BEING HUMAN

Day 24, 24 December 2024, the 1035th day of the full-scale war.

If a global peacetime theology does not wake at the sound of Mary crying out in labor, it will wake at the sound of Rachel weeping over a gospel of no more. But who would care? Who would hear? Who would listen? The benefits of a relationship with Herod, with Pilate, with the Temple are far more promising than recognizing the God-man in a manger, especially in a context of euphemistic armed conflicts, and in offices where traditional Christian and family values are protected by applying violence, so that we may all be comfortable again.

God determined that we should live in a vulnerable, war-torn country, and I hope it was in order to reveal His transforming presence in our lives, so that we would learn that displacement is a sacred journey where providence accompanies the most marginalized rather than a sign of divine abandonment. Through stories of exile, of fleeing families, of interrupted plans, a deeper narrative emerges: divine purpose often appears in spaces of rejection and apparent hopelessness. And this truth contradicts, more and more, the dominant peacetime theology of the global church structures, whatever that phrase means.

Our journey is marked day and night by grief, or rather by a postponed grief, since I still have not had time to weep for Andrii, because of job duties and projects and travel. And grief is not the final word. It is a space behind the broken windows of the soul where divine compassion meets human brokenness. In moments of absolute darkness, in the dark nights of my own soul, I value God’s visible signs more and more, above His silent presence, and they carry more hope for me than a quoted verse does. In this war I keep learning that for some mysterious reason religious powers are co-opted by oppressive systems, while a true faith always stands with the vulnerable rather than with those who lie and dehumanize and kill and rape and loot and occupy in the name of traditional Christian and family values.

As I reflect on a religious world that supports an empire’s claim that God is on its side, and where leaders twist Scripture to serve the powerful, the same kind of power that ultimately crucified the One they claim to serve, I feel called to become a pilgrim, seeking truth at the overlooked margins, outside the peacetime theologies of global religious structures.

In the face of our disrupted plans and unanswered prayers, though we try hard to follow our job descriptions and our contracts, I am learning a paradoxical truth: that emptiness can become fullness even when we are treated as strange outsiders, and that weakness can become witness even when we are treated as voices from the margins. I am discovering that when a war transforms our theological language and our understanding of God, and so contradicts a peacetime theology more and more, this is an invitation into a deeper and more honest faith rather than the beginning of another systematic theology.

Ultimately this is a story of transformation. You may like it or not. You may accept it or not. You may agree with it or not. Suffering rewrites our understanding of divine presence and forces a more authentic and embodied theological reflection. Real wisdom emerges out of a patient and persistent hope, cultivated through long suffering, rather than out of a positivistic Christian enthusiasm, and this is what you learn when you witness funerals every single day for more than a thousand days of full-scale war, and not of a conflict, or a situation, or a tension, as the global church structures so often prefer to call it.

I hope these reflections, forged in the crucible of Ukraine’s pain, have not offended you, and that they can serve as a reminder that the God of Advent is intimately present in our darkest nights rather than distant and aloof, and that His star shines through the broken windows of our souls. Do you want to see the shining darkness of the Lord of the universe? Then welcome the darkness of your own soul.

No concluding prayer. No opening verse. Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine