Even if these forget, I will never forget you… Is. 49:15 (NRSV)
Was reading recently from a Daily Devotional that features excerpts from the writings of Charles (Chuck) Colson, the highest-level staffer in Pres. Richard Nixon’s White House to be imprisoned for the Watergate scandal.1 Just prior to his imprisonment he became an evangelical Christian and remained faithful to his commitment to Christ for the remainder of his life. While this compilation of his writings was published in 1994, much of his commentary still sounds ominously appropriate and curiously applicable to our current, everyday state of affairs.
Colson referenced Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in a recent reflection. He was the Soviet dissident who was imprisoned in 1945 for writing a letter critical of Stalin. He spent seven years in the infamous Gulags, a system of forced labor camps under the Communist regime. Following his release from the gulags, Solzhenitsyn wrote extensively about his experiences, eventually winning a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.2
Colson recounts a particular episode in Solzhenitsyn’s life when he came to a place of desperation and despair. So deep was his hopelessness that he resigned himself to death at the hands of the cruel guards who oversaw their work. Colson writes:
Like other prisoners in the Soviet gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn worked in the fields, his day a pattern of backbreaking labor and slow starvation. One day the hopelessness became too much to bear. (He) felt no purpose in fighting on; his life would make no ultimate difference. Laying his shovel down, he walked slowly to a crude work-site bench. He knew at any moment a guard would order him to get up and, when he failed to respond, bludgeon him to death with his own shovel. He’d seen it happen many times. 3
Seated there, Colson describes Solzhenitsyn becoming aware of someone beside him. He raises his eyes to find an elderly, wizened man seated with him. Hunching over, holding a stick, the man traces a cross in the sand at Solzhenitsyn’s feet. Solzhenitsyn, who had rejected the Christian faith of his childhood well before his incarceration, staring at the rough outline experienced an ‘aha’ moment. Colson continues,
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the rough outline, his whole perspective shifted. He knew he was one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet in a moment, he also knew that the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple cross – and through its power, anything was possible. Solzhenitsyn slowly got up, picked up his shovel, and went back to work – not knowing that his writings on truth and freedom would one day enflame the whole world.4
Colson concludes, “Such is the power God’s truth affords one man willing to stand against seemingly hopeless odds. Such is the power of the cross.”5
While Solzhenitsyn had been born and baptized into a Christian tradition, he had rejected any association with Christianity and embraced the atheism presented to him through the Marxism taught within his education experience. It was an experience in the prison camp that brought him back to embrace the Christian faith. A poem recorded in his book, The Gulag Archipelago, reflects that faith:
I look back with grateful trembling
At the life I have had to lead.
Neither desire nor reason
Has illumined its twists and turns,
But the glow of a Higher Meaning
Only later to be explained.
And now with the cup returned to me
I scoop up the water of life.
Almighty God! I believe in Thee!
Thou remained when I Thee denied…6
What was true for Solzhenitsyn as he sat on that work-site crude bench, is still true in our present day circumstances. The power of the Cross to change lives, and history, is still equally valid here, now as it was for him in that Soviet gulag some 75 years ago. It is the purpose for which we must stand, even in the face of risks to our personal safety and freedom, just as he did.
There is another reference that I have just read that puts into perspective the meaning of the Cross, which begins with the birth of a Baby, in a stable in Bethlehem, more than 2 millennia ago. Albert Holtz, O.S.B. writing in his Lenten devotional, Pilgrim Road: A Benedictine Journey Through Lent, says this:
It is only in coming as a baby that God can assure the powerless that salvation doesn’t lie in might and mastery. It is only by being born in a stable that God can persuade the poor that salvation doesn’t lie in wealth and economic security. It is only by being born unnoticed in the obscurity of a small town that the King of Kings can convince the unloved that salvation doesn’t lie in fame or popularity. Emmanuel, God-with-us, comes as Mystery to be seen only with the eyes of faith. God comes as a surprise, in a shocking reversal of this world’s wisdom.7
When we understand the mystery of God, the Word made flesh, coming to dwell among us as that Babe in a manger, and the meaning of the cross…the instrument of his horrendous death…and the purpose and meaning of this God-with-us paying the price for our salvation, it is then that we see that each life has purpose and meaning, even if it is not to have international influence and effect as Solzhenitsyn’s life has, or a Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, or a Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Yet, we all have a role to play, a part in the tapestry of history that is being woven as each one of our lives play out. The nameless who have given their lives for freedom are as much heroes as those we are aware of and celebrate.
Our lives are no less meaningful and purposeful when we live for the purposes of God, and stand for Truth and Freedom, as any of the well-known martyrs of the faith. We will be judged on our faithfulness and obedience. And, St. Mother Teresa, another Nobel Prize winner, says, we must be known, not for our worldly success, but for doing small things with great love.8
The Lord sees us, and knows us, and does not forget His own. If we are His, we need not fear, whether it is the threat of death from the COVID-19 pandemic or a war on our own soil. He continues to be Emmanuel, God-with-us, if we embrace Him in our hearts and trust in His everlasting Love.
1https://www.npr.org/2012/04/21/150918213/chuck-colson-watergate-figure-and-evangelist-dies-at-80
2 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn
3 Charles Colson, with Nancy R. Pearcy, A Dangerous Grace: Daily Readings, Word Publishing, 1994. Pp. 69-70
4 Ibid. p. 70
5 Ibid
6 https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/webfm_send/558
7 Albert Holtz, O.S.B., Pilgrim Road: A Benedictine Journey Through Lent, Morehouse Publishing, 2006. p. 113
Ending Our Life Well 