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Holding on
...to faith and a good conscience (1 Tim
1:19) 24 May 2001 19:04
Yes it is true: I believe in God,
and whenever now I am trying to speak to people about it they seem somewhat
suspicious (remember atheism was here a state policy whose roots will still
be creeping long into the future). Suspicious of what I wonder? Of me not
being frank in what I state? I think the main source of these doubts is
the bad reputation the priests have here.
But how can I truly show someone
that I am a believer? All I can do is just behave in such a way that my
own example shows that I live in my faith. The power of example is as ever
the best way to teach and promote our Bible based truth.
I have on my mind now St Paul. What
a man!
God has put me through many trials and I thank Him that through it
all, I did not do any transaction with my conscience. That's the real sense of my own freedom, for having a conscience,
the most fearful judge for anyone, which is clean in the human sense if not the
angelic one. That's the essence of my salvation
from the Sodom and Gomorah of our times. I did not, and will not, trade it for worldly goods.
I meditate often on
the reply of the ancient Greek philosopher Diogene to Alexander
the Great:
- "Are you Diogene?"
- "Yes", said the phiolosopher.
- "I am Alexander, King
of Macedonia and now of Greece too! What do you want! Just say it!
- "Sunlight - you are standing between the sun and me!"
Diogene used to sleep in a
cask, to show his disdain toward the comfort that his contemporaries were ever
seeking. I wonder how would he feel after a days journey through the Birmingham
or Liverpool of these days - a world busy
with grasping portions of the elusive ecstasy for which it is ready to pay any
price !
Yes here in this 'monastic place'
- my room at the hotel, I am thanking God for helping me muddle through.
I write and read as much as possible in order that I might pass on something
of value.
But there are many in Romania ready
to scoff and put you down when you put forward a project of your own. No
wonder we all are frozen, unable to make things happen, to move forward,
to build our future, 'to grasp the fate by the throat' as Beethoven put
it. Here in my country this veil of 'negativity' is a true curse. And I
am sure it happens in your country too. But so what? I will tell my story
as one who doesn't have anything else to offer than their life's novel!
Does anyone know what it's like to
be threatened, with having a gun at your head with a nervous finger ready
to pull the trigger to blast your brains? It's not like in the movies at
all because you don't have a remote control to turn off the show when it
gets too tragic. It has happened more than once. But let me tell you about this one:
...in Kosovo
It was about
ten months before the NATO strike on Serbia. Together with six other Romanians I was
looking for work not very far from
Macedonia's frontier. Five of my countrymen were from my home village Enisala, and one from
the nearby town of Babadag
(his name was Miti like mine, this caused unending confusion!)
For about two days we had wandered unsuccessfully from one village
to another. Then, in the morning, we were walking on an old country side road lined on both sides with maize crop,
when we were approached by a young fellow. He had worn out clothing and was bare footed.
Miti (from Babadag) knew some Serbian, and said the guy seemed to offering help
for finding work in the
area.
We stood there in the middle
of the road. No human settlement was in sight and
we wondered where he had come from? - we were a little suspicious.
Suddenly the guy
drew out of his back a pistol, and with an intimidating noise and a theatrical
gesture armed it. Shouting in Serbian, he pointed with a finger and grasped one of
us by the t-shirt and pushed him to the ground in a way that meant
unmistakably: 'Down on your belly, face down.'
We
all dropped down flat.
"Marks! Marks!" he shouted, obviously knowing that Serbians
would usually pay us in Deutchmarks, not their Dinars. We each were terrified
and spoke not a word. Then he began violently kicking each us in the rear and
howling: "Passaports, passaports!"
We gave him our passports. I was hoping he would look inside them and realise that we had just
come in the country and had no time to earn anything. I was relieved when he
studied each passport in his hand, then spoke to us in a bit more of a moderate
tone:
"300 marks" he said.
We had some money on us (I had sewn under
my blue-jeans label, $100, just in case) but we each hesitated to admit
it.
After a few seconds silence, he became wild and began stepping on
our backs, putting his pistol's pipe to the back of each of our heads, while swearing abundantly.
I don't think that any of us in those tense moments recollected any
of Chuck Norris, or Bruce Lee's gymnastic somersaults, although often
before we had boasted of such machismic bravado in the cinema of our daydreams (and
I remember shamefully, we did afterwards too!).
I felt strangely calm, but when I looked at the others - they were pale-faced, and with strangled voices looked
as if they had just heard the death sentence and had before them the executioner.
I had a bizarre remembrance of us playing our childhood cops and robbers games,
acting out a situation not that different from this.
But this was for
real. This executioner wanted 300 marks, and fast.
For some reason, I said
to my namesake "Miti, give it him from your money."
The executioner was an Albanian brigand on the prowl for an easy take (we learned
later about their practices from a serb). He grabbed the money, gave us back the passports, and
disappeared.
A great darkness moved from our sky.
Yeah, relief! We were... free, free, free once more, and suddenly everything was so wonderful
all around. Along the road, we talked thousands of times about
what we should have done to that brat, who at no more than 16-17 years
of age played Russian Roulette with our adult 'I've-seen-it-all'
lives.
