MILAN CICEL WITH GERALDINE FAGAN
Editor’s note: Milan Cicel is a key figure in Cirkev Bratská, an evangelical congregation in the Slovak capital, Bratislava. Two of Cirkev Bratská’s distinctive local initiatives engaging young people—Kaplnka Church and the C.S. Lewis Bilingual High School—featured in vol. 26, no. 2 (2018) of the East-West Church Report. Now in his seventies, Cicel was instrumental to both projects, as well as to the foundation of a number of Slovak enterprises seeking to operate according to Christian values. This account describes his personal efforts to discover, uphold, and transmit those values during the portion of his life lived under Communist rule, including the tumultuous times of the Prague Spring 50 years ago.
As Warsaw Pact troops rolled through Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968, I was one of a team escorting our church’s youth choir on a tour of northern Bohemia. A local pastor woke us at 4 a.m. as the streets filled with tanks. We were in charge of about 40 children, and we raced to catch the last trains back to Bratislava, to the great relief of those children’s parents. If we had not made it home that day, we would have been stranded for a week, as everything came to a standstill. We returned to find Bratislava also filled with tanks, and crowds trying to reason with the soldiers.
The choir was in fact a way of masking our church’s work with young people. From the outside it looked like liturgical activity, even to the ŠtB, the Czechoslovak secret police. After all, a church should sing! Under the atheistic regime it was a criminal offense to lead young people to faith through Bible study and prayer groups. Yet we had managed to revive this youth ministry in 1962. Previously—following the Communist Party’s seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948—Christians
were repressed as an ideological enemy of the state’s atheistic policies. Other non-Communists—including nationalists and the Jewish community—were also targeted, along with the kind of “idealistic Communist” who would later inspire the Prague Spring of 1968. All expressions of independence from state power were severely crushed. There was a climate of fear, denunciation, and lies.
This was a far cry from the jubilant post-World War I atmosphere in which our congregation came to be. In the dying days of the war, on 28 October 1918, Czechoslovakia won her independence. (In addition to the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring, 100 years since the opening of formal diplomatic relations between the new state and the United States are commemorated in 2018.)
By 1919, our congregation of the Union of the Czech Brethren in Bratislava was meeting as a mission outreach of the Free Evangelical Church in the Czech city of Brno. The second element of our congregation consisted of members of the Blue Cross [Slovak: Modrý kríž], which started as a missionary movement within the Lutheran Church. In 1950 the new Communist government suspended all organized activity by civic groups, including the Blue Cross [Slovak: Modrý kríž], and many of its members—including my parents—transferred to the Union of the Czech Brethren.
The third element of our congregation consisted of Slovaks who had been repatriated from Hungary following a citizen exchange with Czechoslovakia after World War II. When in Hungary, these Slovak Christians had belonged to the Methodist Church, but the Union of the Czech Brethren— later renamed the Church of the Brethren [Slovak: Cirkev Bratská]—was spiritually closer to them once they relocated to Slovakia.
Each of these groups brought their own emphasis with them, and aligning these to create one community turned out to be a formidable task. The more or less traditional founders were bound to the Prague headquarters, while the Blue Cross members were young, fiery, and mission-minded evangelicals who did not care too much about church tradition. The repatriates of Methodist origin from Hungary, meanwhile, were imbued with the strong national sentiment that had drawn them back to Slovakia.
Initially, the difficult process of harmonizing these three currents weakened our church community, and the ŠtB secret police took advantage of the situation. In 1959 a show trial culminated in four members of the church—Jan Hollý, Ondrej Lupták, Vladislav Matej, and Ján Rosa—being sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to three years. The main charge against them was “ideological diversion.” They had created Christian youth groups in a local university, and this was understood to be in opposition to Czechoslovakia’s scientific atheist education; they were “ideologically twisting” young minds. The law was also articulated in such a way that religious activity was permitted solely on church premises, so Bible study—even with just three or four people—was clearly illegal in university dorms or halls. It was following this trial that our church’s youth work came to a halt. Everything came under surveillance. Not long solely on church premises, so Bible study—even with just three or four people—was clearly illegal in university dorms or halls.
It was following this trial that our church’s youth work came to a halt. Everything came under surveillance. Not long after Hollý, Lupták, Matej, and Rosa were put in prison, I remember an ŠtB agent standing in front of our church and taking photographs in a blatant attempt to instill fear. There was no agent inside our church, but the ŠtB had informers. This could actually go two ways: If an informer told the church’s leaders that he had been interrogated, it could be helpful, because the church would know what issues were ofinterest to the secret police. But if an informer hid and was afraid to talk about what invitations he had received, it was dangerous, as you never knew what had been discussed.
Moral dilemma
It was the 1959 trial that led me, then a teenager, to internalize the Christian faith. The imprisonment of the four church members posed the moral dilemma of whether I was on the side of those in prison or on the side of those who had put them there. It was very clear to me that those in prison wore the white hats, while those who put them there wore the black hats. That initiated in me the whole process of embracing the Christian faith. There were other factors, of course, but that was when I truly understood that I was a Christian.
