Angels Over Budapest
A Short Meditation On Bearing Suffering In Faith
“You have granted me many blessings; let me also accept what is hard from your hand.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a prayer.
Tonight I had dinner with a good Budapest friend, a fellow American Christian. He’s also a writer, and we talked a bit about our craft. And he is a single man, like me, who would like to be married, but who is having a hard time meeting someone. I get it. I share his pain. My marriage effectively ended in 2012, a decade before the divorce. It has been a while.
On the walk back, we talked about how difficult it is to endure loneliness, with no guarantee that it will end. I told him that it’s frustrating to me to hear from well-meaning friends who assure me that the day will come when I will meet someone, because surely that’s what God wants for me. They mean well, and I accept it as a gift of generosity. But the truth is, they don’t know that God wants that for me, and neither do I. Furthermore, even if He does want that for me, that is no guarantee that either I or the woman He chooses will cooperate with His will. I firmly believe, even to this day, that God intended for my ex-wife and me to be married, but things happened over the course of our marriage that caused us to fail. (I hope you will appreciate that I cannot discuss details here.)
We went after dinner to a big beer festival going on in a public park in our city. There were over a thousand people there, easily, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. But who really knows what was in the hearts of those people? One thing the dissolution and destruction of my marriage taught me is that no one outside a marriage really knows what is going on inside it.
It’s also true with individuals. One of the great things about the 1987 Wim Wenders film Wings Of Desire is how the unseen angels listen to the inner thoughts of the silent people of the city, who appear silent and passive to others, but who inside are often struggling in turmoil. I think about that sometimes when I’m on the subway, and everybody looks so dead inside. They aren’t. None of us are. We wear masks.
As we walked back after the beer festival, we went back and forth about how hard it is to learn how to accept God’s will through suffering, even if it is only the suffering of loneliness. I told him that it’s not easy to accept that God’s will for us may not include earthly happiness — that He seeks our good, not necessarily our happiness. There’s an important distinction.
“In my life, there have been times when God had to intervene with a sign to let me know that He was still with me, that whatever I was going through was part of His plan, and that He had not abandoned me,” I said. Then I relayed to my friend this story, which I told here in this passage from Live Not By Lies:
Ogorodnikov, now nearly seventy, is quiet and intense. His face is partially paralyzed as a result of the beatings he received in the gulag. It is one thing to read about the torture of Soviet prison camps in a book. It is quite another to listen to an account from the mouth of a man who lived them. I find out later from my translator that Ogorodnikov had been anxious about meeting me at my hotel, the Hotel Metropol, because in communist times, it was a KGB den.
Though he did not have a death sentence, Soviet authorities nevertheless decided to teach Ogorodnikov a lesson by placing him on death row in one of the USSR’s hardest prisons—a facility where, according to one of Ogorodnikov’s captors, the state sent people to be broken, “to bleed you out, drop by drop.”
“When I went into the cell and looked at the others who were there, I told them, ‘Listen brothers, I was sent here to help you meet death, not as criminals but as men with souls that are going to meet their makers, to go meet God the Father,” he tells me. “Given that they always took people to go be shot really early in the morning, many of them didn’t sleep. They were waiting for the knock at the door to see who would be called out. So, of course they didn’t sleep. Neither did I. I helped them turn this night of terror into a night of hope.”
The young Christian, not yet thirty, told these hardened criminals that though he was not a priest, he would still be willing to hear their confessions.
“I told them I couldn’t absolve them, but when I die and go before the Lord, I will be a witness to their repentance,” he says. “If I wanted to describe for you their confessions, I would need to be Dostoevsky. I don’t have the words myself. I told them that God is merciful, and the fact that they are admitting what they had done, and denouncing it, would wash them and purify them. They were all going to be shot sooner or later, but at least they would die with a clean conscience.”
When the prison authorities realized that confinement in a cell with the worst of the worst was not leading Ogorodnikov to repent of his sins against the Soviet state, they put him in solitary confinement.
“I was alone in the chamber one night,” he remembers. “I felt very clearly that someone woke me up in the middle of the night. It was soft, but clear.
He goes on:
When I woke up, I had a very, very clear vision. I could see the corridor of the jail. I could see the person being taken out of in chains, but I only saw them from behind, but I knew exactly who it was. I understood that God sent me an angel to wake me up so I could accompany that man in prayer as he was being taken out to be shot. I understood that if God was showing that to me.
“Who am I to be shown this?” I asked God. Then I understood that I was seeing the extent of God’s love. I understood that the prayers of this prisoner and I, for his salvation, had been heard and that he was forgiven. I was in tears. This awakening didn’t occur with all of those prisoners, only with some of them.
Ogorodnikov interpreted this as a sign that not all of the prisoners with whom he prayed had been sincere in their repentance. As he languished in solitary confinement, the mystical awakenings continued, as an unseen force would nudge him out of sleep with a gentle touch. The same kind of vision played out in front of the prisoner’s open eyes: the image of guards leading a shackled prisoner to his execution.
