BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. In the chasm between heaven and earth, written on the plane from Cleveland to Naples, where fear and faith collide in a sacred tension during this full-scale russian war.

Deep in the marrow of the soul, at the very edge of despair, two primal forces converge. These twin mysteries form the crucible where mortal flesh touches divine fire, where our bottomless despair meets His unfathomable hope, and where both are transmuted into something beyond either one: the terrible gift of gazing into the void and finding there the blinding radiance of God’s own darkness rather than the darkness of hell.

Fear and faith are the very paradigms of being and of walking before the Ineffable One, and not mere echoes in the soul’s chamber. When we stand at the edge of all comprehension, where every map has burned to ash and the terra incognita opens in front of us, they become twin paths into the mystery of that shattering question: who art Thou, O Lord, and where art Thou, O brother? Fear whispers of sanctuary in the known, while trust in the darkness of divine glory calls us into the terrifying unknown. Today, tomorrow, the day after, until this war ends, whatever that will mean.

I see it in Abraham’s trembling ascent of Moriah, in Peter’s desperate step into the abyss of the waves, in Job’s terrible silence as he sits crowned with ashes, and in the eyes of my father in that photograph. Fear and faith are co-conspirators in our encounter with a Reality that blinds us with its shining darkness, rather than antagonists. That Reality remains forever vaster than our understanding, nearer than our next breath, and more distant than our deepest terror.

For those of us who have looked at the face, meaning those fallen faces on the battlefield and on the slab in the morgue, fear becomes a sacrament rather than a weakness, testimony to our humanity and to our capacity to fathom the depths of suffering. And faith emerges as the strength to act while trembling, rather than as an escape from fear, even as our anguish is increasingly dismissed by the apostles of peacetime theology and by depersonalized traditional Christian values twisted into geopolitical weapons, which bring fresh wounds through the violence of forced reconciliation and the conspiracy of silence. It spreads like a contagion, and that is a terrible sign.

The passion of the Ukrainian people, and of the peoples of the Middle East far beyond Israel (forgive me, fellow evangelicals, since I am one of you), echoes Job’s ancient silent cry, that raw scream toward a seemingly deaf heaven and toward much of global Christendom. We need words and humanitarian aid, since for some strange reason we live in flesh. But our deeper cry is for co-witness to the divine mystery unfolding in the suffering of the unnamed. What we seek from the Simons of Cyrene is sacred co-participation rather than mere assistance, a willingness to serve together in the presence of fear and death on the road to the hill of crucifixion, and to be recognized as bearers of a terrible wisdom earned in the crucible of suffering rather than as victims requiring help. For it is here, in the space of shared vulnerability and of a common Mission that has not changed, that God’s face is glimpsed in the darkness that blinds and illuminates at once.

In this nadir of despair an authentic faith is born again, a faith that lets us carry the crushing weight of unanswered questions from friends who insist on peace by any means available, rather than a faith offering cheap consolation. It stands between Him and His unrecognized darkness on one side, and the light of Herod and Pilate and Caiaphas on the other.

It is a faith that lets us embrace our fear fully without being consumed by it, to tremble before the abyss while standing firm at its edge, and to feel the full force of terror while remaining anchored in something deeper. This is fear transformed by trust rather than the absence of fear, the capacity to be afraid without being mastered by it, as we glimpse in the darkness a Presence that holds both our dread and our hope.

Every mother who lets her son go to battle walks Abraham’s road again, surrendering what is most precious to the unknown. And unlike Abraham, our fathers find no ram in the thicket, since their sons, my brother Andrii among them, complete the sacrifice in agony. Every defender in the trenches shares Daniel’s terrible communion, where faith denies nothing about the lion’s fangs and grants the courage to meet its gaze. Yet Daniel came out of the den, while so many of our relatives and friends and colleagues found no divine intervention against russian atrocities, only that terrible fellowship of fear and faith in their final moments, when their bones were broken by russian knives and drones and grenades and torture.

When the message of death arrives, we stand with Mary beneath the cross, where ultimate agony and ultimate hope become one thing, and where we face the accusations of God’s servants that our faith was insufficient, while blood from above stains the faces of a mother and a beloved disciple. Our faces. “Andrii was saving the lives of others and could not save his own? You did not pray enough. Your faith is so poor.” But here, at the cross, with the blood of our loved ones on our faces, faith becomes the power to endure the fullness of reality in fear, rather than an escape from it, abandoned and betrayed by those who traded truth for the peace of silence with Herod and Pilate and Caiaphas.

In the crimson forge of war, fear and faith are melted down and recast, and Paul’s words echo: death is swallowed up in victory, and not through any denial of death but through faith revealing a Reality beyond it. That is what lies past your dying brother’s last cry, his face ashen and bloodless, which I saw through the eyes of his comrades, and which I will never forget.

