William Willimon, who once served as a professor at Duke Divinity School, remembers when a friend of his visited the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
Upon his return he announced that the church behind the Iron Curtain was mostly “irrelevant because the only people there are little old ladies.”
Dr. Willimon wrote, “Looking back now at the collapse of communism, the difficulties of rebuilding the Soviet Union after a long period of spiritual bankruptcy, I hope my friend would now say, `Thank God for the little old ladies.’ Their existence provided a continuing, visible, political rebuke to the Soviets.”
It would be wonderful if our witness today was as effective as that of those little old ladies in the Soviet Union in the 1970’s. It is the little old ladies in churches right now in Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba – and especially the United States – who will bring about the change in government and cause a spiritual awakening that these countries desperately need.
My Commentary:
This story overturns our assumptions about the power and the influence that emanates from Washington.
From the outside, those “little old ladies” looked irrelevant — no offices, no microphones, no authority in a system that prized force and ideology. They did not march in the streets or topple statues. They simply showed up. They prayed. They endured.
And by their very presence, they testified that the state was not ultimate, that truth could not be legislated away, and that God still had a people.
In retrospect, history exposes the blindness of dismissing them. When communism collapsed, it left behind a spiritual vacuum that ideology could not fill. No wonder Putin is doing what he is doing. A thousand soldiers a day from Russia die every day in the war in Ukraine. I’m sure there are more “little old ladies” praying in Russia today than there were back in the 1970’s.
What remained was the fragile but persistent faith carried quietly for decades by ordinary believers. Those women did not survive because the system allowed them to. They survived in defiance of it. Their faith was a living contradiction to every claim of the regime.
This is how God so often works. God bypasses the centers of power and plants His witness in the margins. God entrusts the future not to the loud or the influential, but to the faithful. What looks weak to the world becomes a rebuke to it.
The same truth applies today. In churches across the world — and especially in the United States — the most powerful agents of renewal may be those we least notice. They are not chasing trends or platforms. They are lighting candles, praying rosaries, opening worn Bibles, and refusing to surrender hope.
It would be wonderful if our witness matched theirs — not dramatic, not flashy, but steadfast. History suggests that when the noise fades and the structures fail, it is often the quiet faith of the “little old ladies” that remains — and changes everything.
Is YOUR faith and the practice of YOUR faith like the “little old ladies” or not? If not, why not?
TRUTH IS LIKE SURGERY. IT HURTS, BUT THE CURE LASTS. A LIE IS LIKE A PAIN KILLER. IT GIVES INSTANT RELIEF, BUT THE SIDE EFFECTS LAST A LONG TIME.
Please share this Message with people in your parish.
