The Prisoner

What Andrew Brunson's Turkish Prison Experience Taught Him About Preparation

Andrew and Norine Brunson

I’ve become friends in the last couple of years with Andrew and Norine Brunson, who are subscribers to this newsletter. You might remember Andrew as the American missionary pastor held for two years in prison by the Turkish government on trumped up charges. The Erdogan regime wanted to exchange him for Fethullah Gulen, a political enemy living in exile in Pennsylvania. A coalition of Republicans and Democrats in Washington got him out. Pastor Brunson, who was faithfully supported, spiritually and through advocacy for his release, by his wife Norine throughout his confinement, tells his story in this PBS interview.

The Brunsons travel through Budapest three or four times each year, and we try to get together when they’re here. Last night we had dinner in the city, and talked at length about the spiritual darkness we all see over our lands, and how the churches should be preparing. Everything I say from here on out in this post, about our dinner, is nothing he hasn’t said in interviews and in his great prison memoir, God’s Hostage. Just want to make sure you know that I’m not telling something here that I shouldn’t.

I told Andrew that I’m about to go to the Touchstone conference in Chicago to give a talk about how Christian re-enchantment is a survival skill for what Aaron Renn calls the Negative World. I explained that we need to have cultivated a strong awareness of God’s presence in our Christian lives, to help us endure suffering. I brought up a couple of cases of Christians imprisoned or otherwise severely persecuted who held up because their faith was so strong.

Andrew responded by giving me something to think about. In fact, I’m going to change my speech to include his perspective. He said that in his years as a pastor before the Turks put him in prison, he had sought after experiences of God’s presence. He had also read memoirs of believers who had been jailed, and how many of them felt God with them in their suffering. He had even met a couple of prisoners who had been visited in their cells by Jesus Christ.

And yet, when he was thrown into prison himself, he had none of that. Instead, he felt entirely abandoned by God. It was pure torture, and he even got to the point where he thought about suicide. Andrew is blunt in his book, and in conversation: in prison, he broke. As he was telling that again to me last night, I thought of this well-known line from Psalm 50: “A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; a broken and humbled heart God will not despise.”

Today Andrew says he believes that God withdrew his active presence from him in that prison in part to strengthen him for some future challenge. He told me last night that after hearing from me about Dr. Silvester Krcmery, the young physician imprisoned by Czech communists as a leader in the 1950s underground church, and how he endured a decade of captivity, he (Andrew) thought about ways he wished he had prepared himself as Krcmery did in anticipation of captivity. I understood Andrew to be saying he regrets having counted on God being vividly present to him in prison, instead of doing hard exercises in faith prior to prison to prepare his mind for the possibility of captivity. (Andrew, if I’ve gotten this wrong somehow, please correct me in the comments.)

As I was falling asleep last night thinking of all Andrew said, it occurred to me that the pastor’s words are like the lesson in Terrence Malick’s great (and widely misunderstood) 2012 film To The Wonder. The “wonder” in the title is Mont-Saint-Michel, the medieval abbey built on a rock of the northern coast of France. The French call it “La Merveille” — the Wonder. It stands as an enduring symbol of enchantment. The film begins with an American man named Neil and his French girlfriend Marina making a tourist excursion there, where we see them falling in love. Later, Neil invites Marina and her little girl from a previous marriage to move to America with him.

They don’t marry, and we come to see their refusal to anchor their love, born in wonder, in some kind of commitment leaves them vulnerable to the shifting tides of emotions. They grow apart. They break under pressure.

The film contrasts their approach with that of Father Quintana, a Catholic priest in Neil’s Oklahoma town. He fell in love with God and committed himself to a lifetime of service as a priest. But at some point, God withdrew. Father Quintana is stumbling around in the darkness, desperate to feel Him again, craving that experience of enchantment that overwhelmed him and brought him to sacrifice his life to the Lord.

