What the Dissidents Learned about Paranoia

I have gained fresh insight into the meaning of faith from an unlikely combination of sources: the writings of Eastern European dissidents and an eighteenth-century French mystic.

For many years the Eastern Europeans lived under oppressive regimes that tended to promote a sense of paranoia. As the saying goes, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” and these dissidents responded appropriately. They met in secret, used code words, avoided public telephones, and published pseudonymous essays in underground papers.

In the midseventies, however, Polish and Czech intellectuals began to realize that the constant double life had cost them dearly. Quite simply, they had lost the most basic sense of freedom and human dignity. By working in secret, always with a nervous glance over the shoulder, they had succumbed to fear, the goal of their Communist opponents all along. They made a conscious decision to change tactics.

“We will act as if we are free, at all costs,” the Poles, and then the Czechs, decided. The Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland began holding public meetings, often in church buildings, despite the presence of known informers. They signed articles, sometimes adding an address and phone number, and distributed newspapers openly on the street corners.

Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, determined to write no longer with an eye on what the authorities might approve, but to write the truth, no matter what. (Several plays by Havel, who became President of Czechoslovakia, depict the conflict involved in reaching this decision.)

The authorities did not know how to respond. Sometimes they cracked down—nearly all the dissidents spent time in prison—and sometimes they watched with a frustration bordering on helplessness.

Meanwhile, the dissidents’ brazen tactics made it far easier for them to connect with one another and the West, and a kind of “freedom archipelago” took shape, a bright counterpart to the darkling “gulag archipelago.”

Most important, the new approach emboldened the dissidents themselves; they discovered that inner freedom gives sustenance even when external freedom is snatched away. Prison, after all, provides an ideal setting in which to learn to cherish freedom. Against all odds, they clung to belief in fundamental principles of truth and justice even as their governments tried to compel them to believe the opposite.

Remarkably, we have lived to see their triumph. An alternative kingdom of people united by ideas, a kingdom of rags, of prisoners, of poets and philosophers who convey their words in the scrawl of hand-copied samizdat, has toppled what seemed an impregnable fortress.

In three amazing days, the Russians themselves acted out the final script of freedom. They, too, stood in the streets and declared, “We will act as if we are free”—even in front of the KGB building, even staring down the mouth of a tank cannon.

Loving The Present Moment

I was traveling in Scandinavia this summer during the climactic period when the revolution in the streets took place. Each night I watched the images on television. Lacking an English translation, I could only guess at the details of what was transpiring just across the border, but the contrast between the faces of the coup leaders inside and the masses outside told me all I needed to know. With startling clarity, they showed who was really afraid, and who was really free.

On this same trip I read The Sacrament of the Present Moment, a remarkable book by the French mystic Jean-Pierre de Caussade, newly translated by Kitty Muggeridge. Writing to a group of beleaguered nuns in the chaotic decades before the French Revolution, he set out for them a challenging program of spiritual direction.

“Faith gives the whole earth a celestial aspect,” said de Caussade. “Each moment is a revelation of God.” Regardless of how things appear at a given moment in time, all of history will ultimately serve to accomplish God’s purpose on earth. He advised the nuns to “love and accept the present moment as the best, with perfect trust in God’s universal goodness.… Everything without exception is an instrument and means of sanctification.”

Objections immediately sprang to my mind, as probably happened with the nuns who first read those words. God’s universal goodness in a nation careering toward blood and madness? A celestial aspect in a world growing increasingly pagan? Suffering, violence, persecution—are these, too, instruments and means of sanctification?

Paranoia In Reverse

Watching newsreels from Red Square on Finnish television, reading the hard words from de Caussade, I came up with a new definition of faith. It is “paranoia in reverse.”

A truly paranoid person organizes his or her life around a common perspective of fear. Whatever happens feeds that fear. Try to comfort a paranoiac, “I’m here to help you, not hurt you,” and you will merely increase the fear. (Of course he’d say that—he’s part of the conspiracy.)

Faith works in the reverse. A faithful person organizes his or her life around a common perspective of trust. Bedrock faith convinces me that despite the apparent chaos of the present moment, God does reign; that regardless of how cast-off I may feel, I matter, truly matter, to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end. Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of God’s Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest.

Gregory of Nyssa once called Saint Basil’s faith ambidextrous because he welcomed pleasures with the right hand and afflictions with the left, convinced that both would serve God’s design for him. “God’s purpose for us is always what will contribute most to our good,” said de Caussade. Tough words. I believe them today, but will I tomorrow?

We have seen in our own time what can happen when a group of people band together to live out a truth—we are free—that all around them is being denounced as a lie. Walls and kingdoms crumble. What would happen if we acted as if the words of the apostle John are literally true: “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world”?

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