Fraternity-Testvériség, 1962 (40. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1962-07-01 / 7. szám

4

FRATERNITY

of the slaughter. We were shown the museum where the pitiful remains are preserved: the monument that records in granite every other atrocious obliteration of hapless cities wiped out by war. Most of all we missed the lovely church, which had stood at the center of old Lidice. There was no church at all in the new town; only hate and fear — fear of Germany and hatred of the West for contributing to German re-armament. It seemed as if amid the vivid memory of the bitter storm, Christ alone had been forgotten.

The other town was Coventry in England, victim of the same Nazi ferocity, now built up again with great good sense in modern dress — and all on a human scale, rather than with the madness that defiles our American cities by deifying the motorized wheel. People count in England, and the chief street in the new Coventry is a mall for pedestrians only. But the heart of Coventry is still the Cathedral, built anew in modern idiom, perfectly related to the humane concept of all else in the new-sprung city.

In the forecourt of the new Cathedral is the shrine that contrasts so poignantly with Lidice. The forecourt of the new is the nave of the old Cathedral, now planted in grass, still outlined by the broken tracery of its charred windows. There, where the high altar once stood, stones are piled, crowned by a cross made of two ancient spikes from the roof. And behind this cross are written just the two words: "Father Forgive." When one stands in that place, the holy whisper of Christ is almost audible, as He rebukes the wind and the sea. And the people of Coventry, forgiving, in imitation of Him, have received 16 boys and girls from Germany who have given a year of their labor to help rebuild this shrine of peace. They gave me tea, there

among the ruins.

Lidice . . . and Coventry! Hate and Healing! Fear of the storm

. . . and the shelter of faith! At first I thought that these were

symbols of East and West, signs of a differing temper on either side of the Iron Curtain. It is perhaps understandable that we Americans should be caught prisoner by our own propaganda and come to believe that everything on the other side is atheism, while God can only rejoice in the temperateness of our own culture on the hither side.

However, my recent sojourn in Czechoslovakia illumined for me the fact that faith dwells on both sides of the political boundary. The truth is that “In Christ there is no East or West.”

Five days spent in conference with Christian leaders of Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Eastern Germany — and two more days preaching and visiting in two parish churches in Prague — confirmed the holy communion which no political or military force can breach. Christianity in the Russian orbit has been stripped of any complacency, any advantage, any security it may once have had. There it costs dear to confess the faith. A pastor’s child may not enter a university, but is condemned by the father’s profession to a life of manual labor. Those who openly attend Divine Worship are the last to be promoted to any job worth having. Yet I preached, unannounced by any advance notice, to congregations well populated by young and