Religious Liberty and the Liberty of the Religious
Saturday night waiting for fireworks that would start an hour later, sitting around talking, enjoying being together, conversation with my sister-in-law turned to her son’s call to be a missionary in the Czech Republic. It turned my mind to a woman from Czechoslovakia I met in ’93. That year started my four years in Baltimore. My bishop there had joined the church as a teen-ager in Korea, served a mission in his native country, and when his family was young moved them to the United States so he wouldn’t have to work on Sundays. The ward mission leader was from Trinidad, and I got to spend a bunch of time with him as a stake missionary. The ward executive secretary told me of his compelling first encounter with the Book of Mormon in his native Ghana. For a year and a half in 1989 and 1990, recent times when I met him, Ghana’s government expelled the missionaries and locked up the meetinghouses. (link)
The Relief Society president was from Czechoslovakia. She said that sometimes people would correct her. “You mean you are from the Czech Republic?” “No, my country doesn’t exist anymore.” Her story of how she encountered in 1980 the gospel as taught and lived by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been repeated in print a number of times, so I did a web search: Olga, Czechoslovakia, and LDS. The first link took me to a history of the church in Czechoslovakia in the Gospel Library. A portion of it is also found in Saints vol. 4, chapter 21. The setting was good so I read aloud to the family her experience from 1980 through 1989 when communist rule ended and the church could function openly, four years before I met her and shared a ward in Baltimore. Like my great-great-great-grandmother in Sweden, Olga was baptized at night to avoid police scrutiny. The book repeated something I heard from Olga’s own mouth a few times: she grew up in a society where joy and hope were alien. Encountering the last man baptized in her country before World War II introduced her to joy and hope, and his teachings led her to experience that too as a latter-day saint disciple of Jesus Christ.
When I finished reading, my sister-in-law said, “That was a great story to hear on the Fourth of July.” The next day, rehearing Olga’s story stayed with me and added great meaning as I fasted with the church for religious liberty.
