BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. #BrutalHonesty. The war that moved inside.

To our friends and partners outside Ukraine, and offered as clarification rather than justification. In 2022 and 2023 we were often asked how it is to live in the context of war, and I believe it is time to ask a different question: how do you live with the war inside? You did not misread that. The war is inside now, dissolved into the substance of our being.

These reflections, written over several weeks of travel, are not about our military, which is an abyss of pain in itself, but about civilians who have suffered from russian aggression in countless ways since 2014 and especially since 2022: through displacement, through the loss of homes and livelihoods, through watching people they love vanish into absolute absence, through living with new disabilities and wounds both visible and invisible, through seeing children afraid of a blue sky, since the collective West declined to close the skies over Ukraine and gave many reasons for declining, through learning to categorize explosions by their sound as though nothingness had its own vocabulary, and through forgetting what long-term planning means once tomorrow itself has become an act of faith against the void.

In February 2022 we lived in the context of war. It surrounded us like weather, terrible weather but still something external, and we could name it, locate it on maps, measure it in kilometers from our doorsteps. The war was a situation, a circumstance, a brutal disruption happening to our country, and a boundary still existed between it and us, however thin, like the last veil between being and unbeing.

Wars are ugly, patient creatures. They do not stay where we put them, as though we could keep them in a zoo. Context has a way of seeping inward and crossing the membrane between circumstance and self, since wars are parasites looking for hosts, emotionally and psychologically and spiritually and theologically and socially, and they feed on the marrow of life itself.

First came our work with the internally displaced, when our partner seminaries established eleven refugee hubs, ten in Ukraine and one in Moldova. Every family we helped carried the war’s seeds, stories that hatched in our minds at three in the morning, that hour when everything feels most precarious. Volunteers served meal after meal to people whose numbers swelled rather than subsided, lifting soup into bowls held by trembling hands, day after day and week after week, and the line never shortened, only changed faces, an endless procession of souls learning what it means to exist without a world. Each conversation transplanted fragments of their shattered homes into our consciousness, and we absorbed their displacement until we too felt homeless inside our own homes, exiled from being ourselves.

Then uniformed strangers began appearing with familiar faces: sons, fathers, brothers, colleagues, classmates, the cheerful young man from the coffee shop, all of them swallowed by khaki and sent to the front, to that threshold where existence meets its opposite. Friends and relatives who had shared coffee with us the previous year now sent messages from trenches, their words careful and sparse, as though they had glimpsed something that made ordinary language obsolete. Their feeds changed from cappuccinos to combat positions, and some feeds simply stopped updating, leaving digital echoes of vanished selves. We learned to fear the word “heroically,” that euphemism for the crossing into absolute otherness. The arithmetic of loss became personal and accumulated with devastating intimacy, five members of our own family among the numbers. Our conversations on Viber and Telegram and Signal turned into archives of last words, digital shrines to interrupted lives, and every loss carved out a space inside us that the war rushed in to fill with its peculiar nothingness.

Our communities, drunk on early resilience, began their slow sobering into a radical nakedness. Trauma does not arrive with fanfare, since it seeps through foundations like water, dissolving the ground of meaning on which we built our lives, moving through families the way moisture moves through porous stone and through neighborhoods the way smoke moves through ventilation, until the air itself tastes of endings. Support groups multiplied like desperate prayers against the void. Anxiety medications grew scarce. Children’s drawings filled with tanks, their innocence conscripted into the absurd. We stopped asking how are you, and asked many of you not to ask us, because the answer was always either a lie or an unbearable truth.

Our families exploded across the map in slow motion, each separation a rehearsal for the ultimate one. Mothers and children in Poland, in Germany, elsewhere. Fathers at the front. Other children scattered like shrapnel among relatives. Grandparents dying on video calls, pixels bearing witness to the final transformation. Weddings conducted over Zoom, love asserting itself against the arithmetic of annihilation. This war turned geography into a weapon against love itself, in the name of protecting traditional family values, which is a metaphysical perversion so many russian Christians have accepted, and it created separate realities for those who fled and those who stayed. The longer our families remained divided, the more we understood that geography had become irrelevant, since the war had mapped itself onto our hearts and created new territories of grief and anger and exhaustion that recognize no borders.

