transformation of the heart and soul. The abiding condition of the disciple becomes one of ‘love, joy, peace, long-suffering [patience], kindness, goodness, faith to the brim, meekness and self-control.’ (Gal. 5:22)…These are called the ‘fruit of the spirit’ because they are not direct effects of our efforts but are brought about in us as we admire and emulate Jesus and do whatever is necessary to learn how to obey him.

5. Finally, there is power to work the works of the kingdom…Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward.[46]

What will the kingdom of heaven be like? Willard tells us “[O]ur experience will not be fundamentally different in character from what it is now, though it will change in significant details. The life we now have as the persons we now are will continue, and continue in the universe in which we now exist. Our experience will be much clearer, richer, and deeper, of course, because it will be unrestrained by the limitations now imposed upon us by our dependence upon our body. It will, instead, be rooted in the broader and more fundamental reality of God’s kingdom and will accordingly have far greater scope and power.”[47]

We are participating in the eternal life now, living in “now” and the “not yet” simultaneously. “The agape love of I Corinthians 13 will increasingly become simply a matter of who we are. But the effects of our prayers, words, and deeds – and sometimes of our mere presence – will also increasingly be of a nature and extent that cannot be explained in human terms. Increasingly what we do and say is ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and every part of our life becomes increasingly eternal…. We are now co-laborers with God.”[48]

Dallas Willard showed many souls the way to enter the “divine conspiracy” with Christ to overcome evil with good in this realm, while looking toward the next. His wise, warm voice will be missed here, but Heaven most certainly rejoices with his arrival. May he rest in peace.

This essay originally appeared here May, 2013. Much more on Dallas Willard may be found here.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Books by Dallas Willard

Translations of Works by Husserl

Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (1993). Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy of Arithmetic, (2003). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy

• Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge: A Study in Husserl’s Philosophy (Series in Continental Thought, Vol 6) (1984). Ohio University Press.

Christian Books

The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (1988). San Francisco: Harper and Row.

The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (1998). San Francisco: Harper.

Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God (1999). InterVarsity Press (USA). (formerly titled In Search of Guidance: Understanding How God Changes Lives)

Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (2002). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006). San Francisco: Harper.

• Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (2009).San Francisco: Harper.

• Revolution of Character: Discovering Christ’s Pattern for Spiritual Transformation (2005). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions (2010). IVP Books.

Notes:

1. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

2. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1998), page 291.

3. Ibid., page 25.

4. Ibid., page 31.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., page 22.

7. Ibid., page 11.

8. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

9. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, page 38.

10. Ibid., page 41.

11. Ibid., page 54.

12. Ibid., page 55.

13. Ibid., page 58.

14. Ibid., page 26.

15. Ibid., page 27.

16. Ibid., page 90.

17. Ibid., page 250.

18. Ibid., page 251.

19. Ibid., pages 23-24. Cited from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, (Old Tappan, NJ:  Fleming H. Revell, 1974).

20. Ibid., page 250.

21. Ibid., page 352.

22. Ibid., page 354.

23. Ibid., page 355.

24. Ibid., page 364.

25. Ibid., page 24.

26. Ibid., page 122.

27. Ibid., pages 123-124.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., page 320.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., pages 320-321.

35. Ibid., page 321.

36. Ibid., page 334.

37. Ibid., pages 334-335.

38. Ibid., page 335.

39. Ibid., page 336.

40. Ibid. pages 334-336

41. Ibid., note 12.

42. Ibid., page 336.

43. Ibid., page 367.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., page 368.

47. Ibid., page 395.

48. Ibid., page 396.

This Mortal Coil: Poems of DNA

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Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality.

This Mortal Coil: Poems of DNA, by Eric Forsbergh (150 pages, Resource Publications, 2023)

In This Mortal Coil, Eric Forsbergh wrestles with the essence of what it means to be human. These poems contain reflections on the human condition using DNA as the touchstone, affirming the uniqueness of each person. Although Dr. Forsbergh did not set out to write an explicitly religious book, his poems are shot through with the reflected light that Gerard Manley Hopkins describes as the “grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” In some mysterious way, God writes unique code for each human person in their DNA, with precise details delineating each person’s aptitudes, even before they come into the world and begin to unfold the chemical origami in their individual way.

Dr. Forsbergh’s interest in the ancient classics permeates his poem, “First the Good News,” in which a bloodied Odysseus crawls from the surf to be healed by an “unguent fog” sent by Athena to be presented to a “curious Penelope.” Their perfect offspring, Telemachus, will face his Trojan warriors, 7,000 rare diseases, all carried genetically: “All in battle garb/ dark eyes restless/through their helmet slits.” The stakes are very high: one of these diseases is all it will take to kill him. The new Cassandra can “predict entirely the issue of your loins…. Now no one can dismiss such a figure, robed in utter potency.” But do we truly want to know everything about our future offspring? In “Aching for an Oracle,” this new certainty may make us yearn for “the indistinct voice of a priestess/moaning from a chair.”

