Never mind who’s behind the Iron Curtain
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 3, 2019
- 1549
When I was younger, I would sit in the pew at church and fidget. I’d seek pencil and paper and write my name over and over and over until its meaning was lost to me amidst the scribbles, anything to not pay attention to the sermon being directed at the small sea of faces sitting dutifully in the same spots, worn from holding our bodies upright.
In this relative safety net, I’d pore over the pamphlets and newsletters that were placed there every month. Of interest to me was the one I remember being titled “Behind the Iron Curtain.”
I’d read of attempts to deliver Bibles, people being persecuted for their faith and all matter of intrigue that would never touch me where I lived. In my youngish mind I envisioned an actual iron curtain, an impenetrably long wall separating communist countries from the rest of the world. It took me awhile before I realized it was a metaphor for their government’s structure that kept them apart: blocked-off information, feeding the population only what they wanted them to hear through repetitive state TV, slow trickles of false information.
I always wondered whether the people living inside these countries knew what was happening. Because the publication I was reading was Christian, it talked of smuggling in the word of God — sending them the words they needed to be free in Christ even while trapped in a world their own governments made for them. I understood it in a minute way, my still small mind diluting the words into comprehensible and digestible portions. Reading comprehension came early to me, but the ways of war, communism and the blockage of free will remained at large in my head, a free-floating concept I wanted to learn more about.
But even with free will taken away, your mind is free to think, to pray, to endeavor and engage.
What I didn’t understand is why the people didn’t just leave, flee to another country because of this oppression. Why would you stay somewhere that wants to harm you, hold you hostage to certain thoughts and processes they deem necessary for you? What I didn’t understand then was that they couldn’t just leave, and if they did try, it would be under cover of darkness and done in a way that was “illegal.”
I also wanted to know why we took extreme measures to smuggle Bibles into these countries but didn’t take extreme measures to smuggle people out. Why was it OK to smuggle an illegal Bible in to a country where it was banned? Is it only OK to break the law if it’s to spread God’s love?
This question still stands for the events of the current day: lack of compassion for refugees, disdain for asylum seekers and hatred for those seeking better lives on our own borders. If people risked their life to deliver Bibles in a communist country, how easy would it be for us in the current day to show love to those that need it?
All we need do is take a drive to the border to serve, supporting better laws instead of hostility.
I was drawn to books on the struggle of the Jewish people to stay alive during WWII, the fall of Tsar Nicholas in Russia, and the Civil War between the northern and southern portions of our own country that fought to end/keep slavery. I was ever drawn to those in peril and under oppression, seeking to understand from their perspective how they existed inside unsafe circles. And as I grew older, I wondered how their own neighbors watched as they were dragged into the ghettos, the gulags and why half of our country believed holding slaves was the only way to live.
Progression is the path forward.
From my church pew I would travel through words to these places, seeking to understand the whys. We were taught in church to read and revere the Martyr’s Mirror. Martyrdom — dying for one’s faith. Going against the grain. Bucking the system, like the good protestants we are. Protestant. Protest.
Would we know if we were living inside a system of oppression? Or would it sneak slowly up on us, like a slithering snake in the grass, lulled into an existence by the repetition of words and phrases that become rote, conditioned? Would we, now, become martyrs for what is good, what is right? Or are we happy to become drowsy and tired, content to live inside safe circles?
My younger mind sought to know the whys, but my older mind begs me do not become sleepy. Do not be annoyed with anything that might tip the balancing plates and send our ostensibly safe lives off kilter, lest we wake up inside an iron curtain of our own making.