A city where God was not welcome

In Poland, during their regime, the communists had a dream. They dreamt that a city would be built where God did not feature anywhere. No church was to be built there. Nothing would remind people that there was anything beyond the purely physical and material aspects of life. You are born, you live and toil and finally you die under the vigilant eyes of the government.

This did not come about because the Poles, led by the intrepid archbishop of Cracow, Karol Woytjla, opposed the communists’ plans. The city, Nova Huta, after much suffering and strife, was built and ended up having countless churches where people could worship that God viewed as such a threat by the powers that ruled the country.

This is but a reflection of what is at present happening in many formerly Christian countries. God is being constantly marginalised in the lives of many of us. His laws, which do not change in order to fit the customs and desires of passing generations, are under constant threat. Never before, since the complete Christianisation of Europe around 1,000 years ago, has there been such widespread indifference or even hostility to the very idea that there could be a God who oversees our lives, who is good and all-loving but to whom we have to give account of our actions at the end of our worldly journey.

There is the intention to confine God in the sacristy of churches, to be neither seen nor heard, while we continue with our lives as if He does not exist at all. The rationale behind all this is that, at long last, we have broken free from the laws of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and especially those laws which Christ made perfect upon His coming on earth. We have come round to believe that we have achieved the unthinkable – to be in complete control of our lives, to do what we wish irrespective of what God has revealed to us in scripture both in the Old and in the New Testament.

Any notion of sin and its consequences both here on earth and later on in eternity is banished from our thoughts. However, Christ made it clear that when we sin we cease to be free. “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” (John 8, 34) Now if there is one thing that we modern men and women treasure above all is the freedom to do whatever we like, even if it is sinful in God’s eyes, provided it is within the constraints of the law of the land.

This line of reasoning contrasts deeply with what Christ taught when He said that it is only truth that makes one truly free while sin enslaves. It naturally follows that this enslavement gives us neither joy nor much less peace of heart. No matter how much we try to delude ourselves we feel, especially when we are all alone and away from the “crowd”, the anguish, despair and lack of hope that the breaking of God’s laws and consequent distance from His love inevitably causes.

Deep down in the heart of each of us there is a nostalgia for God and the Absolute (even if we are not always fully aware of this) and which we vainly try to smother. For as St Augustine, who fully knew what being away from God and breaking His laws means, said, “O Lord, you have made us for you and our heart will never rest unless it rests in you.”