The idiom of science provides further images. Dr. Forsbergh spent many hours in laboratories pursuing a double major in microbiology and zoology, so when he writes about the chemical compounds that make up DNA, he is speaking a language in which he is fluent. His education in literature, theology, and art is also evident in his imagery, which germinated in the languages where these converge. He merges the idioms of science and art in “What the Eye Perceives.” Capturing early images of DNA was the feat Rosalind Franklin accomplished in 1952, sorting out unstrung proteins and ruptured nuclei.

Franklin’s lab captures Photo 51,
DNA as pure geometry:
our diagram.
A folded tight infinity.
Stranger to the world than
microscopic Cubist origami.

When the poet writes about telomeres, dots on the tip of every chromosome, we learn the astonishing fact that parts of our bodies dissolve and are replaced every ten years. He describes it as Pointillism “now thrown into reverse, you and I disappear by dots.”

The title of this book comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the prince asks pensively, “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…?” The composition of this coil is the subject we contemplate in all its complexity and mystery.

One poem stands out with particular echoes of the transcendent. In “Twice Identified as Eve,” the poet shares the story of a federal agent who was called in to apprehend suspected heroin dealers. A woman stands “naked in a freeze of fear/ her fingers curled to small fists at her mouth /her forearms trying to hide her breasts.” Meanwhile,

[A]s only attending angels can, each burly agent
gently bends to pinch a corner of a sheet, stands
and drapes her lightly into modesty, where she begins
to breathe of Nefertiti. They avert their eyes
so cannot see the scattering of scars…
This the agents miss, occupied in the arrest.
From beneath the sheet, what’s rancid falls away from her.
And she is as washed as a Black Madonna.

Nor in her do they notice either of the two Eves.
The anthropological Eve, found deep in a cave’s recess
in the Eastern plains of Africa…. She. The gene of all our genes.
And the pristine Eve, born of the fruitful garden,
to whom God said Who told you that you were naked?

These arresting agents had been taught to preserve the dignity of the people they encountered. And in so doing, they found themselves standing on holy ground.

Eric Forsbergh’s poetry also has a muscular quality. He knows the grit of warfare in Vietnam, which buried a ticking time bomb of Agent Orange in his marrow. The poem “Smoldering” unspools his story of lurking cancer in his own body. After a war, an open wound can remain for those who are left behind, not knowing the fate of their loved ones. “The Unknown Soldiers of Shiloh Battlefield Park” are still unknown since DNA still doesn’t provide the identity of fallen soldiers. Surviving a war can still shatter soldiers when they attempt to re-enter their country if the contrast is too overwhelming. “My Veteran of Iraq” suffers this kind of crushing re-entry, crippled by PTSD. In a courageous voice from a contemporary conflict, “A Mother: Sniper for Ukraine” claims in the love of her homeland that she would rather die fighting with her husband than yield the family farm to the invading Russians.

It is impossible for me to take an impartial look at Eric Forsbergh’s poetry. I have known him and his wife as the dearest of friends for 45 years. So, I write from the loving bias of someone who knows him well enough to have heard the unedited version of the labyrinth he has lived. The love poems he writes here were taking place “In Real Life” as I first knew Eric and Yvonne. He had served in the Navy during the Vietnam War and was on the path to entering dentistry, where he would spend the next 38 years. He offered his medical skills on Latin American medical missionary trips and to America’s homeless people. He recently retired from dentistry and completed training in Scripture to bridge the gap between urban and suburban followers of Christ. He is in training to enter prisons to teach inmates how to write poetry. His poems here, which were nine years in gestation, are tethered to autobiographical allusions, but the portrait they render transcends the particularities of the human condition.

Eric Forsbergh writes in the language of love, from courtship to romance and marriage, followed by having a family. In “Gaunt but Fresh in Love,” the lover washes the hair of the beloved to build trust. In the sensual “Pursuit of Food,” the lover feeds his beloved steamed clams dribbling in butter as finger food. Marriage follows in “Summer Sunday Volleyball,” as the delight of love fuses two lives into one flesh. As the couple lives the harmony of “Violin,” the delicate interplay between them is like the simultaneous fingering of struts and bowing to give voice to music. Each poem is written with tenderness, in delicate restraint. Can passion fuel fires sufficient to warm a long marriage? In “Long Love Comes of Age,” the answer unfolds in the tempo.

What do these love poems have to do with DNA? The propagation of the human species! From expressions of their parents’ love, children enter the world with the blueprint of unique identity in their DNA. If they are fortunate enough to grow up in a family that loves and nurtures them, children can unfold their inborn potentialities most completely. These poems are a paean to love and its unfathomable generative nature, as they honor the innate dignity of each sacred soul.

Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality. In our DNA is written the code of the possible but also the inevitable in our lives. In each of us is an expression uniquely our own. How we live it out is our own story. What emerges in these poems is a multifaceted depiction of the complexity, the brilliance, and the unfathomable perfection of God’s creation.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

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