Wishing Fourth of July Blessings to All

Because of my work-related travels, it is rare that I am in the USA for the Fourth of July, let alone have the day off! So, today is an exciting, if unusual, one for me.

Donnie and I are preparing for an afternoon BBQ. Shane, wife, and kids will come -- and yes, our little disassembled granddaughter, now in one piece, will be here, too! (We now have a name for what her "issue" is: OEIS complex. For those of you who can speak medicalese, you can find out more about it here. For those who prefer a lay description, that can be found in my earlier posts.)

Then, after mass, Donnie and I will drop in on an evening party thrown by one of the supervisors who works for me, an Iraqi born on the fourth. Somehow, being with Iraqi immigrants on our Independence Day is both ironic and appropriate. Iraq has yet to experience its day of independence, but perhaps it will soon, insha Allah (God willing), as Arabs say whenever they refer to the future. Insha Allah, freedom of speech will become a way of life for them. Insha Allah, they will experience the freedom to worship God each in his/her own way, without Shia and Sunni being pitted against each other and together against Christians and with Kurds, Sorranis, Assyrians, and Arabs all respecting each other.

It reminds me of my days in the former Soviet Union although there are significant differences. In the USSR, unlike in Iraq where people kill each other over religious denomination, religious practice was banned. Believers carried Bibles inside folded newspapers. The Moscow Baptist Church--there was only one during the heyday of the Cold War when I was there--was located in a warehouse; unless one knew that the church was there, one would never suspect it. The Orthodox churches were closed down and locked up, except for those few that had been kept open as tourist traps, such as St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square. (My favorite picture of St. Basil's depicts an era before Russia was sovietized, and, as in so many cases in life, the beautiful outside is far different from the dark inside, which is mostly dirt from the erosion of time and the effects of a series of wars.) I remember when Orthodox friends of mine (a family with three children) fled Moscow for Leningrad in the summer of 1982 after a friend of theirs was arrested for her active participation in the then-underground Orthodox Church. My friends feared that they might be next. The series of events are permanently fixed in time for me. As my friends were fleeing, I was retiring to bed in my University of Moscow "blok" (dorm suite in which my roommate and I each had our own small bedroom and a shared bathroom and shared toilet room) when I saw a frightened face, seeming to ask for help, in my dorm window. I turned on the light, but the face remained. I ran to my roommate's bedroom and asked her to come see, but by then the face had disappeared. I knew that the face belonged to an acquaintance, but I did not put two and two together until the following week when my roommate and I were visiting Leningrad. As "luck" (?) would have it, my roommate ran across the mother of the fleeing family on Nevsky Prospekt, the main street of Leningrad; the mother asked my roommate to have me meet her in front of the Hermitage, the USSR's most famous art gallery, the next morning. I came and recognized instantly that it was her face I had seen the week before. An art historian, she gave me a wonderfully detailed tour that few docents could have given. Open discussion in the USSR being difficult and definitely prohibited, as we moved from room to room she sandwiched into the tour the details of what had happened to her neighbor, her fear for her family, and her plans for leaving the country through the help of a friend from Germany whom she had been able to contact after arriving in Leningrad. I asked her where she had been at 8:00 the evening of July 18, the time that I had seen her face in my window. She replied that she and her husband had hastily packed a few possessions and their children that evening, purchased tickets, and were at the very time I had "seen" her on the train to Leningrad where she was thinking very intently about me, hoping that I might be able to help her. As it turned out, I did not need to help her. An alternative had been found. Nonetheless, knowing that I was within reach seemed to comfort her. We exchanged coordinates in the way that coordinates were shared in those days: we took the time to memorize each other's personal information (she gave the me the phone and address of her German friends, which I recited until I knew them as well as I knew my own address and once I left Soviet soil wrote it down; being caught at customs or passport control, or even in my dorm room, with that information is not something that would have had a pleasant outcome).

Independence and freedom did come to Russia, and there has been quite a revival of Orthodoxy in Russia, along with the introduction of many new religious faiths. The Soviet Union today is but a memory (not always a pleasant one) for Cold War veterans like me and my daughter, Lizzie, who spent time going to school there one year when I was conducting research at the Academy of Sciences. It is even less than that to the young people of today both in Russia itself and in other countries. (One, of course, hopes that Putin will not walk back too far the flamboyant freedom that has overwhelmed Russia for nearly two decades now.)

No one thought that the Soviet Union would fall, that freedom would roam Russian streets again and come home to live in Russian cities. But it did. And, so it seems, it will in Iraq, as well. Insha Allah.