"the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands."

"However, the root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of [not just high-ranking clergy, but] Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.
     "True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code—in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 37-38.

"why did I keep silent?"

     "Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself.
     "But it did not begin.

     "And so they are leading you. During a daylight arrest there is always that brief and unique moment when they are leading you, either inconspicuously, on the basis of a cowardly deal you have made, or else quite openly, their pistols unholstered, through a crowd of hundreds of just such doomed innocents as yourself. You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations!  That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! . . .
     "Instead, not one sound comes from your parched lips, and that passing crowd naively believes that you and your executioners are friends out for a stroll.
     "I myself often had the chance to cry out. . . .
     ". . . So why did I keep silent? Why, in my last minute out in the open, did I not attempt to enlighten the hoodwinked crowd?
     ". . .
     "Every man has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. . . . Others have not yet attained the mature concepts on which a shout of protest to the crowd must be based. Indeed, only a revolutionary has slogans on his lips that are crying to be uttered aloud; and where would the uninvolved, peaceable average man come by such slogans?  He simply does not know what to shout.  And then, last of all, there is the person whose heart is too full of emotion, whose eyes have seen too much, for that whole ocean to pour forth in a few disconnected cries.
     "As for me,. I kept silent for one further reason: because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for me, too few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200, but what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million.
     "But for the time being I did not open my mouth, and the escalator dragged me implacably down into the nether world.
     "And when I got to Okhotny Road, I continued to keep silent.
     "Nor did I utter a cry at the Metropole Hotel.
     "Nor wave my arms on the Golgatha of Lubyanka Square."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 15-18.

Anti-classism

"In his instructions on the use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Latsis wrote:  'In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power.  The first question should be:  What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? . . . These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.'"

       Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 96-97.  Martin Ivanovich Latsis, born in 1888, was himself executed as a counter-revolutionary in 1938.

"Is there any truth to this claim?"

"In the course of time the Easter dance came [for a period] to be directed to and confined within the labyrinths that were set within the nave of the church, at least at several of the cathedrals of northern France.  We do not know exactly where or when this first occurred.  What can be said with certainty is that all of the extant references to the use of the labyrinth in the church prior to the seventeenth century pertain to the ceremony of the Easter dance and no other."

. . .

"Most guidebooks explain the presence of the maze on a cathedral floor in something like the following terms:  'In the Middle Ages the labyrinth served as a place where devout souls carried out a vicarious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, praying as they followed the path of the maze on their knees.' . . .  Is there truth to this claim that the maze entered the church as a site for substitute pilgrimage?  None at all.
     "In fact, the church maze was used as a place of fictive pilgrimage not at the beginning of its history, but at its end.  The two earliest documents to refer to the labyrinth as a 'path to Jerusalem' date from the late eighteenth century" and refer back to a "ritual . . . performed at Chartres" no earlier than the seventeenth century.

. . .

"During the sixteenth century . . . the labyrinth lost some of the Christological associations it had acquired during the Middle Ages.  It became, as it once was long ago with the patristic fathers, a simple [and almost purely literary?] metaphor for the route along which the solitary soul must pass. . . .  [T]he maze evolved from a medieval symbol of noisy Hell and Purgatory to a post-Reformation place of quiet, where a more personal, possibly nonsectarian experience might take place. . . .  This maze has no demonic center.  There is no implication of a round-trip journey by Christ.  There are neither militaristic nor eucharistic overtones.  There are no praises to martyrs of the Christian cause.  This maze has no special relevance to the season of Easter.  The pilgrim may set forth to Jerusalem at any time.
     "As he does so, he will find himself alone.  In this early-modern maze, the emphasis has shifted from a collective symbol seen from without to an object for individual meditation experienced from within.  We should recall that there are no records attesting to, or even suggesting, a personal journey on a church maze prior to the seventeenth century.  [Though I (Steve Perisho) find some of Wright's interpretative work speculative, too,] All earlier accounts speak of clerics dancing on the maze or processing across it on Easter as part of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church.  Allusions to a meditative experience for laymen begin to appear only in the seventeenth century.  Not coincidentally, it is in this period that the 'pilgrim on the maze' sets forth in emblem books in the West."  Etc.