Despite continuous monitoring and persecution by the ŠtB, my generation of Christian youth continued to be formed under the guidance of church secretary Milan Jurčo. Critically, Brother Jurčo removed from us the fear of the Communist system. Rather than starting with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he said, we are able to look back on a spiritual history spanning 2000 and more years; the Communists are the ones who should fear, because they will be gone one day. He also insisted that we are not secondclass citizens, as the whole of society rests upon the values of believers even if society may not currently recognize it. Milan Jurčo’s principles for spiritual development gave our generation hope, and a sense of meaning in the fight against injustice and oppression. We were able to experience inner freedom as individuals, in our families, and in small groups.
At the same time, in the years leading up to 1968, the Czechoslovak political system cautiously began to liberalize. Liberalization in terms of parliamentary socialism—or “socialism with a human face,” as it has been named— threatened to reduce the power of the Soviet Union over the satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe. When this liberalization attempt was curtailed by the August 1968 invasion, it had a spiritual as well as political impact upon Central Europe. People became much more cynical.
Almost one million members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia failed to pass political loyalty checks. Conservative Communists tried to tighten their grip on power in what was dubbed a “normalization process.” Many people stopped believing in Communist ideals, however, and if they were in the Party, they remained there only out of fear or to maintain individual privileges. This included some officials charged with supervising churches. After 1968 even the ŠtB understood that the Communist system was no longer about helping humanity, but a power game. They did their job, but the point was no longer to participate in an ideological fight against enemies.
In my heart I had wanted to study philosophy or sociology, but I chose computer science in order to avoid this initially genuine ideological conflict. After graduating in 1964, I worked at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in its Institute of Technical Cybernetics, an early term for computer science. Yet this choice would still have enormous consequences on my personal life in the wake of 1968. From the point of view of the “normalizers,” the Slovak Academy of Sciences was a center of counter-revolution. As an insufficiently politically loyal worker, I and many other colleagues were fired.
From 1970 onwards I worked at the Department of Automatic Control at the State Forest Product Research Institute, where Milan Jurčo of our church was a department leader. Jurčo recommended me for a study stay in Finland—a great power in the research field of wood processing—to study the optimal control of solid wood lumber drying processes. Thus I spent the academic year of 1973-4 in Finland. At that time, The Navigators—a worldwide missionary movement focusing on the spiritual growth of university students—had recently established a presence at Helsinki Technical University. Milan Jurčo’s earlier spiritual mentoring propelled me to join their mission work, and this time in Finland would become a turning point in my life.
My encounter with The Navigators in Finland helped me to crystallize the awareness of my personal calling. I stopped perceiving my faith as something private or internal and instead began to see it as a responsibility to transform myself and the world around me. Parallel to this, I stopped perceiving Communist Czechoslovakia as a prison from which I should try to escape, and began to see it as a place where new tasks awaited me. I felt compelled to take them on in order to contribute to the liberation, healing, and recovery of individuals and my community in general. I became convinced that restored and transformed people could shape and nurture new communities, and ultimately a new society. I even felt equipped to proceed in fulfilling this mission: To concentrate on the spiritual training of individuals so as to form communities of “positive deviation.”
Support from The Navigators
After returning from Finland in May 1974, I started to organize Bible study groups for young people at our Cirkev Bratská Church on Cukrová Street in Bratislava. In our group work, we followed the Design for Discipleship lessons developed by The Navigators, which I reproduced and disseminated together with Pavel Kailing and Milenka Uhlíková (Jurčova). We used the best underground publishing technology we could find at that time, including an Apple II computer-controlled Olivetti typewriter.
At the same time, I benefited from friendships beyond the Iron Curtain that became a long-term source of encouragement and support in accomplishing my personal calling. Here, I must emphasize the role played by the foreign evangelical mission of The Navigators. In the mid-1970s they formed a “traveling team” in Vienna consisting of about ten families. The team’s task was to support Christians inside the Communist bloc. Although individual team members were primarily responsible for only one specific country, they rotated their country visits for security reasons, so that no one person travelled to the same country more than twice a year. We were careful never to use our real names or to take notes; everything had to be learned by heart. My main contact was with Paul Wyckoff, and this grew into a personal friendship. The greatest benefit to our family was that Paul strengthened not only our faith, but also hope for freedom and democracy, and the feeling that we were not alone behind the Iron Curtain, but linked to a larger family beyond.
Parallel to our Bible study groups, church members were at this time working on a major building project at Cukrová Street. Older members of the church community expressed concern that our work could distract young people from helping with construction. With some reluctance, we therefore put the study groups on hold in 1975, but this later turned out to be an inspiration from above. I did continue individual meetings with my friends Pavel Kailing, a therapist for children with learning difficulties, and Daniel Raus, who had come to Bratislava from the Czech town of Vysoké Mýto in order to study electroengineering.
