The humble pastor

I had come to Elijas Nams, an isolated meditation compound in rural Latvia, to ask the Latvian Lutheran pastor, Juris Rubenis, about his significant involvement in some of the largest and most successful anti-Soviet movements of the 1980s. Rubenis was a founding member of the religious anti-communist movement, Atdzimšana un Atjaunošanās (Renewal and Awakening), a vital member of the human rights group Helsinki-86 and a director of the Latvian Popular Front (a sort of umbrella organisation for most of the anti-Soviet and anti-communist groups in Latvia). His résumé brought me to Elijas Nams for the interview, but his magnetic personality led our discussion towards his thoughts on the future of spirituality, the value of contemplative practices and the hope for modern society.  

To meet with Rubenis, I drove north on the wet pockmarked road from Ventspils, a small port city on the Baltic Sea, towards Cape Kolka. The road ran parallel to the sea coast which, though only a few hundred metres to my left, was completely obscured by the birch forest, still dripping wet and foggy after the storm that cut power to some of the few remaining houses by the cape the night before. The raw and winding path through the trees yielded to a straight and manicured gravel road, lined with unlit glass orbs on tasteful black columns. The road cut a line through the low shrubbery in the clearing, inviting us towards the log house with a big glass window that overlooks the colourful moorland. Rubenis’s gaunt but kind face greeted me in the light drizzle outside Elijas Nams.

Complicated relationship

At the height of his public influence, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and while he was the chairman of the Latvian Popular Front, Rubenis left the “political river”, as he called it, to return to a life dedicated to spirituality. He served the noblest aims of the human spirit as a political figure in the 1980s and now continues to nourish the human spirit as a religious figure in Latvia. His political activities and his spiritual work are inextricably linked with Latvia’s fate and the future of Eastern European democracy. 

Soviet Latvia had a deficit of pastors in the early 1980s, which is why the then 21-year-old Juris Rubenis was put in charge of a Lutheran congregation in Liepaja before he even finished seminary. “It was terrible,” said Rubenis. “What kind of life experience can you offer as a 21-year-old pastor?” While at the church, he befriended a group of young ministers who began meeting regularly to discuss an agenda that could perhaps widen the abilities and responsibilities of the church in the Soviet Union. Nominally atheist, the USSR had a complicated relationship with religion which was still very deeply ingrained in the daily life of most Eastern Europeans. The Soviet Union essentially issued a “containment” policy against religious institutions; ministers could conduct ritualistic programming within their church walls, but any sort of charitable activity or communal organisation that could be conceived as an attempt to create a “civil society” was strictly forbidden. Rubenis began his decade-long anti-Soviet career by simply petitioning the Lutheran patriarch and other Soviet officials to give the clergy some breathing room to do more good outside the church. By 1987, this group of young pastors grew into a national religious anti-communist movement called Atdzimšana un Atjaunošanās.  

In 1986 three dockworkers in Liepaja, the city where Rubenis had his church, formed the human rights group, Helsinki-86. If Rubenis had not already established himself as an intellectual spokesperson for religious rights in Soviet Latvia, the dockworkers might never have met him. But their partnership worked because Rubenis provided the organisation with the intellectual foundation that it needed to communicate with western countries about the Soviet Union’s humanitarian violations.

“They were brave,” Rubenis recalled. “But they were simple workers. It was difficult for them to formulate what they wanted. It was hard for them to write documents. For about a year and a half, my pastor friends and I wrote all the documents for Helsinki-86. We had intellectual backgrounds, channels to the West through religious organisations, and helped get documents to Radio Free Europe.”

Life assignments

Juris Rubenis helped organise some of the largest anti-Soviet demonstrations on June 14th, August 23rd and November 18^th 1987, all before his 30th birthday. He co-wrote the founding documents for the Latvian Popular Front and signed the official document declaring Latvia’s independence from the Soviet Union. Through it all, Rubenis’s idealism, spirituality and commitment to democracy helped the Latvian anti-Soviet movement transcended naked nationalism without losing touch with the needs and desires of the Latvian nation.

“We have some concrete assignments in life,” Rubenis explained when I asked him why he stayed when he could have left. “If I am born in Latvia, and not somewhere else, then in some way, Latvia is my assignment. Maybe people idealise their ethnicity too much, but there is a sense of importance to me about this culture because I was created for it. I understood I must serve people, not just Latvians, through the prism of Latvian culture.”  

When Latvia won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, some participants in the decade-long struggle against the Soviet Union felt as though they single-handedly took down the Soviet Empire. They expected democracy to create a heaven on earth and they desperately wanted to be in charge of the new paradise. Others, seeing that democracy alone does not create paradise, quickly lost faith in the system altogether. Rubenis did not lose faith in democracy because his expectations about democracy were modest.  

