Yakov Krotov

THE DAY AFTER FREEDOM:

It happened so that I came to America not as Columbus, through Haiti, but as the Mayflower, through England.I was shocked with my first encounter with the West in London: the air of freedom, inner dignity, sincere politeness, and privacy. In a week I got used to the blessed air of democracy.

But I was still shocked by U.S. All my life I got used to the idea of differences of America and Russia, and I was not ready to see the similarities. The semblance can partly be easily explained: beginning from Khrushchev's visit to states and his famous decision "to run down and to outrun America" the United States became an example to Russian leaders. As Peter the Great Westernized Russia, a la mode Germany, so Communists did the same a la mode America.

The difference between America and Russia came out to be not the rude and basic difference between black and white. It was the second-rate distinction between clean glass and dirty glass. I have suddenly seen what Russia can be, and what, I pray, she will be some time in the future.

I understood that the Russian dream is as similar to American dream as the Russian dream is unsimilar to the English dream, whatever these dreams are. I was really taken back to the USSR, to the USSR all Russians dreamed of, and tried to build, and try to build now with other means. I have seen the USSR without communists, evil, and imperialistic. It was just like a fairy tail became a reality.

The problem is that fairy tales cannot become reality. The fairy tale simply finishes, and life begins. The prince and princess become husband and wife, and they live happily evere after. This "evere after" is described not by fairy tales but by "Macbeth" and "Hamlet": the former prince became Father's Ghost. Reality of "evere after" is a reality of pshycoanalysts, home counsellors, mortgages, children, the teeth and hairs leaving us.

United States shocked me because everybody seems to preserve their children, teeth and hairs. So it is possible to gain a victory, a princess, trip to Hawaii and keep smiling! In the medieval East artisans believed that when the work was finished, there is nothing left to do. Then a man must die. So they always left some nearly invisible detail unfinished. But, alas! The modern America proves to Russian that he can finish his work, gain the victory and happiness, and still remain alive and begin a new one.

For a Christian that means making a shift in those parts of Christianity which he thought to be eternal and immovable. Russian preachers most often repeat the words of Solszhenistyn: "The people have forgot God." That is why we became poor, egotistical, dirty, "Russian" in the worst possible sense of the word. Restore Christianity, and you restore Russia.

I was shocked as a man can be shocked in Spiellberg's films, when he seems himself in the far future as a retired old man. The goal is reached, the dream is realized, and difficulties are overcome with God's help, thank God. And what's after?

I was shocked to see that Americans don't have the answer. The only answer which is ready is the answer of Fukuyama: history came to an end and is replaced by Liberal Democracy, which comes out to be another name for Eternity. We are in Heaven, or, to be modest, in purgatory.

What can be immediately seen is that nobody wants to enjoy eternity, to be in Heaven. People try to return to a life of struggle. It is very easy: you only need to remind yourself that not everybody is still in Paradise, that there are starving people in United States itself, not to mention the outer world. So Americans become sickened with the idea of helping others. It is as if saints in Heaven have decided to make a strike, a theological strike, and refuse to enjoy eternal life until all sinners will be saved from the eternal fire. But what must be ever after all sinners come to Heaven?

You can be help-oriented for some time, may be for several ages. God expelled us from Paradise with the words: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; In sorrow shalt thou eat of it ... In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." (Gen 3:17, 19). Usually this is thought to be a curse, but it is a blessing, as well as the life penalty is a blessing compared with the immediate electric chair. All economic and social injustices are a deviation from this blessing. There are too many people who eat bread without any sweat of the brow; there are even people who eat bread although the sweat is on the brow of others, and these others are starving. Those, who are bothered mainly by this problem, become socialists. But many more people work with the sweat of their brows and still don't have bread. Their creativity is spoiled or badly oriented. Those who bother about this problem turn to capitalism. The Church has something to say to both systems and both deviations. But here, in the States, there is a blessed silent majority, eating its own bread in the sweat of its own brows, and so obedient to God's commandment. The Church is why this is so. But whether the Church is needed only a base for economical prosperity and psychological stability? Persecutions help us to be Christians, but persecutions and disasters are not the sense of Christianity. How to live without persecutions, after recovery, in wealth and health?

I experience America's nicest side. I live in fine hotels, communicate with spiritually and physically healthy people. Certainly, I suspect that the States are not really Heaven. That doesn't matter! Man is such a being that what is meaningful to him need not be reality, but possibility. So, even when I shall return in Russia, I will be obliged internally to preach the Gospel in a different way. I must now remember that Church is not only a shelter, a spiritual hospital. Not only disabled, but abled also have their place in the Church. Moreover, Church is present in order to help everybody become healthy and abled. the Church is a medicine but the Church is something more than a medicine. So even those who are ill must look at the Church not as they look at the phisician. I am sure, this is possible. I am sure that the Church and Christ are needed even in Heaven, they are not just a ticket and guide to happiness. Moreover, in the Paradise, among healthy and happy people, Church is more needed and Christ recover His ultimate sense..

To be the Church among wealthy and healthy people is more difficult. I am speaking not about the sick wealthy, who can be very greedy and as such a nice and endless object of preachers' efforts. I am speaking about healthy wealthy, and healthiness is always compassionate without the encourangment of sermons, without external spiritual violence. But it is among the healthy wealthy that the Gospel opens some of its most precious pearls. One has a new understanding of sin. Anther is a new understanding of love.

Healthy wealthy has a unique opportunity to understand that sin is not only a crime against this or that law, but that sin is a violation of Grace, against Love. When we come close to perfection, we see that perfection is greater and further than we thought. Love comes out to be not only help, the filling in of the gaps.

