Being Faithful in Persecution

(Picture found here)

The author tells of a friend who pastored in Ukraine:

“. . . One thing was becoming clear to me: he knew all about the deep, unkillable life of the Church. As a young priest-monk from Canada, he had been sent from Rome—where he had learned to speak fluent Ukrainian—into Soviet-controlled Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was just beginning to emerge, stealthily, from hiding. He rode the train from Rome to Kiev with Bibles and cash strapped to his body under his habit; the Bibles were useful for bribing the guards who found the cash—they fingered them eagerly and tucked them away under their jackets. The train was stiflingly hot back then; the windows were nailed shut to prevent people from getting on and off where they shouldn’t. Guards walked up and down the carriages pouring boiling tea into glass cups with metal holders, and the people sucked it through a sugar cube clenched between their front teeth. At night, he would be awoken by a jolt when the train lifted off the European train tracks and swung clunkingly onto the old Soviet gauge. Then he would fall asleep as the train adjusted to its new rhythm and went on its way.

It was the early nineties. Ukrainian priests, bishops and faithful had been executed by the Soviets in the hundreds. Divine Liturgy was said in secret, in private homes, but slowly, Ukrainian Catholicism was becoming visible again. When he first arrived as a young monk, he told me, as he walked through Kiev in his long black cassock the people simply stared at him. They stuck their heads out of the shops with empty shelves and gaped. An old lady came and took his hand, led him to her front step and gave him spoonfuls of thick honey from a jar.

He lived in the old Communist Party school at first and attended Divine Liturgy in the botanical gardens that surrounded the shut-down Vydubysk’yj monastery while members of the Orthodox Church would circle and catcall and jeer as they prayed. Through the Soviet era, churches were used as tractor sheds. When the monks retook them, they found oil all over the floor and filthy altars that had been used as workbenches. The monasteries were derelict and infested with rats. When he eventually moved into one he would find bread gnawed by rat teeth in the kitchen in the morning. Some of the monks simply cut off the end and ate the rest for breakfast. There was only one way to cull the rats, one old monk told him: capture one, plunge a knife into its eyes, then throw it, screaming, into the cellar. A blinded rat will eat its brethren, he said.

Most of all, he remembered the golden sun against the golden domes of Saint Sofia as he explored the streets that first day in Kiev, people staring at him as though he were a ghost. His recollection was so vivid, it was almost as if I remembered it too. I saw him: thin, uncertain, blinking at this new reality as though he himself had been living underground.

. . . In Ukraine, he was threatened with being burnt alive in his car (a favored method of murder by the Ukrainian Mafia at that time) if he didn’t leave the country. He didn’t leave at first. He told me his great fear was for his driver, who had a family, and he didn’t want to desert his post as head of the Basilian Order. Like any serious Christian, he wondered if this was to be his cross, and he didn’t want to climb down unless he was sure he should. Two weeks after that first call, he received a second one: this time with a promise that the threat would be carried out two weeks from that day. Once again, Father Gregory informed his superiors. The Canadian embassy wrote immediately to urge him to leave the country at once, but there was still no word from Rome. Those days of waiting were still visible on his face, in his words and manner, when we first began to meet. It is one thing to contemplate death; it’s another to contemplate the inhumanity of people who are ready to kill you.

Eight days before the threat was to be carried out, an email came ordering him back to Rome. He arrived in the city he had studied in, on and off, for so many years, with only a small amount of money he had requested from the monastery bursar in his pocket—no place to live, no role. He walked the streets of the city for days, unable to stay still, sitting in piazzas, moving from church to church. He put me in mind of Lazarus, after his trembling exit from the tomb. There is the relief and the glory of being saved, but no one talks about the burden of knowledge you bring back with you into the world. Being saved in body isn’t the end of praying for resurrection.”

~Sally Read