#BeingHuman. Ashes on our foreheads… ashes in our hands… A Ukrainian reflection on Ash Wednesday… In Ukraine, we understand ashes differently now….
The symbolic dust placed upon our foreheads in the solemn liturgy (that we became a part of today in the morning at the ICETE 2025) has become literal: falling from bombed apartment buildings, settling on children’s toys, covering family photos that survived while their owners did not… Under Russian aggression, Ash Wednesday cries to us with unbearable clarity…
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”… These words, once abstract before 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time, now echo through concrete reality. We have witnessed our mortality with open eyes, burying our loved ones… as Russians killed my sibling Andriy and other relatives and friends… The fragility of flesh has been demonstrated on our streets, in our homes and hospitals, in mass graves hastily dug… What was liturgical has become experiential…
Yet Ash Wednesday is not despair… This is what many outside Ukraine cannot or choose not to understand. The ashes mark not just death but the beginning of a journey… through the wilderness, through suffering, through death, but… toward resurrection. When we, Ukrainian Community of Hope, receive those ashes, we testify that we do not surrender to darkness but invite the light of the Holy Spirit to this political and spiritual and often physical darkness…
For us, these ashes do not mean God’s absence but rather God’s solidarity with the suffering. Christ did not remain untouched by our human pain… he entered it fully on the Cross… The God we worship bears scars… even after His resurrection… And so when Russian missiles destroy our churches and homes, we recognize that God on the Cross dwells not in safety but in vulnerability…
Ash Wednesday does not mean passive acceptance of evil. The ashes we wear are not a sign of defeat but a declaration: we know the worst that “Christian” empire can do, and still we stand… These ashes do not mean we accept death’s dominion but rather that we understand precisely what is at stake… and still we choose life, choose resilience, and choose to believe in the resurrection… We do not pray only because we have been spared suffering. We also pray because suffering has not destroyed our capacity to recognize God in the rubble…
Acknowledging our mortality does not diminish our humanity but deepens it… to being truly human… The ashes remind us not only of what we have lost but also of what cannot be taken… our divine image and our stubborn hope that outlasts “Christian” empires…
“From dust, you came”… Yes, we are vulnerable… we break… we bleed. “To dust, you shall return”… Yes, our cities can be reduced to rubble, our bodies to earth. But… between those truths lies another: that dust in God’s hands has always been the material of new creation, new beginnings, and resurrection… Peace be with you and keep your children away from war… Taras D, Albania (ICETE 2025)
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