What They Really Wanted
On Monday afternoon I took a break from writing to sit on the front porch absorbing the beautiful sunshine and fresh air. As I sat with my feet up, I continued listening to a book which will, at first, seem incongruous with a relaxing break.
I came to a passage that brought deep joy to my heart. When the music began to signal an end of the chapter and the beginning of another one, I turned off the audio. I wasn’t ready to go on to another part of the story. I needed time to absorb and savor what I had just heard.
I hope I can convey the meaning to those of you who are too young to remember the world that people of my generation experienced. We were born into a world that was sharply divided between oppressed and free, between democratic and Communist. We could never quite get away from the reality of it. Though I had a wonderful childhood and have precious memories, there was always the reality that a dictator in the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) could order nuclear bombs to destroy us and everything around us. Those bombs might make earth unlivable or, in the best scenario, a terrible nightmarish desolate existence.
This photo is from a meeting at the U.S. State Department during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union came close to moving from threats to actual attacks on one another.
The two main players in the conflict were our own beloved United States and the U.S.S.R.. We didn’t hate the people who lived in the U.S.S.R., but we were justifiably frightened by those at the top. The name of this conflict was The Cold War and that is the name of the book I was listening to on Monday afternoon. The whole title is The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. The book isn’t so new now; it was published in 2005. Gaddis continues as a history professor at Yale. He is now 79 years old.
The book is a fascinating explanation of national and world events that whirled around me from my birth until our children were 20, 18, and 16. If it were not for a handful of expletives within quotes from famous people, I would recommend it wholeheartedly. It was refreshing to hear an honest history of an historical period which has not always been history to us Baby Boomers. It was not “past tense,” but “present tense,” for us.
As a child, I remember wondering whether I could stand up for my faith in God if a real live Russian asked me point blank if I believed in Him, threatening to kill me if I answered yes. The atheistic philosophy of Communism in the U.S.S.R. was central to its practice. I had never heard the word atheize until I started listening to this book. Atheizing was a key purpose of the education of children in Communist countries. I believe with all of my heart that atheizing is one purpose of many American professors today. That gives me pause. Have I really lived to see atheizing become a main objective in some universities? Why does anyone encourage their children to learn under someone who wants to do that?
The U.S.S.R. not only controlled its own people but also the people in many “satellite” countries that came under its sphere of influence at the end of World War II. As Winston Churchill put it, those countries were behind an Iron Curtain. Those countries were part of the Warsaw Pact. In addition to the U.S.S.R., they included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The U.S. and the countries of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) were on this side of the Iron Curtain. We were part of the free world.
For people in my generation, we could hardly imagine a world that was different from what we knew. As we grew up, we were always hearing about one set of talks or another between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. These talks were not about real peace. They seemed always to have the same basic theme: how can we co-exist and keep enough weapons to destroy each other without actually blasting each other to smithereens?
Now for what moved me on Monday . . .
In 1978 Karol Józef Wojtyła of Poland became the head of the Roman Catholic Church. His name as pope was John Paul II. He was the first non-Italian in over four centuries. He was the first pope from a Slavic country. He was from behind the Iron Curtain, from a place where the Communist Party had worked to atheize its citizens.
During his first visit to Poland after becoming pope, he landed at the airport in Warsaw. Hundreds of thousands of Poles came to meet him. As he deboarded the plane, they shouted: “We want God! We want God!”
Research shows that since this pandemic began, more people have prayed. Evidently they want God, too.
The God who made the world
and all things in it,
since He is Lord of heaven and earth,
does not dwell in temples made with hands;
nor is He served by human hands,
as though He needed anything,
since He Himself gives to all people
life and breath and all things;
and He made from one man every nation of mankind
to live on all the face of the earth,
having determined their appointed times
and the boundaries of their habitation,
that they would seek God,
if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him,
though He is not far from each one of us;
for in Him we live and move and exist,
Acts 17:24-28
Amen!! We need more of God. This has become a prayer of mine through this “pandemic” that people would see their need for a holy and just God.
Thank you also for this quick walk through history, which by the way I walked too as I remember those days of hiding under desks for bomb drills and when I was very young, the school we went to had a basement. I still remember the fear I felt when we would descend those stairs for once everyone was down, the lights would go off except one small light near the door at the top of the stairs. We would sit in darkness with our heads between our knees until the lights would come back on and the okay given to go back upstairs. The world today is a very different world from back then. But the solution needed then is the same today–Jesus!