But the truth is that then, I bet not one of us saw anything else, other than the gun.
After the war, the history is written...... |
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The
Little One
28 May 2001 11:33
From here in Romania, I see your
Labour party is running England with Tory means, somehow wrapped in the
old working class flag to please only its hard core members. Let's remember
that the reigning Labour of today has little remembrance to that one from
the heyday times of Soviet Union. Then it had many affinities to the Russian
socialism. But today? For an outsider like me, there's a huge difference
between Tony Blair's 'New Labour' speeches and the old Harold Wilson's
ones filled with populist stuff.
Your countrymen have always had
the luxury of ruminating about something they have never, in their whole
history, experienced. For no Englishman alive, nor any of his ancestors,
has ever known totalitarianism.
It's a gross mistake some people
are still making by seeing capitalism as another ideology just like communism
or nazism. Capitalism is the natural development of the human societies
whereas communism is artificial, an ideology-based mutation. If you look
around you can see just as many capitalisms as there are countries, but
always the same communism wherever you go.
For us in Ceausescu's Romania, the
theology of the party forced bitter dilemmas, dividing mind from spirit,
truth from fact:
Is it moral to kill ten people in
order that five may live better off? For a fanatical communist, 'yes'.
I remember a communist leader once
said: 'When a woman labours to give birth to a child, it is no matter how
much blood flows or if the mother dies, it is only important for the child
to come out alive.' (important that is for the state, to keep a dream alive).
There are some guys ever ready to allow any barbarism, to sacrifice not
only the truth, but human life too, just to prove that their theory is
right. Living people are already for them statistics. For these the Gulag
did not exist. For if it really existed then they have to admit the social
and political system they believed in was a huge abattoir where 30-40 million
people were slaughtered. I don't know the real number.
Yes, it's interesting that communism
as an ideology still fascinates some people in the west just like the nazi
one. I would not understand how people could still hold to these ideas
but for this....
In Enisala there was an old man,
we called him 'Mititelul' - that is the 'little one' in English - because
he was short.
As always I loved listening to old
stories from the past, I would ask him each time I had opportunity to tell
me again about war times (he fought in both world wars as a soldier). I
was interested to learn about his version of the events he went through.
He was short, as I said, and never
wore modern clothes, despising anything new that would make a comfortable
life - from using electrical appliances, or shaving blades, to walking
to the nearest town instead of going by bus.
We then (in the 70's) lived in the
style of those 'modern' times as we do now. It was a world he utterly rejected.
He lived in his own traditional universe that he inherited from immemorial
times, passed down from father to son. He was the only man I ever knew
who really breathed and lived like the century-old Romanian peasant, traditionalist
in every true sense of the word.
Mititelul was a patriarchal figure
from the bottom of time who had grasped some truths on the way to eternity
and would rather die than change or jettison them. The doctrine of Darwinism
was totally unknown to him. God was present and in control of every aspect
of his life. He was connected to the divine high order and it's rhythm,
by each sacred deed in his everyday life - plowing, sowing, harvesting,
social events etc.
He was a reader of nature, and knew
from his father when it will rain, or when there will be a drought, or
if it is a good year for sheep breeding etc, - just by reading the signs
in natures' book that was, and still is, sealed to me. He lived life adjusted
to the cosmic rhythm about him, accepting all the hardships, and the disasters
of war, with incredible serenity and a 'God gives and God takes away' obedient
attitude. He brought with him a sense of eternity because he wasn't infected
by the century's virus of ever more speed.
No woman could adjust to, or cope
with, his odd life style. He changed a lot of them (the idea of emancipation
was out of another world for him, used as he was to seeing his mom washing
his father's feet!).
When Romania entered World War Two
on the side of Germany he was bombarded with nazi propaganda so strong
that the next ideological wave - communism - did not brake an inch of his
own first convictions.
Hitler was a God given hero to him,
the German occupation was 'salvation'.
Not even the Siberian Gulag could
alter his thinking, on the contrary, it hardened it.
When I asked him once about Dachau
he burst with anger:
"It never happened, it was just
Russian Bolshevik propaganda" he said.
"And the Auschwitz extermination
camp?" I asked.
"Who told you about this?" he thundered.
"The school teachers and the history
books."
"Let me tell you this, young boy:
you are too young to understand what happened then. The teachers are bloody
communists, Bolsheviks, and who was it who wrote those history books if
not the Bolsheviks that are now leading the country?"
He hated the communists after being
taken prisoner by them in the war, and then spending many years after the
war in the Siberian Gulag, years that hardened his strong character as
he endured deprivations and death threats.
"It's all but lies and I am telling
you the truth: Hitler was a very clever man and if there hadn't been a
Bolshevik-led union of world armies against him he would have rid peoples
around the world of poverty and civilised them. Germans soldiers that I
met gave me chocolate, and clothes, and cigarettes. - And they were well-mannered
with our Romanian women!"
He died with his personal, very
personal opinions that the nazis were angels and Bolsheviks were demons.
And if even the long Siberian Gulag
years could not make him see that there was no difference between his idol
Hitler, and the opposite idol Stalin, how could I, an inexperienced young
boy?
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