I am on the night train from the south of Ukraine to Kyiv, and after a few more meetings I go on to Rivne. Travelling through the seminaries of southern Ukraine showed me how much this full-scale war has taken out of the people charged with forming Christian leaders and training the present and the next generation of church ministers.
Everywhere I went I saw the marks of exhaustion: the emotional fatigue of comforting devastated students and staff and faculty while their own spirits are worn down by how close the front has come, the mental weariness of working through impossible dilemmas and an unreadable future, and the physical tiredness that comes from throwing yourself into relief work while the resources keep shrinking.
And the work goes on regardless. Students train as military chaplains while they study theology, which I watched in Zaporizhzhia, a city some fifteen miles from the front. Professors face their own hard decision about whether to send the family abroad to safety while they themselves stay to teach, as in Odesa. Seminary leaders carry the weight of deciding whether to relocate an entire institution further west, while at the same time holding up morale and keeping some vision of the future alive, which is the situation in Kherson and Ivano-Frankivsk.
The moral clarity this moment demands asks a great deal more of us than platitudes, and it does not come from the comfort of a peaceful pub. It emerges in battered seminary halls and crowded bomb shelters, in the places where you share the darkness and the raw nearness of death with the people who are living inside it. It shows up in the tired grey eyes of professors who sent their families away and stayed to teach through air-raid sirens, and in makeshift chaplaincy courses where students hold a text on just war in one hand and a plea for protection in the other, and in the whispered questions of the grieving and the traumatised, and in the silences where easy answers used to sit.
The moral clarity we are looking for lives at the margins and requires that we join the people already wrestling in the middle of it, if we want to hear it at all. It arrives at the dawn of new life out of the shining darkness of a night we shared.
Our Mission has not changed.
Peace be with you and your families.
Taras Dyatlik, south of Ukraine
696 days of the full-scale russian war against Ukraine
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