Vaclav Havel

Dear Friends,

I’ve never seen so many candles in one place.

Vaclav Havel passed away on Sunday, December 18th, and the Czech nation collectively mourned their loss in a way I’ve never seen in this area of the world. In public squares all over the country people spontaneously left candles and notes. Havel was a symbol of freedom, a dissident playwright turned president, occupying the highest office in the country just four months after his release from prison. He was also their collective conscious, calling a people trapped in dehumanizing socialism, and later pragmatic capitalism, to a higher horizon.

“Truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred.” he repeated over and over.

Havel expressed unusual insight into the state of the human soul. Just after the revolution, in early 1990, he argued that the “present global crisis …is directly related to the spiritual condition of modern civilization. This condition is characterized by loss: the loss of metaphysical certainties, of an experience of the transcendental, or any superpersonal moral authority, and of any kind of higher horizon. It is strange, but ultimately quite logical: as soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension and man began to lose control of it.”

Later that year someone asked him if he had experienced conversion. “Genuine conversion, as I understand it”, he replied, “would mean replacing an uncertain ‘something’ with a completely unambiguous personal God, and fully, inwardly, to accept Christ as the Son of God, along with everything that entails. And I have not taken that step.”

I don’t know if he took that step before he died – I deeply hope and pray that he did. I do know that a friend of mine gave him a special Christmas present in 2009, a signed copy of the most recent translation of the Bible into the Czech language. On the front page Sasa Flek, who has spent the last 20 years toiling over each word of this translation, wrote the following note to Havel.

“In this book, truth and love triumph over lies and hatred.”

The candles have all burned out. But we know that the triumph won by the victory of Jesus Christ still shines as the only hope for Central and Eastern Europe. Pray that we will effectively bear witness to the True Light in this dark and needy place.

Grateful for a “completely unambiguous personal God”,