“Freedom has its risks,” he told me. “It allows people to show who they really are. In a totalitarian system, people are so repressed that they can’t express themselves. So to us, it might seem that totalitarian societies are more moral because people don’t die on the streets or dance inappropriately. They all behave, but only because they are broken. Freedom removes our chains and all of a sudden we see that we are not all that moral, not that good. We actually have a lot of problems. And when a person in a free society sees this, he blames the free society. He says, ‘it’s the free society’s fault that I have to face my problems! It’s not my fault!’ We fault democracy because it reveals what is in us. But democracy forces us to face unpleasant things and we need to work through them.”

Internal freedoms

Rubenis says that he left the political river after two years of deep involvement in post-Soviet Latvian democracy in order to help people work through the unpleasant side of the democratic transition.  His fight against totalitarianism, however, did not end with the collapse of the USSR. In the 1980s, Rubenis fought for the external, or political, freedom of Latvia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began fighting for its internal freedom, for the people who survived the totalitarian state. He explained his train of thought like this: “External freedom is only one part of total freedom. It is impossible to properly utilise external, political freedom if people do not have enough internal freedom. You see in the post-Soviet states that the inertia of Soviet thinking remains deeply ingrained in people, despite the political, external freedom. So I understood that the main effort against totalitarianism in the years to come would not happen in the external world, but in the internal world. How do we become internally free?”

Rubenis’s quest for internal freedom took him to a contemplation school in Switzerland to learn about how contemplative and meditative practices help people discover the sort of internal freedom that superficially free post-Soviet states were lacking. Despite the nominal democracy that swept through Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of the post-Soviet states kept thinking in totalitarian clichés. According to Rubenis, even western liberalism, as it is practiced and preached today, has a tendency to impose and dictate its values and institutions. 

As an antidote, Rubenis built a meditation centre, called Elijas Nams, to help people divorce themselves of their old totalitarian clichés. Through meditative and contemplative practice it may be possible “to come to the realisation that I am not the greatest. Then, maybe, I can become more tolerant of others. If I can understand the complications of my own psyche, I can appreciate how hard it is for others to be ‘good’ or ‘right.’”

Giving me a tour, he flipped on the light in one of the small rooms, where guests of the meditation centre can sleep in monk-like minimalism, and said: “in this world, there are no ideal people. The biblical term ‘eternal’, as in ‘the eternal soul’, means that we are eternally developing. This is scary for a person who thinks that there’s a room somewhere with all the answers, and everything will become clear if I can just get in that room.”

Contemplation as an antidote

Just as it was important for him to serve humanity through the prism of his Latvian heritage, it was important for him to discover contemplative practices through his Christian tradition. There are contemplative schools that take meditative practices from all different faiths and combine them, but Rubenis calls this flavourless and vulgar. “In Christianity, you don’t see the word meditation often, but you often see ‘contemplation’”, he explained. “It comes from the Latin contemplatio, which means simply to be attentive in the temple. Not to speak, not to worship, but to be attentive. There is a very strong basis for contemplation in Christianity. Until the Middle Ages it was an important tradition, mostly in monasteries. But beginning with the reformation and then the Enlightenment, it fell by the wayside. The church, as it began fighting with rationalism, became too rational itself.”

After several hundred years on the periphery of Christian and western thought, contemplation made a comeback in Eastern Europe through people like Rubenis as an antidote to communist hyper-rationality. It is a human-oriented spiritualism that celebrates the individuality, mystery and complexity of the individual human being – it’s like shock therapy for people who have been educated in communist rationalism. Christianity rejects the communist idea of heaven on earth; meditation corrects the false notion that earthly happiness is easy, quick, or simple.

The point of meditation and democracy is not to find answers quickly. However, “people want things quickly,” Rubenis says, “which is why we now have quick spirituality. Spirituality, like McDonalds. If people demand that service, many will oblige. But spirituality is a long process. The point is to find the correct questions that help you live and guide you on the right path.”

Like political liberty, meditation is a means towards discovering your own solution. Sometimes, the solution that meditation leads you to is a reaffirmation of your own faith and culture, which is why, despite his world travels, his cosmopolitan perspective, illustrious résumé, hundreds of publications and an adoring Twitter following in Latvia, Juris Rubenis remains a humble pastor on the Baltic coast.

Naphtali Rivkin is a research fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington DC and a graduate candidate in international relations at the University of Cambridge. He studied in Russia and lived in Latvia as a Fulbright Researcher.

fall of communism, Latvia, Protestantism, spirituality