In Praise of Crying Out

A Full-throated Response to a Constantly Escalating Disaster

There’s a line in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago that I’ve been returning to a lot lately.

Solzhenitsyn is describing his arrest during Stalin’s purges, alongside the arrests of so many other innocent people who found themselves declared ideologically incorrect or enemies of the state. People who were denounced by neighbors, or, worse, friends who were seeking to secure their own survival. People whose professions or identities were suddenly considered dangerous to the regime. People who heard about the knocks in the middle of the night, the black cars idling quietly outside while people were led down the stairs in the dark, many of them never to return. People who still never thought the knock would come for them.

Solzhenitsyn was just as incredulous as the others when his moment came, thinking that there must have been some mistake, that surely if he complied, everything would soon be sorted out, and he’d be back to his normal life. Of course, he, like all the others, was wrong. Eight years of imprisonment in a labor camp awaited him, followed by exile.

A young Alexander Solzhenitsyn, before he was arrested for criticizing Stalin, under a pseudonym, in a private letter

Here’s the line that I can’t chase from my mind. In retrospect, Solzhenitsyn asks himself, Why didn’t I cry out?

He lists all the places, all the stops along the way during the process of his arrest and imprisonment, where he could have cried out, but didn’t.

At one point, Solzhenitsyn remembers, he was led through the Moscow subway, with two hundred people as his witnesses. Why didn’t he scream? Tell them an injustice was occurring? Enlist their help in freeing him?

Resistance, his and everyone else’s, should have begun right there, Solshenitsyn says. Right at the moment of arrest.

I keep returning to this passage because I do not want to get to the other side of this and not have cried out, not have screamed, not have spoken the truth about the horrors that are befalling this country and its people, and people all over the world as a result of our government’s actions.

Is there any hope that I, one not terribly well-connected or powerful person, can actually change anything? In a word, no.

But together we can.

Please do not stop crying out. “Cry out” is a very good translation of the Russian word кричать in this context. But it can also mean “scream.” And that is what I think and hope we are all doing.

As always, I recommend keeping up with this tracker of the administration’s actions. So many morally reprehensible things are happening every day that it’s hard to keep up, but keep up we must. Deportations and denunciations continue. Humanitarian funding has been slashed, and people are dying. Essential services for the care and safety of our people are in jeopardy. I struggle to think of anyone I know who hasn’t been negatively impacted by this administration.

Real leaders do not deal in threats, lies, and callous dehumanizations of entire groups of people. Real leaders do not place their own personal benefit as the nation’s highest concern. Real leaders do not seek to subvert the legal limitations of their office.

We are dealing with a power that is wildly committed to altering the fabric of reality with its lies. They could have written the book on DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). This is, understandably, traumatizing for survivors of abuse, and I highly recommend this post from Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes if that’s where you are finding yourself.

I also want to acknowledge that there are people for whom this country has always been a narrowly-survivable disaster. To them I bow deeply and offer thanks for their leadership, advocacy, and truth-telling of the highest order.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention in closing my favorite saint, Óscar Romero, whose feast day was Monday. He was murdered 45 years ago in El Salvador, for telling the truth, for refusing to cower to threats, for calling for the restoration of sacred human rights for all until the very end.

St. Óscar Romero, pray for us.

Carry on. Cry out. Scream.

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A Few Hopeful Things:

—I was honored to be asked to write a piece for Outreach, and I reflected on the comfort of ritual in times like these, and the ways it guides us into community. It was a joy to contribute. (Also, check out this post about a new Way of the Cross in Solidarity with the LGBTQ Community. Amazing.)

—Would you LOOK at this icon of Julian of Norwich that my best friend Emily Austin made and sent me in the mail with no warning? Those are eyes that know suffering. Those are eyes I can trust. I wrote a bit about grappling with her assurance that all shall be well over on Instagram. (She’s making a whole series of female saints and mystics, and I will let you know when they’re for sale!)

Also, THE FLOWERS! I’ve never been more grateful for them than I am this year. The first blossoms are opening on the cherry trees, the grape hyacinths are popping up their little heads, and I’ve even seen a few rogue azaleas and one rhododendron braving the wind. All of them keep me going. The photo above features purple rock cress (peppered with fallen cherry blossom petals), and oh for a whole yard full of it!

Post-evangelical friends, I was lucky enough to get an early copy of my friend Cara Meredith’s book Church Camp, a reckoning with that most adventurous and tightly theologically scripted mainstay of suburban Christianity. It is a really liberating read.

Crying out with you,
Cameron