The Paradox and Proof of Variegated Praise

Long ago in Romania I noted a sure portent of the coming Communist collapse. It was during the rule of the wretch Ceausescu. I was meeting with university students in Bucharest. The young American missionaries who organized the meetings now live in Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. One has moved back to Colorado with his Romanian wife. The balcony of the flat where they lived faced toward an inner courtyard. Here in Budapest we are fond of calling those monochromatic blocks “Commie Condos.” They litter the Eastern European cityscapes reminding us that Communism was an enemy of aesthetics as well as freedom.

Algernon Swinburne, the Victorian skeptic and poet, declared that the world had grown grey from the breath of Christ. A pity he died before the advent of the Communist era (and it’s a mercy we’ve lived past the death of the Communist era). Perhaps the visual evidence provided by societies determined to deny Christ would have convinced him of the idiocy of his assertion. God made the sky blue and the leaf green. Spiritually it is the atheist who pollutes and defoliates. It is the secularist who drains the earth of color. It was Jesus who (in the words of Calvin Seerveld) brought rainbows to the fallen world.

The balcony where I stood in Bucharest was on an upper floor. I looked down on an aged Romanian woman lovingly tending the flowers in her window box. Those blossoms were a riot of color, splendid in contrast to the dull greys and browns which dominated the hideous background. She was obviously poor, as was nearly everyone in Romania and certainly everyone in that particular apartment building. But at the impulse of her private, creative reflex she brought forth more loveliness than the regime who rendered her life arduous and her nation ugly. I thought in that moment, “Ceausescu won’t win. God has left a testimony to his beauty in that solitary gardener. She is proof enough that the beauty which endured is the beauty which will prevail.”

I was overwhelmed with a similar impression on my first visit to Eastern Europe in 1987. The indigenous Christian music produced by marginalized Hungarian Christians meeting in secret was surpassingly beautiful. I never thought I would hear its equal.

But I did.

Later that year I met in secret with a few university students in Brno, Czechoslovakia. That group was forced to observe even greater measures to insure secrecy. The Moravian and Slovak Christians who emerged from the blight of Communism began to compose their own extraordinary versions of Christian music in their native idiom. The most impressive songwriter I met during those early days was a young Moravian girl named Lenca. She remains impressive. Last Tuesday evening at a student meeting in Brno I heard Lenca (now a mother of two working with her husband in ministry) playing her guitar and singing Christian songs.. I’ll do what I can to make her music available on this site soon.

Christ is the Savior of the whole world. He is the coming King and His reign is universal. The praise offered His name by Christians in disparate places is strikingly familiar and startlingly different at the same time. It is this paradox which provides another piece of evidence that though we come from radically different origins, through radically different experiences, we arrive at the same radical conclusion:

There is one God who made heaven and earth and Jesus of Nazareth is His Son.

It makes us want to sing.