On Wednesday, March 12, 2025, I too part in the International Seminar and Discussion “Elaborating a Theology of Grief: Ecumenical Commitment,” organized by the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at Ukrainian Catholic University with support from Kerk in Actie.
I presented alongside Rev. Rodger Murchison, a Baptist minister and author from Princeton Theological Seminary, Yulia Vintoniv, a UCU scholar researching godforsakenness, Fr. Oleh Kindiy, UCU associate professor and head of the Center of Ecotheology, and Fr. Serhiy Dmytriev, an Orthodox military chaplain and chairman of Eleos-Ukraine. Fr. Roman Fihas, director of the Institute, moderated our discussion.
The seminar focused on developing theological responses to the suffering caused by russia’s full-scale invasion, and on how Christian theology engages the ethical and spiritual challenges of mass violence. We addressed the central questions: what theological reflection is possible after atrocities like Bucha, how we recognize God’s presence within suffering, and how pastoral practice can address trauma while still offering hope. The full seminar is available online, where my own presentation appears in a much condensed form.
My contribution was a personal testimony of grief after my brother’s death in this war, used to illustrate how Ukrainian communities are developing narrative and contextual theologies that make room for lament and for resurrection hope at the same time.
As Ukrainians we now live in the space of Holy Saturday, that suspended time between crucifixion and resurrection. We have buried the people we loved, and we stubbornly await a dawn that seems impossibly distant. This letter to my brother Andrii comes out of that theological borderland where faith meets raw grief.
What follows is theology incarnate rather than academic theology, written in tears, spoken through ritual, carried in procession. On 21 July 2024, at half past six in the morning, the heart of Senior Lieutenant of Medical Service Andrii Dyatlik stopped beating. My younger brother, a talented military doctor, a devoted son and a beloved friend, had been severely wounded by russians on 6 July, his thirty-third birthday, in the Kherson region. The symbolism of that age, matching the earthly years of Christ, is not lost on our grieving family.
I accompanied Andrii’s body on 24 July, from Independence Square in Rivne to his resting place in the Alley of Heroes at the Nove cemetery. This burial marked our family’s third loss to russian aggression, one brother and two members of our extended family, and even as we grieved him, four more of our relatives were serving in frontline trenches, which turns mourning into a state of permanent vigilance.
Through this edited letter, based on the one I wrote to Andrii on 17 August 2024, I try to articulate a theology of grief born from the reality of flag-draped coffins and of communities kneeling in the street, rather than from the abstract principles of systematic theology. I witness how faith creates a space where protest against evil and hope in resurrection can coexist without contradiction, how our national trauma finds expression in shared symbols and rituals, and how genuine theological reflection emerges from inside the suffering of war.
Churches and seminaries cannot offer neat answers to the question of evil, and they can walk alongside the grieving, honoring the full depth of the pain while still gesturing toward resurrection. This letter witnesses that tension: the impossible task of speaking about God’s goodness from inside the valley of the shadow of death. I offer it as a contribution toward pastoral approaches that neither diminish the reality of trauma nor surrender to the finality of despair, approaches grounded in the truth that we live in the tension of Holy Saturday, where absence is palpable and hope remains defiantly alive.
My dear brother Andrii, in this sacred space between heaven and earth I write to you as a brother and as a theologian, though today the brother’s voice cries louder. The psalmist wrote of waters that overwhelm the soul, and I understand this now as a lived reality rather than a metaphor. My theology has taken on a body, and that body is made of tears.
When the news of your death came, I experienced what the ancient Hebrews called shevirat ha-lev, the breaking of the heart. We were six brothers and five remain, and in that numerical reduction lies a cosmic diminishment, since the God who counts the stars and calls them by name surely felt the universe contract when your name moved from the present tense into the past. Like David lamenting Absalom, though you are nothing like Absalom, I cry out: my brother, my brother, would that I had died instead of you.