     Craig Wright, The maze and the warrior:  symbols in architecture, theology, and music (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001), 138 (chap. 5, The Dance of the Maze), all italics and underscoring mine, and then 208-210 and 213 and following.
     That was in 2001.  In 2004 Connolly challenged this, asserting that "We should not let [the absence of] texts do all of our [art-historical] work for us" ("At the center of the world:  the labyrinth pavement of Chartres cathedral," in Art and architecture of late medieval pilgrimage in northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick & Rita Teppike, Studies in medieval and Reformation traditions:  history, culture, religion, ideas 104  (Leiden:  Brill, 2004), 293n25)).  I have yet to grapple fully with the serious argument made by Connolly, or with any other serious counter-arguments for that matter, but my point is that too much of what "the 'ecumenicalists' of the New Age" (Wright, 271) have claimed for the purpose and use of the large pavement maze (the relatively time- and space-bound occurrence of that phenomenon) in the history of Christian spirituality seems to have been theoretical at best and fanciful at worst, or, in other words, perfectly contestable.

"The house of the Lord (domus Dei) consumed the house of Daedalus (domus Daedali)"

      "Although symmetry can be identified in mazes since the dawn of the Mediterranean world, not all mazes possess a beautifully repeating rhythm [visible only from 'above'].  Many labyrinths found in medieval manuscripts, for example, do not.  Consider the often-copied maze that appears in Lambert of St. Omer's Liber floridus (1121). . . .  There are twenty-five segments in this labyrinth and no symmetry whatsoever; the succession of quarter, half, and full turns has no rhythmic reason to it.
     "The Liber floridus tells a pagan tale and offers a pagan illustration, and that is precisely the point:  irrationality can flourish within this and similar mazes because they lack the cross.  The axes of the cross dictate the artful sequence of quarter- and half-turnings segments.  It is the cross that creates the perfect symmetry; it forces the turns that create the mirror images.  Rationality, order, and perfection are caused by this most fundamental of Christian symbols.  The message that the creators of the Chartrain and Reims/Sens-type mazes wished to convey was twofold:  first, inherent in every true maze is the process of a miraculous reversal; and second, divine perfection can be wrought from chaos only with the aid of the cross."

     Craig Wright, The maze and the warrior:  symbols in architecture, theology, and music (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001), 69 (with 65, 67, and 71).  Indeed, even "the fourth-century Algerian maze . . . embodies a pleasing, though different, recursive rhythm".

"California — with its peerless density of crackpots per capita"

Meher Baba

      Pratinav Anil, "Spiritual snake oil:  a century of pseudo-enlightenment," a review of The nirvana express:  how the search for enlightenment went west, by Mick Brown, Times literary supplement no. 6302 (January 12, 2024):  4.

"that, having done thy will with cheerfulness while it was day, we may, when the night cometh, rejoice to give thee thanks"

"O GOD, the King eternal, who dividest the day from the night and turnest the shadow of death into the morning: Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep thy law, and guide our feet into the way of peace; that, having done thy will with cheerfulness while it was day, we may, when the night cometh, rejoice to give thee thanks; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen."

"O God, the King eternal, whose light divides the day from the night and turns the shadow of death into the morning:  Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep your law, and guide our feet into the way of peace; that, having done your will with cheerfulness during the day, we may, when night comes, rejoice to give you thanks; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen."

     William Reed Huntington, "For the Sunday before Easter," Materia ritualis: An appendix to a paper on "The revision of the [American] common prayer" in the American Church Review for April 1881 (1882), ___.  And on p. 594 of the 1928 and pp. 56 and 99 of the 1979 Book[s] of common prayer.  Hatchett, 126; Marshall, Prayer book parallels, vol. 1, p. 132,133.