Sunday meditation

7/30/06

A truly glorious day, such as I have not enjoyed in a very long time. The weather is perfect—sunny and cool, with the recent rains washing out the air. I am not drugged, and it feels so good to have a clear mind and body. I am not task oriented today, except for making sure that my plants get their needed ration of sunshine. But the dishes can stay dirty in the sink and my clothes piled in the laundry basket. This is a true Sabbath---a day of rest. There is no greater prayer to offer God than praise and there is no greater praise to offer than the inner contentment of a happy heart. I subscribe to the theory that a major factor in America’s ills is our loss of leisure—not the leisure that gets you up at 6 am to go boating or biking or yard sale browsing, but just the old fashioned sitting and being, aware of, in tune with, and grateful for everything that is going on around you. And truly I am.

I read another half chapter of the Gulag Archipelago this morning, and I wasn’t going to, because it seemed too grim for Sunday morning reading. But I am not simultaneously reading another book right now, as is my custom, so I decided to offer up the unrelenting negativity and suffering as intercessory prayer for the situation in the Middle East. I have always had mixed feelings for Solzhenitsyn. While I admire his courage in his dedication to the truth, I have always sensed the strong, conservative, reactionary streak in him. I had a Marxist professor once, who called him, "monarchist." I don’t know if I would go that far, but I wouldn’t like to live in the political community that he seems to envision as ideal. He writes honestly of his own arrogance upon his arrest. He was an officer in the Army, and he thought that status entitled him to special privileges even from his fellow inmates. So he expected and demanded that his fellow incarcerated peers carry his luggage while they trekked from one prison to another. He finally draws the conclusion that such a mindset is really what is behind the horrors of Communist Russia—the authoritarian/submissive model of social relationship that predated 1917 by centuries, and he blames it on the nature of the "Asiatic people."

That is an interesting racial/cultural observation, and given the rising power of another Asiatic people (the Chinese), it would be good to read a really insightful, objective book on the Asiatic personality. It would also be interesting to see if itcould be traced to the devastation wrought by Genghis Khan and the Mongols. By thoroughly decimating the population, and idolizing and rewarding the warriors of the culture, did they set up the cultural mindset for centuries to be submissive to power? Or did the submissive nature of the population make the decimation possible? I can’t say for sure, but I can say that I have been praying for the "conversion of Russia" for years, but my idea of conversion is different than most of the fundamentalist (especially Fatima-driven Catholics) Christians. I don’t think of Russia as particularly any more "godless," than other countries. I do think that the political/social environment has been historically repressive to the human spirit (but then so have a lot of theocracies in the Middle East—only they do it in the name of God instead of socialism), and I think that now the Russian population is devastated by centuries of suffering and repression. Whenever I watch a documentary about Russia, I am appalled at how sickly the people look. I can see severe alcoholism on nearly every single Russian face. I know people don’t understand my terminology, but I can see the multitude of evil spirits that plague the populace. There are evil spirits in every country, but honestly the nation seems put under a curse, and perhaps that is the natural result of a nation that complicitly sided with the most insidious of evil—the destruction and dehumanization of your own kind. Fear led people to comply and now fear and shame of the memory binds the Russian personality into tighter repression. As Solzhenitsyn says, Russia never came to terms with, much less justice for the evil done under the Stalin years, and he compares that with the trials done in Germany after WWII. Even though there is still anti-Semitism in Germany, I can see that most Germans are appalled at what happened in their country under Hitler. There was a collective and healthy kind of repentance associated with the post war trials, and that is why the German nation and personality has rebounded so well. When I look at German faces, I see much healthier and happier people (and they like to drink too!). But the Russian people are burdened by an unexpiated judgment of their own collective guilt and shame, and I fear that unless a collective conversion towards repentance occurs, they will not shake it off, but allow themselves to be driven into another destructive war that could eventually cause a near total collapse of the planet. There is an image I think of when I think of Russia. It is that of a Russian mother holding the hand of her bald headed little girl who is undergoing chemotherapy near Chernobyl. The mother is massively built and strong, with shoulders wider than most NFL tackles. The girl looks desperately sick, and is looking up to her mother for strength. The mother, for all physical strength seems beat down and demoralized, but there still is a fighting spirit in her. Russia is afflicted by a cancer—the cancer that occurs when you destroy the healthy and most vital parts of your own body—and that is what Stalin did for decades—he destroyed the best and brightest of the Russian populace. But they are an incredibly strong people with a fighting spirit. Can they fight off the cancer? I don’t know. That is why I pray for the conversion of Russia. They need all the help they can get. I know somewhere too, Solzhenitsyn is praying for them too.