If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy the ministry of reconciliation would be. A russian seminary professor could lecture on it inside a Ukrainian seminary, untroubled by any victim in the room, and publish his paper on forgiveness in Theological Reflections. And because nobody would interrupt him, no Ukrainian student would ever put to him the single question the whole subject turns on: who, exactly, is to forgive whom.
If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy it would be for an untroubled Christian conscience, fortified by strong traditional family values. The Pentecostal bishop who blesses the russian army could keep his seat on the state council and his sleep unbroken, since a conscience is troubled only by what it is made to hear, and with the room emptied of Ukrainians there would be nobody left to name the killed, the injured, the raped, the tortured, the missing, the abducted children. Ukrainians would concede, in silence, what Sergei Ryakhovsky has already said aloud: that for him and his brotherhood there is nothing to repent of.
If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy it would be to restore the russian-Ukrainian evangelical brotherhood. The partnership could be put back into working order, the joint statements signed, the photographs taken, everyone in good suits, the light arranged so that nothing in the frame is bleeding. And since a brotherhood, once restored, has to be fed, a few more Ukrainian women and a few more Ukrainian children could be offered up to keep it warm.
If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy joint theological scholarship would be. We could build educational programs together again, and because silence has such excellent manners, nobody would need to say aloud that the last such program, thirty-one dissertations deep, simply, somehow, came to its end. We could sit on one another’s defense committees and grade the footnotes, asking only that the candidate quietly delete the ones recording where and how his brother or his son was killed, since such details could wound a russian supervisor, and a wounded supervisor cannot grade in brotherly peace.
If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy the ministry of conflict transformation would be, at least for those who have already established that the Ukrainian is a nationalist and the russian a victim of the Ukrainian language. We could run a summer school of theology in russian, using a good Anabaptist curriculum, and teach the relational repair of a wound in a carefully arranged room, never asking which of us is holding the knife. We could tend to Cain and counsel him gently through his distress, and bury Abel in an unnamed grave, since the truth spoken plainly can hurt Cain’s feelings, and a transformed conflict turns out to be one in which only the dead, and those who lost them, are asked to keep quiet.
If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy irenic publishing would be. The joint monographs could carry that gentle chapter, “Toward a Theology of Reconciliation in the Post-Soviet Space,” with the last phrase doing the quiet work of folding two armies and four annexed regions down into a single point on the compass. We could weep together, in russian, over the fall of the Soviet Union as a lost brotherhood, and arrive, weeping, at the comfortable conclusion that the Christians it shot and imprisoned had probably earned it, having gathered to pray without first requesting the permission of the KGB.
If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy above all for some of our former partners, and I mean specifically those for whom a bruised russian feeling weighs more than spilled Ukrainian blood. They would be spared the hardest thing of all, which is having to choose. With no Ukrainian left to raise the matter, they could convene the balanced cohort at last, a russian voice and a Ukrainian voice in dialogue, two sides, as though the disagreement lay between two opinions rather than between an arsonist and the house he is burning. They could hold their access in Moscow and their good name in Kyiv in the same hand and spend neither. They could build bridges, since we are all so fond of that word, to the very people who taught us what a bombed bridge looks like. And they could feel, at remarkably low cost, like true peacemakers, which is so much more restful than being one, because the Ukrainian has fallen silent for the sake of peace.
The arithmetic is generous. For the price of silenced Ukrainian churches and seminaries: the comfort of dozens and probably hundreds of institutions, careers kept whole, friendships unbroken, conferences rebooked, sabbaticals in pleasant cities far from any siren or funeral. Almost a bargain. Almost…
So yes, there would be many benefits for the brotherhood, if only Ukrainians could learn to be silent, and to die silently, and to be raped and tortured silently, and not to weep at the daily funerals… Taras D., Ukraine
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