And the silence grew. Not peaceful silence, and not the pause between words, but silence as compression, everything folded in on itself until language collapses. The silence of saturation, when words fail from touching the unspeakable rather than from ignorance. The silence of souls crowded with untellable stories, of people who have learned that discussing tomorrow means wrestling with the angel of nothingness, of communities where everyone knows someone who has completed the journey into not being here. We recognize each other now by the particular exhaustion in the eyes, that gaze belonging to people who have watched being itself fracture.

The worse things become, the quieter we grow, since the war has migrated from context into content, from environment into the very structure of consciousness. It lives now in our hypervigilance, in our gallows humor, and please forgive us for that, in our shortened attention spans, and we are sorry for not fulfilling our job descriptions the way we would in peacetime, in our hoarding habits, and in our inability to enjoy fireworks, those mockeries of the revelation we have received. It lives in how we instinctively locate the nearest safe place in any building, even outside Ukraine, and in how we hold our breath when a phone rings unexpectedly. We carry it in our nervous systems, in our dreams and nightmares, and in our inability to plan beyond next week, having learned that the future is the most fragile fiction of all. It lives in how we love desperately and trust cautiously, knowing now how thin the membrane is between presence and absolute absence.

Not everyone, of course. Not those fortunate enough to remain untouched, in Ukraine as well, who still dwell in the illusion of solid ground. But everyone the war has tasted, it has taken up residence in.

The war moved inside us, and each of us is occupied territory now, with the metaphysical front line running through our kitchen tables, our bedrooms, our dreams. We have become the war’s home, its memory and its witness, at once the territory and the map, the story and the storyteller, the silence and what the silence contains.

This is what we hesitate to tell you about war: it refuses to stay where you put it. It wants inside. It wants to live in your bones, breathe with your lungs, see through your eyes, and once it moves in it redecorates everything with the aesthetics of the void. This war has made us its autobiography, written in scar tissue and insomnia, its archive and its prophecy, bearers of an anti-gospel we never chose.

We are different people from who we were when this began, in 2014 and in 2022, citizens of another order of being. You may despise us or walk with us, rebuke us or walk beside us in silence. The war has rewritten us from within and made us a nation of the war-altered, speaking a language only we understand, or those of you who stand close enough to us, emigrants from our former selves. In this strange new country, peace is not the opposite of war but something we have to build inside ourselves first, despite the war and because of it, while it pulses in our veins like a second heartbeat.

The external war will end someday. The war inside us will take much longer to quiet, especially for those who lost the people they loved among the fallen, the missing, the captive, the disabled. Perhaps it never will fully quiet, even when we are forced into an unjust peace for the sake of those who have lost no one and want to return as soon as possible to a normal life. Perhaps we will always carry these fault lines, these places where the war broke through and made its home in the innermost cave of the self. And it will be your choice as much as ours: whether to remain with people who will carry a war in their souls long after the guns fall silent.

And yet, inside this terrible silence, we somehow continue. We are learning the hardest lesson, which is how to live with war as the condition of our existence and our job description rather than merely as a backdrop. The war lives in us now, and we still live and minister and serve and dream and love in the spaces it cannot reach. Perhaps that is the most revolutionary act available to us: to remain human while carrying the inhuman weight, to speak when silence seems safer, to hope when hope feels like a betrayal of the truth we have learned, and to insist on meaning at the very heart of meaninglessness.

This is our new geography, then: the war within us rather than the war around us, and the fierce quiet work of staying alive despite all of it. Not because we are strong, but because the war inside has not yet learned how to stop our hearts completely, as it stopped the heart of my brother Andrii and the hearts of hundreds of thousands of others. Everything lives in that “not yet”: our resistance, our humanity, our refusal to let it win outright. To be colonized and not conquered, changed and not erased, to carry war in our cells while still carrying love in whatever spaces remain, whatever the betrayal by so many russian Christians. And to discover, in the abyss of our own occupation, that something exists within us which the war cannot digest, a Light the darkness does not comprehend, a Word that silence cannot swallow. That is why we are still here, still human, still able to recognize the infinite in one another’s wounded gaze.

Taras D., Ukraine
1185th day of the ongoing full-scale russian war, and of the institutional silence of russian Christians and theological educators