Yet unlike Neil and Marina, Father Quintana turned his initial experience of wonder — the one that caused him to change his life — in a firm commitment to serve the Lord as a priest. It is this commitment that keeps him on track through his long, dark night of the soul. Father Quintana continues to visit the poor, to preach, to counsel, to offer the sacraments, even though he feels hollow inside. His service is entirely an act of will, based on the faith that his initial experience of wonder was true, and that the Lord will return in time. Watch this sequence, in which we hear Javier Bardem, who plays the priest, praying, as we see the Lord’s suffering servant go through his days. Trust me, this will be among the best minutes of your day. In it, Father Quintana incorporates part of the famous Breastplate of St. Patrick prayer — which, by coincidence, I have begun to pray again as part of my morning routine.

I further thought about the lesson of Luca Daum’s powerful “Temptation Of St. Galgano” engraving. The deeper I go into that image, the more amazed I am by what it says, and by the fact that God sent the artist to me that night in Genoa in 2018 to give it to me. (You might remember that Luca approached me that night after my talk, and said he didn’t know why he was there to give me this image he had created, only that he had been praying in his studio that afternoon, and the Holy Spirit told him to do it.) Now that image has given birth to my book Living In Wonder; those who buy the book will get a full-page reproduction of it, courtesy of Luca, who refused to take our money for the rights. He only wants it to be for God’s glory. Anyway, once again, here is the image:

This image is also the message of Malick’s To The Wonder. When you have the initial experience of wonder, in which God’s reality is revealed to you, and brings you to your knees, you must seal it with sacrifice. Your life is no longer your own. (This was Neil and Marina’s mistake; they kept their options open.) Galgano’s sacrifice is symbolized by his sword miraculously buried in the stone. But in Luca Daum’s image, that miracle is not where the drama is. Remember, it’s called “The Tempation of St. Galgano”. The temptation is a serpent swirling out of his head — a bad thought — trying to draw his eyes off of the contemplation of God, and to the ground. It is significant that the serpent has a human face. It wouldn’t be much of a temptation if the evil thought presented its true face.

The message here is that we must seal our life changing encounter with wonder by making a concrete sacrifice, and then we must stay humble in the face of the great mystery. (It cannot have felt good on the saint’s bare knees to have them on the rock.) We cannot expect that faith will be easy — that is, that it will be easy to keep our eyes on God, and the things of God. Temptations will come — and they might conceal themselves as good. I see this image as a practical catechism telling us how to react to the initial experience of awe that brought us to faith (or, as in Malick’s film, to fall in love). If I heard Andrew Brunson truly last night, he was saying his prison experience made him wish that in his many years of freedom, he had done spiritual exercises that would have strengthened his ability to keep his eyes firmly fixed on the God to Whom he had given his life — the God whose presence had been obscured temporarily by dark clouds.

We also talked last night about what might be ahead for all of us — that is, for we three at the table, as well as all faithful Christians. This morning, as I prepare to say my prayers, it is heavy on my heart that I need to take Andrew’s testimony seriously, and approach my spiritual life with more diligence. You never know. As Dr. Krcmery wrote in his own 1996 prison memoir:

We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.

I quote that in Live Not By Lies. Also from the book, here is the passage in which I write about his spiritual exercises:

In totalitarian Czechoslovakia, Kolaković follower Silvester Krčméry emerged as one of the priest’s most important disciples and organizers. Years of Bible study, worship, and personal spiritual practice under the guidance of Father Kolaković prepared the young physician for a long prison term, which began with his arrest in 1951.

The basis for his resistance was the firm conviction that “there could not be anything more beautiful than to lay down my life for God.” When that thought came to Krčméry in the police sedan minutes after his arrest, he burst into laughter. His captors were not amused. But refusing self-pity, and teaching himself to receive whatever the interrogators did to him as an aid to his own salvation, saved Krčméry’s spiritual life.

Behind bars, and subject to all manner of torture and humiliation, Krčméry (pronounced “kirch-MERRY”) kept himself sane and hopeful through cultivating and practicing his faith in a disciplined way and by evangelizing others.