In that van on the way to the Alley of Heroes, I sat beside your flag-draped coffin as both homo dolens and homo theologicus, the suffering man and the theological man united in one broken frame. The dark lacquer of your coffin reflected my questions about divine presence in the valley of the shadow of death. I trust that you are with Christ, and my finite understanding still cannot bridge the chasm between here and there, which is the mysterium tremendum of death, terrible in its certainty and mysterious in its passage.
The white mourning ribbons around your coffin speak a visual theology of purity and of loss. Like the torn garments of biblical mourners, they turn our internal rupture outward, and they bind together more than your coffin, since they bind our family’s collective wound: parents who should never have outlived their child, sisters who lost their protector, five brothers reduced to an incomplete circle. In our tradition we speak of Christ’s seamless garment, and in death that garment is torn, though we trust it will be rewoven in resurrection.
The wooden cross before me, wrapped in an embroidered ritual cloth, stands as the central paradox of our faith, an instrument of execution transformed into a symbol of transcendence. Your name engraved on it joins the great community of saints who passed through death’s portal before us. I remember our discussing Bonhoeffer’s cost of discipleship, and I never imagined the cost would prove so literal and so final. Yet even while I grieve I hear the echo of Easter: the cross is empty, Christ is risen. This is our theologia crucis made personal, lived rather than argued.
The evergreen cypress wreath in the corner preaches its silent sermon about immortality. Your body was destroyed by russian violence, a manifestation of the fallen world’s capacity for evil that so many still try to justify in the name of traditional Christian values, and the cypress reminds me that your essence continues. Augustine wrote that evil is privation, the absence of good, and your death is such an absence, a hole torn in the fabric of creation, while our faith proclaims that what looks like absence is a transition. The white on the branches, symbolizing purity, reminds me of the promise in Revelation about those washed in the blood of the Lamb standing before the throne in white robes. I imagine you there now, Andrii, clothed in resurrection dignity.
Looking through the window at the people gathered on the Maidan, I see the communio sanctorum made visible, since these grieving citizens form an earthly echo of the heavenly assembly. The Book of Hebrews describes a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, and today they materialize in flesh and in tears, forming a liturgical community that participates in what the early church called holy remembrance. In their faces I see the imago Dei reflected even through grief, each person bearing God’s image while they honor yours.
The procession along the streets of Rivne becomes a public theology of lament. When drivers and passengers stop their cars and kneel as we pass, I am watching a sacramental moment, the ordinary transformed into sacred witness. You knelt so often in prayer, Andrii, and now others kneel for you. This is kenosis, a self-emptying before mystery, and their genuflection asks the question my heart cannot stop asking: will this sacrifice, alongside so many others, finally bring redemption to our suffering nation? Like Abraham journeying toward Moriah, we process toward the Alley of Heroes carrying our beloved sacrifice, confronting the most difficult demand faith has ever made.
At the Alley of Heroes our private grief enters communion with national lamentation. Like the ancient Israelites who created communal rituals for mourning, we take part in the collective processing of trauma, and your thirty-three years, mirroring the earthly span of Christ, now join the theological narrative of sacrificial love. Greater love has no one than this, the Gospel says, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. Your calling to heal has been transfigured into a different kind of healing, purchased at a terrible price.
I do not want to release you, Andrii. My whole being resists this final acknowledgment, as Jacob wrestled the angel and demanded a blessing before letting go. Yet I have to practice what the mystics called holy indifference, that painful surrender to the divine will, which means entrusting you to the God who promises resurrection rather than forgetting you. Your body remains here until the first resurrection, and your spirit already dwells in that place where death shall be no more, and neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more.
Until we meet again in the fullness of the Kingdom, I remain your brother in flesh and in spirit. Like the disciples after the ascension, I stand gazing between two worlds, honoring your absence here while trusting your presence there. This is our family’s Holy Saturday, suspended between the grief of crucifixion and the promise of resurrection, and we will carry both your memory and our hope as we continue our journey on this silent planet.
In the name of Christ, who turns even death into a doorway, your older brother, Taras
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