Since I had promised the older members of our congregation that I would not invite younger church members, we then started to address people from outside the church environment, primarily university students who had existential questions and were searching for answers in the realms of freedom, truth, or beauty in art. In this way Jozef Kerekréty, a chemistry student at the Slovak Technical University, strengthened our trio in 1976.
From 1977, with the elders’ consent, we again started to meet as a church Bible study group movement on condition that our work would focus on young people outside the church. The key idea in The Navigators’ ministry is to pass on the Christian faith from one person to another, and the experience of re-orienting away from group work toward investing in individuals was a milestone in my personal development. I started to understand that the Christ-like attitude towards social transformation is to look at the world through the prism of helping individuals become more mature people.
Influence of Václav Havel
I was also greatly influenced by Václav Havel, who by this time had become a key dissident figure with the Charter 77 human rights initiative. Havel did not identify as a Christian, but his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” maintained that the whole world functions according to values such as truth, righteousness, and love. He argued that if history gets out of balance, such as through fascism or Communism, it will return to those fundamental values. One of his key ideas is that the strength of a community lies in the truth, which cannot be eradicated by living a lie:
Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does living a lie make any sense: it exists because of that background.
The Communists were therefore afraid of the truth. That was an absolutely revolutionary thing for us to think, because everything was run by fear. Yet we felt that we were free from that oppression to the extent that we were ready to follow the truth. As long as you were prepared to risk that, you were free.
The risks were real. During the 1970s the “normalization process” was in full swing, and this included intrusive church supervision by the ŠtB and other bureaucratic authorities. In the early 1980s the leaders of our congregation, Pastor František Ciesar and Milan Jurčo, asked me if I would become officially responsible for youth development within our congregation, including before the state authorities. This meant that the supervisory authorities would register my name. I accepted this request readily as I personally knew both Pastor František and brother Jurčo to be courageous, creative and honest people who had stood in the frontline of the fight against the oppressive regime for many years. What I admired in them was that, under ever-changing political circumstances—whether favorable or unfavorable—they knew how to take the right stand, not only to protect the church, but also to open up space for its spiritual growth.
As it turned out, my professional endeavors in lumberprocessing technology assisted me in my dealings with the government. Since 1970 I had participated in a long-term state research and development project, which was recognized by the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Economy as an example of the successful transfer of scientific research into practice. Our research team received a state award in 1979, and this had a huge impact upon how the secret police interacted with me as the head of the church’s youth work. (At first, the authorities wanted to remove me from the team as I was Christian, but my colleagues explained that this would be impossible because I had authored the research!) Instead of summoning me for an interrogation with an aggressive senior agent at the ŠtB headquarters on Račianska Street, a philosophy graduate who had only become an agent in order to receive an apartment would interview me at a café. I had been afraid that I might be beaten during the two interrogations I had with the senior agent, but this was a totally different discussion. When I explained that the Christian conversion process actually saves the government the expense of providing rehabilitation in the case of a drug addict, for example, the young ŠtB agent even asked if I minded that he was getting in the way of my work!
In all, we developed The Navigators’ ministry in three cities in Czechoslovakia: Bratislava, Prague, and Ostrava. This saw around 100 people meeting secretly for Bible study in private homes by 1985. These groups had a natural attraction. Communist culture was saturated with lies, suspicion, and denunciation, but here was a little place where you felt accepted unconditionally, could discuss freely, and make friends whom you could trust.
The participants were mostly students, and 60 or 70 percent came from a secular background. Some were even from staunchly Communist families. In one case, an engineering student was afraid to tell his father, a school inspector, that he had become a Christian. To ease the situation, I went to see his father, who listened to what I had to say in stern silence. Then his wife recalled that she too used to pray the “Our Father” when she was young. We turned out to be tapping on deeply buried cultural roots. In another case, an economics student was knocked down by a bus and fell into a coma that lasted a week. My wife is a medic, and so we did everything we could for this girl. Her father was a judge in the city of Kosice and so very close to the secret police. It was an awkward situation as we were technically enemies; he knew we were the ones who had led his daughter to Christ. On the other hand, he had to trust us to take care of his daughter, and so he came and stayed with us. Here too, a rootedness in Christian values would come to the fore, as his wife—a schoolteacher—began to attend church regularly after 1989.
Open theology
In the light of experiences such as these, our theology became open, somewhat akin to a centered set in mathematics. In mathematics, a bounded set is defined by its boundaries; as soon as we define them, we determine whether an element is inside or outside the set. In contrast, a centered set has no boundaries but is defined by whether the vector of an element is pointing towards or away from the center. An element may be situated rather far from the center, but if its vector is pointing toward it, it is considered inside the set.
We know that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and once it becomes a great tree, it provides shelter for all kinds of other life. By being open to people and serving society, I believe that we Christians can participate in the formation of culture. To this end, I am seeking to assist all those who currently bear the responsibility for this ongoing work in Bratislava as they strengthen the identity of those young people who are just setting out upon their spiritual journey. I am convinced that, just as God revealed His mighty and eternal presence in our and our fathers’ lives during the Communist period, He will do the same for all who dare to rely on Him today and in future.