After this happened a few times, Ogorodnikov wondered why, in these waking visions, he was not allowed to see the condemned prisoners’ faces. He did not penetrate this mystery until later, in a different prison, through what Ogorodnikov regards as a divine revelation.
In that small prison, Ogorodnikov was the only captive, and he was looked after by a single guard. He was clearly a pensioner who was allowed to work the night shift because he was lonely.
One night, he entered Ogorodnikov’s cell with a wild look on his face. “They come at night,” said the old man to the prisoner. Ogorodnikov understood that the old man was being driven to the brink of insanity by something and that he needed to confess. Ogorodnikov urged him to speak. This is what the haunted prison guard said:
“When I was a young guard in a different prison, they would gather twenty or thirty priests who had been behind bars, and took them outside. They rigged them up to a sled, so that they were pulling the sled. They had them pull the sled out into the forest. They made them run all day, until they brought them to a swamp. And then they put them into two rows, one behind the other. I was one of the guards who stood in the perimeter around the prisoners.
“One of the KGB guys walked up to the first priest. He asked him very calmly and quietly, ’Is there a God?’ The priest said yes. They shot him in the forehead in such a way that his brains covered the priest standing behind him. He calmly loaded his pistol, went to next priest, and asked, ‘Does God exist?’
“‘Yes, he exists.’ The KGB man shot this priest in the same way. We didn’t blindfold them. They saw everything that was about to happen to them.”
Ogorodnikov fights back tears as he comes to the end of his story. In a voice cracking with emotion, the old prisoner says, “Not one of those priests denied Christ.”
This is why the old man volunteered to keep Ogorodnikov company after sundown: memories of the priests’ faces in the moments before their execution haunted him at night. This encounter with the broken prison guard made Ogorodnikov understand why, in his mystical visions, he had not been able to see the faces of the condemned. He too would have been driven mad by the horror. He had to be content with the knowledge that because he had been present to share the Gospel with them, those poor souls, damned in this life, would live forever in paradise.
Ogorodnikov has had a hard and lonely life, even in freedom. I tried to find him so we could interview him for the Live Not By Lies documentary. It turns out that he is now living in India, suffering from dementia. It sounded from his son like he doesn’t have much money.
And yet, I am absolutely certain that in the life to come, faithful Alexander Ogorodnikov will be one of the greatest of saints. He has always lived by the standards of that other world. But his life in this world has been a failure by most measures.
I told my friend tonight that nothing I suffer can come close to what Alexander Ogorodnikov endured. But when I start to feel sorry for myself, I think about that man, and how God sent angels to restore his faith, and to show him that he was living out the divine plan.
My friend then shared with me this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
"In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things, the figure of Him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. The world will allow itself to be subdued only by success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds. Success alone justifies wrongs done. . . . The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard."
There we are. Though I have deliberately not discussed the reasons for my divorce in public, people — mostly men — have reached out to me from time to time to tell me their divorce stories, and sometimes their stories of suffering inside a badly broken marriage. I listen, and comfort them as I can. God cannot will evil, and I’m sure He didn’t will my divorce. But it happened, and it could be that He has allowed this to happen to put me in a position to be a comfort and encouragement to others who suffer in this way. I don’t know. I would very much like to be married again, but more than that, I want to follow God’s will, wherever it takes me.
I love that Bonhoeffer quote. I hope and pray that it will not be my fate to die alone, but He did, didn’t He? We are all called to have a share in His suffering.
Do you find that depressing? I find it realistic — and hopeful. So much so that I wanted to share it with you all before bed. I was thinking just now that those who believe that God’s will for us inevitably means our personal happiness and satisfaction will not make it through what is to come. They will capitulate. Maybe they already are.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Maybe not in this life, but someday. The Cross inverts everything. The world thinks this is morbid. I think this is the secret of a good life. For all we know, two angels followed my friend and me on the streets of downtown Budapest, whispering into our ears words of comfort and wisdom. I really believe that. God is everywhere present, filling all things — and He sends us his messengers to comfort and guide us, if we are willing to listen. This is what I try to convey to people in Living In Wonder (click there to check out our new Zondervan page for the book, and to pre-order it). I’m so excited for the book to come out on October 22, so we can discuss it in the comments section here.
Please say a prayer tonight for our brother in the faith Alexander Ogorodnikov, now 74. Here’s a great book about his life and work.
“… no one outside a marriage really knows what is going on inside it.”
In my experience no one inside the marriage really knows what’s going on either!
In all aspects of life, here we see only through a glass, darkly.
Rod, thank you!! I am one of those men suffering in a marriage, but I always pray to God to help me bear the Cross of it to keep an intact family. I have been willing to sacrifice my happiness because I have believed my children, two in high school and two in college, would benefit from a family unit going to Church and staying unified. Some days it gets very lonely and was I praying so hard today for the Lord to help me and comfort me. This is proof He was listening!!