War and violence overflow with intensely painful emotions, with grief and anger and shock, and when we are triggered we try to silence one another instead of listening in order to understand a trauma unlike our own. This runs well beyond Ukrainians and russians, since it reaches into the Community of Hope in Ukraine and our partners from the collective West, for whom the greatness of the Kingdom of God matters more than empires or traditional values.
We cannot move forward together unless the emotions on every side of the Community of Hope, ours here in Ukraine and our partners’ abroad, are voiced carefully and with care for one another. Only when we let each other, carrying our different wounds, stand close enough to be heard, and only when we open our hearts to share and to understand pain, can we find a common language for telling the truth. Pain has no language of its own at first, so we, our partners and the People of the Bridge alike, have to search together for the words and the narratives that let its meaning come through.
Our faith goes through its own trials in the moral storms and the corruption of wartime, because we expect God to act like a cosmic magician who solves our minor inconveniences rather than permitting great tragedy and death itself to break into the home of people we love.
A veteran quoted a theologian to me: “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.” When horror surrounds us and our neatly packaged certainties collapse, the doubts start eating at the spiritual assurance that was built in peacetime.
An honest relationship with God asks for emotional transparency rather than spirituality or religious practice alone, and it often begins when we admit brutally that He seems absent, that things are unjust, and that there are apparent contradictions in how an all-good God allows this to continue. That lonely space of wrestling with theological questions is itself His grace working quietly, expanding our capacity to see the limits of our own understanding.
In the Gospels the followers welcome the power and the teaching of Jesus while His blessings fill their days with wonders and meaning and community, with food and with healing. Then He is arrested and condemned unjustly through jealousy and lies, and even His closest disciples run away in fear and confusion. All of us, in Ukraine and in the collective West, ran with them. No men stayed with Him.
Only the women around Jesus on the Via Dolorosa found the courage to remain at His side to the end, as that seemingly cursed cross came closer. And the reason has to do with how they knew their Teacher, since they knew Him beyond the blessings He had given them and knew Him through the vulnerability and anguish and woundedness He was willing to receive from them, as their gift to Him, the gift of those who suffer less offered to the One who suffers beyond comparison. Their honesty and their faith in the dark opened channels through which brokenness could become wholeness, tragedy could turn into beauty, and crosses could be redeemed by grace.
So can we, inside the trauma and the corruption of this war, give Jesus something other than what we assume He wants from us, other than our success and our certainty and our loyalty to earthly powers pretending to divinity? Can we give Him our pain and our powerlessness as the gift? Would you dare, friends, to bring such a gift? Can we stop expecting Him to work as a cosmic problem-solver who removes suffering, and instead walk close enough to touch the wounds ourselves? Can we accept that the partners walking beside us on this path of conscience are themselves wounded by the effort to understand us and to support us?
This ongoing full-scale russian war against Ukraine keeps testing the moral foundations of everyone it touches, ours here and yours in the West, and it strains relationships of trust across every divide. And by sharing our anguish in solidarity, those who are willing to stay human, haunted as they are by past and present and future suffering, will find their way through the storm together.
Scripture reminds us: “The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18, NKJV). Do you want to be near Him? Then allow Him to break you, and give Him the right to crush you.
If we turn to Christ and to one another as the Community of Hope with broken hearts, and if we keep our hearts open and broken as a gift to each other, then healing grace can appear even now and light the path forward toward the hill of crucifixion. We cannot heal each other, neither the People of the Bridge here in Ukraine nor the partners who follow the road of Simon of Cyrene, since the healing happens on that hill, through death into new life.
Can we, then, give Jesus our pain and stop asking Him to take it away? Can we walk the whole Via Dolorosa in pain, all the way to the hill? And can we pay attention, while we walk it, to the people who suffer less than we do? Are we able?
Peace be with you, People of the Bridge.
Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
737 days of the full-scale russian war against Ukraine
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