In 1994, five years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I traveled to Hungary, Poland, and the newly formed Czech Republic. Then, life in these countries was at a crossroads, with all the attendant contradictions born of any emerging society.
In one of Prague’s quirkily futuristic subway stations, for example, I saw a massive and altogether bizarre wall mosaic, a cultural icon just dripping with Cold War sensibilities.
Built by the Soviets who, for reasons not entirely clear, knew how to build clean, efficient subways (in contradistinction to the rest of their architectural efforts), the mosaic celebrated the idealized workers’ paradise, complete with heroic farmers and industrial workers linked arm-in-arm.
At its center stood the Kremlin, in all its majestic splendor, like a benevolent, animating force in the midst of some heavenly realm. As I ascended one of the many gigantic escalators that at dizzying speeds propelled hordes of commuters up inclines of what seem to be almost 90 degree angles, I couldn’t help noticing how truly odd and out of place this icon’s symbolism was to the Prague of 1994.
Watching my fellow commuters gliding past this utopian dreamscape, many dressed in fashionable Western garb, left an almost surrealistic impression. Their fixed eyes and grave countenance bespoke the failure of the icon’s absurdist vision, while their American T-shirts and hurried pace seemed to mock openly its curiously priggish austerity.
In Eastern Europe one could see everywhere such signs of a lingering past coupled with those of an emerging future. Needless to say, these contradictions were baffling, even to the casual observer. While life there appeared to me a bit grim and forbidding, those familiar with the region reported at the time how much greater was the sense of optimism and freedom since 1989.
In our faith lives as well, it’s sometimes difficult to make sense of the changes that come upon us, changes that continually renew and transform our inner being.
Not all change is as tumultuous as that which rocked Eastern Europe 29 years ago, or as obvious. Life can settle in. There come great moments of spiritual awakening and then, invariably, days when nothing seems to happen at all.
It occurred to me as I walked around the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau how life can change piecemeal, though, in time, radically.
On a bright blue day, with tourists like me milling about, it was difficult to grasp the horror that once held its death grip on this place. Even walking directly into the gas chamber and crematorium where just 70 some-odd years ago unchecked evil had raged and lusted, even then, my mind simply could not comprehend their true significance.
From a window in one of the cells at Auschwitz I took a picture of a gun tower with a bicycle leaning against its base. Behind the rows of barbed wire, in a place once as close to hell as any on earth, a day worker’s bicycle stood peacefully under a lazy summer sky, the scene almost commonplace, strangely commonplace. Who could have envisioned such a scene in, say, 1943?
God’s kingdom has broken into the world. At times we feel it dramatically, at other times quietly, if at all. God is bringing down the old order and replacing it with the new. The eternal NOW has come upon us, and it shall not fail.