I have been rereading sections of Michael O'Brien's excellent book Father at Night. The book is a compilation of stories and reflections by O'Brien, usually related to events in his own life. One such story involves O'Brien sharing tales from a friend he once had many years ago. This friend was an old Polish man who lived on his own, spoke broken English, and usually kept to himself. However, after a while he began to open up his life story to O'Brien.
The stories are simply stunning. The man was a Polish officer in WWII who was chased to Russia by the Germans. Once there the Russians captured him and led him (and 20,000 other Polish officers) to be executed. But wait! Weren't Poland and Russia on the same side? Well, the man explains that for the execution there were people dressed as German soldiers, but they all spoke Russian. In other words, it was actually the Russians who carried out this mass murder. The man escaped into the woods, thanks to some of the Russian soldiers being too drunk to shoot a gun properly, but he was later recaptured and sent to a couple of prisoner camps in northern Russia. One of the prisoner camps was actually an old monastery. O'Brien's friend recalled that he was once shown a cellar at this monastery where he was shocked to see skeletons wearing monk-clothes tied to a wall. Apparently the Russians had rounded up the monks at one point and simply tied them to the wall in the cellar to die. At another time the man was told that the entire earth underneath the monastery was filled with corpses of hundreds of priests and monks whom the Russians killed.
These were just some of the stories recounted by O'Brien's friend. Many of them have never made it into history textbooks. Many horrors of communist Russia are known only to God, and a few scarred and silent survivors. It is a scary thought thinking about monk skeletons chained to walls (probably still there) in northern Russia.
Then O'Brien shares this thought:
"An important insight that our friend often repeated was this: he believed that the people of the West have not been put to the test of faith as have the Christian people of the East, and that we in the West are unprepared for great suffering. He wondered if we understood that the spirit of evil, which had acted openly in the East, was also at work in the West, and that terrible evils always follow when men turn away from God" (p. 77).
Hmmm...
Ok, what is going on in the world today? The West is chiding Russia over human rights abuses. These abuses highlighted, though, usually have little to do with the communist era. Rather, they mainly concern the gay rights agenda.
Our increasingly Godless West is telling the East how to live. Perhaps instead the scarred East should be warning the West how to live.
I'm sure if they could speak, the dead monks tied to the wall in northern Russia would agree.