Fear and faith are twin keys to our authenticity before the Ineffable. Their paradoxical union gives birth to a courage unlike any other, the strength to tremble and advance anyway, despite the mounting violence of peacetime theology from those who would preserve the normality of their comfortable existence through the violent protection of traditional Christian values, for the sake of societies untouched by war.

The blood-red thread of hope, woven out of our fear and our faith, runs through the fabric of human history and binds our existence together, making it at once more tragic and more human, more agonizing and more divine, even as the violence of peace grows through those soulless traditional values.

Divine wisdom lies in the tragic and beautiful dance where fear and faith each lead to the other, fear driving us into faith’s embrace and faith unveiling new depths of holy fear, rather than in transcending fear through faith. In their union a new way of being human is born, and it reaches its height in the cry of the God-man from the cross: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”

Here, in Christ’s moment of ultimate abandonment, His fear and His faith converge perfectly, since the Son’s terror at the Father’s absence becomes the purest expression of trust in the Father’s presence. Like Christ trembling in Gethsemane and drinking the cup anyway, like the forsaken Jesus who still commits His spirit into the Father’s hands, we learn to let fear and faith interpenetrate in the shining of divine darkness.

For it is only through this double door, the fear that deepens faith and the faith that sanctifies our fear, that we can enter the gates of death itself with our last breath on a gray face, like my brother, and like so many prophets and heroes of faith tortured in the name of traditional religious values. There, beyond that final threshold where fear and faith become one cry, the Unknown One who has haunted all our days becomes known at last, within the darkness rather than despite it. We discover that His face has been turned toward us the whole time, most present in His seeming absence, most faithful in the moment of abandonment. Yes, fellow evangelicals: most faithful in the moment of abandonment.

Let us not refuse this terrible mystery, which finds its fullest expression in the paradox of the cross, that theology of the cross which most of us have forgotten, where the Son’s cry of dereliction becomes the ultimate testimony of trust. And perhaps, if our fear and our faith have not yet met in our own Gethsemane, and if we have not yet uttered that shattering cry from our own cross, my God, my God, why, then perhaps we have yet to sound the depths of either one.

For it is in these moments of supreme testing, when fear and faith collide in the darkness of divine absence, that both reach their full stature. Until we have wrestled in our own garden of anguish, and until we have screamed our own cry of dereliction into the void, in the presence of disciples and mothers and thieves and occupiers and the spiritual authorities of peacetime theology, we may still be dwelling in the shallows of both, strangers to their terrible intimacy.

Let us not fear these dark nights of the soul, since they may be our truest teachers in the school of divine love. And here, especially among war-torn Christian communities that are forcibly kept in the category of Christian news and romantic stories of forgiveness rather than raw reality, we discover that hope emerges in the space between fear and faith, a third presence born of their communion, rather than existing separately from them.

To be the Community of Hope means learning to dwell at their intersection, where the darkness of God’s radiance blinds and illuminates at once, rather than transcending fear and faith. It is precisely in that crucible, where the two collide and interpenetrate, that hope takes on flesh in our lives and minds and souls, as the capacity to bear witness to a Reality deeper than death and deeper than russia’s mills of atrocity, rather than as an escape from reality.

This hope is the fruit of having faced our fears with faith and our faith with fear, rather than evangelical optimism. It is born in a community that has learned to tremble together before the abyss while still proclaiming the possibility of dawn. Like the women at the tomb, terrified and filled with joy at once, we discover that hope emerges through the union of fear and faith in the presence of the Risen One who still bears His wounds.

Let us embrace this sacred tension, since to be bearers of hope in a war-torn world, one that no Christian news outlet will ever manage to translate, means letting our fear and our faith teach us their terrible wisdom here in Ukraine, rather than rising above them, even if most of Christendom chooses to ignore it.

Perhaps this is what it truly means to be the Community of Hope, at least for us here: to be those who have learned to live within the darkness and to see by the light of God’s own dark radiance, carrying both our fear and our faith as witnesses to the Love that finally encompasses even death, and fear, and faith themselves. Because in His presence, when we finally see Him as He is, we will need neither hope nor fear nor faith any longer, since all of them will be swallowed up in the direct vision of Love itself.

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Taras Dyatlik, on the way from Cleveland, Ohio, to Naples, Florida
24 January 2025, Friday

Six months since Andrii’s burial, and since the accusations of insufficient faith and prayer from certain bearers of traditional spiritual values who chose security over the terrible dance of fear and faith. Nothing personal, merely reflections at the edge of the abyss. And let us not forget that the feelings of the good russians matter.