In his memoir, This Saved Us, Krčméry recalls that after repeated beatings, torture, and interrogations, he realized that the only way he would make it through the ordeal ahead was to rely entirely on faith, not reason. He says he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.”

In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety,” he writes. “Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations.

The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.

His personal routine included memorizing passages from a New Testament a new prisoner had smuggled into the jail. The Scripture Krčméry had already learned before the persecution started turned out to be a powerful aid behind bars.

“Memorizing texts from the New Testament proved to be an excellent preparation for critical times and imprisonment,” he writes. “The most beautiful and important texts which mankind has from God contain a priceless treasure which ‘moth and decay cannot destroy, and thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6:19).”

Committing Scripture to memory formed a strong basis for prison life, the doctor found.

“Indeed, as one’s spiritual life intensifies, things become clearer and the essence of God is more easily understood,” he writes. “Sometimes one word, or a single sentence from Scripture is enough to fill a person with a special light. An insight or new meaning is revealed and penetrates one’s inner being and remains there for weeks or months at a time.”

Krčméry structured his days and weeks to pray the Catholic mass, and sometimes the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. He interceded for specific people and groups of people, including his captors. This was a way of ordering the oppressive expanse of time, especially during periods of solitary confinement. Krčméry and his fellow prisoners were astonished, repeatedly, that beatings and interrogations were easier to endure than seemingly ceaseless periods of waiting.

The prisoner did periods of deep, sustained meditation, in which he thought deeply about his own life and his own sins, and he embraced a spirit of repentance. At one point, Krčméry wondered if he was wasting his time and increasing his emotional and psychological burden by sticking to these daylong spiritual exercises.

“I attempted to live a few days entirely without a program, but it did not work,” he remembers. “When I thought that I would only vegetate for the whole day, and just rest, that is when there were the most crises.”

Along with other prisoners, Krčméry would sing hymns, and would pray litanies for everyday needs, including for a spirit of humility and willingness to endure all for the sake of Christ. This brotherhood was an integral part of the spirituality of Christian resistance. Father Kolaković had taught the Family the virtue of reaching across church lines to establish brotherhood with other Christians. Captivity and torture turned this into a practical reality.

“In prison, nobody recognized any confessional differences,” writes Krčméry.

This same principle echoes in the testimony of the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand and other former captives of the communists. It is not a false ecumenism that claims all religions are essentially the same. It is rather a mutual recognition that within the context of persecution, embracing Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shattered,” becomes vital to spiritual survival.

What stands out to me, re-reading that passage in light of our conversation last night, and pondering the St. Galgano image, is what Dr. Krcmery says about how he tried living without a “program” of prayer, and it didn’t work. Man, that convicts me. My prayer life is highly disorganized. I do pray all the time, but with scant order. That has to change. We don’t know what tomorrow may bring. It’s relatively easy to keep my eyes on God now, but later?

Living In Wonder also has practical advice for things we can do to prepare ourselves to recognize and receive God’s presence. You can’t command God to come. (Indeed, in the book, an exorcist tells me that this is one big difference between demons and God: if you call the demons, they will come every time — but they come to enslave you. God respects your freedom, and wants you to come to Him freely, in love.) What you can do, though, is sharpen your capacity to perceive Him. And, when He makes Himself known, you can build a life of spiritual discipline to make the memory of that theophany concrete.

This is what Mont-Saint-Michel means in the Malick picture: it is a monument to the eternal presence of God through time. In the final scene of the film, Marina is traipsing through a field, when she is hit from behind by a blinding light. She turns, and there she sees Mont-Saint-Michel, shrouded in darkness, but a spiritual lighthouse through which God calls His children home, always.

Why did God allow Pastor Brunson, who had served him so faithfully in hostile mission territory for years, to suffer like that? We may never know this side of heaven. Consider, reader, that it might be so that you and I could heed his warning against spiritual complacency. He suffered so that one day, thanks to his testimony, you and I might not have to.