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THE BODY of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was
laid to rest at a funeral service held at Moscow’s Donskoi monastery.
The great dissident died August 3 of heart failure at
his home near Moscow, aged 89.
Author of The Gulag
Archipelago and One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. His writing exposed dictator Josef
Stalin’s prison system; it earned him eight years in prison, and 20
years in exile from the former Soviet Union.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev joined the
writer’s family, friends and hundreds of mourners at the
monastery’s cathedral, near the city centre. The BBC reported that
the Nobel prize-winning author lay in an open coffin with a wooden cross on
his chest, surrounded by hundreds of candles.
Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, reflected
on Solzhenitsyn’s passing in an article written with Anne Morse, and
posted on the Christianity Today website.
“As it happened, this summer I was reading a
tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn’s [Harvard] speech at the same time I
was studying Jeremiah in my devotions. I was struck by the chilling
parallels between the dissident’s words and Jeremiah’s warning
to the Israelites.”
According to Colson, Solzhenitsyn accused the
totalitarian Soviet Union of “complicity in the West’s
surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage,
and with all the moral horrors that followed.”
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God, Colson noted, “spoke through Jeremiah with
biting sarcasm, warning the Israelites of where this kind of
‘freedom’ leads. It would be freedom ‘to fall by the
sword, plague and famine.’ Jeremiah’s prophecy all too soon
came to pass; the Israelites fell into Babylonian captivity.
“Three decades after Solzhenitsyn’s
speech, where do Americans find themselves? In the grip of a similar
captivity: violent and pornographic ‘entertainment,’ growing
censorship of unfashionable ideas, and a spiritually exhausted citizenry.
Solzhenitsyn did not leave Harvard that warm, June day without offering a
solution: a ‘spiritual blaze’ was needed to recover our
footing. Have we listened?
“[This] left me with a haunting question for the
church: Is there still time to renew ourselves out of our spiritual
exhaustion?”
– Michael Ireland, Assist News Service
September 2008
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