A Story from a Communist Prison by Rachel Phifer
The
research I did for my last book took me to accounts of the Eastern European
gulags and to Gheorghe Calciu of Romania. Put into prison for broadcasting
sermons to youth, he was tortured, starved and isolated. Ronald Reagan took a
special interest in the man’s welfare and what he represented, so the prisons
were especially severe with him.
But it was almost comical how the
plots of the guards never ceased to fail. In one instance, they put two
murderers into his cell, hinting at an early release for them if Calciu should
be killed. Within days, he found the two men kneeling with him as he prayed.
On Easter morning, one of the
harshest guards and a determined atheist entered his cell. Calciu called out
the traditional Easter greeting, “Christ has risen!” He expected a beating for
the words. Instead, the guard answered with the reply, “Truly He is risen!”
Then the guard shook his head, as if confused by the words that had somehow
left his mouth, and walked out.
When Calciu left prison, I won’t say
he was unaffected by the years of torture. He said he still found himself
panicking at the sight of policemen years later, but he continued praying for
his torturers, and those who knew him described him as a man "surrounded
by a cloud of joy."
In my research I was expecting
stories of broken men, and I’m sure there were many. But there were many who
grew stronger than ever in prison. Through beatings and starvation, through
long nights of sleep deprivation and days of hard labor in the mines, through
mocking and psychological torture, as their hair turned prematurely grey and
their bodies wasted, their spirits somehow thrived.
Calciu said prison was the happiest
time in his life, because it was there Christ had been most present. And he
wasn’t the only prisoner who said this. It was in the prisoners’ absolute
poverty that Christ came to them – really came to them.
When I started my novel, I had
thoughts on my mind of how God heals us in the midst of our brokenness. But as
I think of my next book, I’ve had another thought on my mind – of how God
conquers brokenness altogether.
Sometimes it seems that to
understand heaven’s ways you have to look at life through a mirror – your
expectations have to be seen in reverse. To give is to grow rich. To die is to
live. To love your enemies is to overcome them. But the most amazing to me is
that to suffer is to know joy. The less we have – material goods or emotional
goods – the more God is able to give us. And that’s where the conquering comes
in. What is meant to break us, when God draws us near, instead makes us whole.
Rachel Phifer is a wife, mother of
two beautiful girls, contracts manager and writer. In her fiction, she explores
both the riches and sorrows of God’s world, and searches out the Light that
gives hope to both sides of the experience. Her most recent novel, tentatively
titled, The Language of Sparrows,
tells the story of a friendship between Sierra, a teenage genius who is failing
school, and Luca, an old man who spent his youth in a
Romanian gulag.
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