Christ is not only a healer, not only a Savior. The Church is not only a hospital or hotel. Salvation is not only healing, but also a communion of healed. Heaven is not the triumph of consumption, whether material or spiritual. Heaven opens the ultimate sense and justice of productivity and creativity. One produces not for his own or his neighbors' consumption, but produces in order to see that "it is very good" and rejoice in Gods' in everlasting creation.
 

CHURCH INVISIBLE IS CHURCH INVINCIBLE

The Church can be justly blamed for resisting to democracy, but Christians cannot. Christians invented democracy, fed democracy, lived and died for democracy, while their Churches opposed to democracy. This is the paradox: how the ways of the Church and Christians be different?

This paradox cannot be solved as easily as it is to proclaim that Church and Christians are different things. They are not. Christians are blaiming their own Church (non-Christians also, but this is not part of this discussion.) Christians want the Church to flourish, the churches to be over-crowded, the social life ruled by Christian ethics -- and at the same time the same Christians want their Church to be socially and political invisible, they are afraid of the slightest signs of direct interference of the Church in political affairs, blaming it as "clericalism."

This desire has different levels, which can be demonstrated in the case of George Weigel. This devout Polish Catholic, who himself struggled for the freedom of Poland from the Bolshevics and now is close to begining the struggle of freeding Poland from the Church. Poland is a land, newly reclaimed for freedom, and the problem is seen there in all complexity.

First, Weigel says, the Church -- and this is to say, the clergy -- must be more polite to the laity. "Most of the people were ready to give the Church what it wanted, but they wanted to be asked nicely. It is supposed to be part of the new era that you discuss things rather than just demand things." (This and following quotations are from: Richard John Neuhaus. Poland: Reflections On a New World. First Things. February 1994. Number 40. P. 21)

Weigel doesn't explain why the Church must be more polite, why during the Communist era it was fine for the laity only "to pray, pay, and obey - also in the realm of the political", and now it is not. The answer is obvious: "to ask nicely" means to let the laity share in the ruling of Church matters, to share information, to share responsibility. This is too close (for a Catholic mind) to the idea of a democratically governed Church: sharing information is the first step of the democracy.

Second, Weigel says, "The challenge to the Church is not only to surrender her monopoly but actively to cultivate other centers and institutions of virtue. . . . Not of course that the Church herself can be democratically governed, but she should acknowledge and welcome the integrity of decision-making by others in the spheres of politics, economics, and culture. In a free society, the influence of the Church is exercised not so much in direct relationship to the state as it is mediated through the activity of the faithful."

The Church must be not only polite and democratic internally. Externally the Church must be connected with the state and society only "through the activity of the faithful." Why? Why is freedom in democracy, born by the Church, the first of all freedoms given by the Church, from the most visible part of the Church?

The answer is simple and sad: because the Church is the body of Christ, existing, and co-existing with the bodies and souls of men and women. This not a peaceful coexistence. Christians are unworthy of Christ, Christians tend to witness not about Christ, but about themselves. Christians are tempted to return to phariseeism, substituting God's merits with their own merits (and sins.)

God in due time took the horn of force away from the Church, gave it to the civic society, and individuals, thus creating through different historic ways secular society in the best sense of the world: not as an opposition to the Church, but as a substitution, alter ego, counterbalance of the Church. It will be so fine to think about civil society as only addition to the Church. The problem is that civil society is too overtly against this idea, it is addition which wants to be the main body, it is a shadow which wants to become a master and excecute the original master.

God separated state and Church, society and Church, but first of all He separated freedom from the Church. That doesn't mean that freedom can be gained only outside the Church; but members of the Church are now not the only people to guard the freedom.

"Members of the Church" means all those who want to be members of the Church, and here lies a bitter piece. Lay Christians want to share with the hierarchy responsibility, power and glory. They received what they wanted. The result was not so much glory as coolness and boycotting of laymen's Christian responsibility and true Christian behaviour by those whom laymens helps.

Bishops knew this from the Dark Ages. The same principle which lead laymen and laywomen to look with suspicion toward clergy, now lead the secular world to look with even greater suspicion toward any Christian. During the Middle Ages people received sacraments and ethics from the Church hierarchy, without much respect to the hands who mediated in the distribution of these goods. Now the entire society receives the fundamentals of natural law and some parts of grace from Christianity without any desire to admit that Christianity is the source of all this.

Many Christians think such a situation is dangerous. We are afraid that it diminishes our influence. We want to have the Christian trade mark on everything which is connected with Christianity -- and it is nearly everything in modern world. Society opposes this, and God seems to help society, not the Christians' endevours. The reason is just the same: not to let Christians be proud of Christianity, to free people gratitude to the Church.

Lord created secularization, maybe as kind of a joke. Lord makes his Church, his Body invisible while His faithful tries to make her pompous and forcefully self-evident. But invisible does not mean non-existant, but non-defeatable. Invisibility is an ancient dream of all warriors. Certainly, this doesn't mean that Christians must themselves try to be invisible, must be afraid of constiting the Church, of mission, of worship, or of dogmas. This is a long-awaited ideal of agnostics: to make Christianity (and all religions) sophisticated to the degree of non-existing. But the reverse is more apt: the more this world denies Christianity, the more Christian we ought to be. But we must not await for recognition, applauses, or proud of how the fruits of Christianity are consumed by those who have not planted a seed in the soil. In doing this we shall be invisible as Jesus, invincible with Christ.