BEING HUMAN

If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy the ministry of reconciliation would be. The Russian seminary professor could lecture on it in a Ukrainian theological seminary, untroubled by a victim in the room, and publish his paper on forgiveness in “Theological Reflections.” Because no one would interrupt, he would never once be asked by a Ukrainian student 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 the untroubled Christian conscience, fortified by strong traditional family values. The Pentecostal bishop from ROSKHVE who blesses the Russian army could keep his seat on the state council and his sleep unbroken, for a conscience is troubled only by what it is made to hear, and with the room emptied of Ukrainians there would be no one left to name the killed, the injured, the raped, the tortured, the missing, the children kidnapped… Ukrainians would admit, in silence, what Sergey Ryahkovsky said: for him and his brotherhood, there is nothing to repent.

If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy it would be to restore Russian-Ukrainian Evangelical brotherhood. The partnership could be put back into working order, the joint statements signed, the photographs taken, the kisses given, everyone in good suits, and the light arranged so that nothing in the frame is bleeding. And since a brotherhood, once restored, must be fed, “a few” more Ukrainian women and “a few” more Ukrainian children could be offered up to Russian rapists to keep it warm…

If only Ukrainians were silent, then what a joy of joint theological scholarship resumed. We could build theological educational programs together again, Russians and Ukrainians and their foreign friends around one long table, and because silence has such excellent manners, no one need say aloud that the last such program, thirty-one dissertations deep, was not ended by Russian aggression in 2022 but 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 son was murdered by Russians; such details could wound a Russian supervisor, and a wounded Russian supervisor cannot grade in brotherly peace…

If only Ukrainians were silent, then what a joy of the ministry of conflict transformation, 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 the Summer School of Theology in Russian, using a good Anabaptist curriculum, and teach the relational repair of the wound in a carefully arranged room, never asking a Russian who is holding the knife. We could tend to Cain, counsel him gently through his distress, and bury Abel in an unnamed grave, for the truth, spoken plainly, can hurt Cain’s feelings, and a transformed conflict is simply one in which only the dead must be asked to keep quiet and those who lost the dead…

If only Ukrainians were silent, what a joy of the ministry of irenic publishing would be. The joint Russian-Ukrainian monographs could carry that gentle chapter, “Toward a Theology of Reconciliation in the Post-Soviet Space,” the last phrase doing the quiet work of “two armies” and four annexed regions, all of it folded 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, weeping, arrive at the comfortable conclusion that those 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, then what a joy, above all, for some of our former “partners”; I mean specifically the ones for whom a bruised Russian feeling weighs more than spilled Ukrainian blood. They would be spared the hardest thing of all: having to choose. With no Ukrainian left to raise the matter, they could convene the balanced cohort at last with two perspectives, a Russian voice and a Ukrainian voice “in dialogue,” “two sides,” as though the disagreement lay between two opinions and not between an arsonist and the house he is burning. The steering team would keep its pleasing symmetry, the funder its beloved “non-politicized witness,” which is to say a witness to anything on earth except the thing standing in front of it. They could hold their access in Moscow, enjoying the Red Square with Georgian strips, and their good name in Kyiv (avoiding the streets with devastated ruins) in the same hand and spend neither. They could build bridges – we are so fond of that word – to the very people who taught us how a bombed bridge looks. And they could feel, at remarkably low cost, like true peacemakers, which is so much more restful than being one, because a Ukrainian is silent for the sake of peace…

The arithmetic is generous… For the price of silenced Ukrainian churches and seminaries: the comfort of a dozen and probably hundreds of institutions, the careers kept whole, the friendships unbroken, the conferences rebooked, the sabbaticals in pleasant cities far from any siren and explosion and funeral. It is almost a bargain. Almost… And as I was writing it, I realized how much our non-silence ruins brotherhood, peacemaking, and conflict resolution… if only Ukrainians could learn to be silent and die silently, and go through rape and torture by Russians silently, and learn not to cry at the daily funerals…

Yes, there are so many great benefits for the “brotherhood” if Ukrainian Christians learned to be silent… Keep your children away from war… Taras D, Ukraine