Gospel News — Jun-Aug 2012

23

Grace in Latvia

Sis. Irma Sabele, (Riga, Latvia)

I would like to thank you for all the good work you have enabled in Latvia and in my own life. I understand you want me to tell you something about myself and my experience of grace.

I am a Latvian but was born in Russia. I was the daughter of a Red army officer, who was repressed during the time of Stalin (when many Latvians - and not only Latvians-suffered the same fate). He was rehabilitated after he volunteered to go and fight fascism. After the war we came to Latvia and I went to a Latvian school, but then I went to study English at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages. My husband was Russian-speaking, my daughter married a Russian and I live with them now. So I am bilingual in Russian and Latvian (but in Soviet times most Latvians were bilingual). I am, as it were, caught between the two worlds, Russian and Latvian.

Like everyone in the Soviet Union I was raised under the dogmas of Marxism, of atheism and materialism. I wasn't a religious person. I had accepted communism as a system in which there is no private property and goods are held in common and available to all as needed and I had heard people say, and it seemed to be common knowledge, that the moral code of the Communist party was practically based on the Bible. But I have to say I didn't think deeply about it. I was busy with life, raising my daughter, and working at the University in Riga teaching English. I noticed there were students who were marked by the authorities as `Believers', the subtext being – you have to be stricter with them and I could not understand it, still believing that we had freedom of conscience as it was stated in the constitution