9 March 2022 A Candle in the Window Peter Millar
Words to encourage us in these times.
Our new world order - embedded in unimaginable human hatred and incredible waves of global compassion.
* * * God, keep watch over our children so that we may again say ‘good day’ to them. An old prayer of Nandi fighting men, Kenya, off to war.
* Lord, help me not to waste a drop of my energy on fear and anxiety, but grant me all the resilience I need to bear this day. Etty Hillesum, Dutch and Jewish, while awaiting deportation in 1941.
* * * Right now, none of us knows what is in store for us. Yet in the midst of this uncertainty may we discover somewhere deep inside, new inner strengths, deeper understandings and renewed pathways of compassion and awareness. pm - I wrote this on the first day of the war in Ukraine.
* They speak of ‘the art of war’ – but the arts draw their light from the soul’s well, and warfare dries up the soul and draws its power from a dark and burning wasteland. Denise Levertov, Misnomer, 1972.
* Through the winters of your grief: understanding our sadness and pain…..
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so you must know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracle of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy. And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch the serenity through the winters of your grief. Kahil Gibran
* * * In the pain, misfortune, oppression and death of the people,
God is silent, God is silent on the cross. In the crucified.
And this silence is God’s word, God’s cry,
In solidarity, God speaks the language of love.
Jon Sobrino, El Salvador in the book he edited with Juan Hernandez ‘Theology of Christian Solidarity’ Orbis, New York, 1985.
* Lord of peace, with your Spirit, we pray and hope for peace in our time.
Let the European Union respond to Ukraine’s request now:
(Prof Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford University is a wise and much respected commentator on global affairs. I include part of one of his recent articles.)
For 77 years since 1945, people have compared this or that European figure to Adolf Hitler. For 77 years this has been indefensible hyperbole. Now, when applied to Vladimir Putin, this seems for the first time an appropriate comparison – not yet to the Hitler of the Holocaust, but to the Hitler of 1939, invading Poland.
Every hour we see, as live video clips on our mobile phones, scenes from the second world war. The rubble of bombarded cities. Killed and orphaned children. The treks of refugees. All the while, Ukrainians tell us on the radio, in fluent English, how they face death to defend their homeland, freedom and Europe.
With its superb resistance over the last week and more, Ukraine has already done for most Europeans – who sit safely inside NATO, the EU or both – this great service: to wake us up, at least, to the dangerous world we are in. The transformation of German policy in particular, and the resolute determination of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the French president Emmanuel Macron, to build a Europe with all three dimensions of power – military as well as economic and cultural – this too, we owe to the Ukrainians’ determination to resist Putin’s war of recolonisation. So this is what Ukraine has done for Europe. What will Europe do for Ukraine?
“Do prove that you are indeed Europeans” – thus did the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, challenge European Union leaders, in a passionate, unscripted video address to the European parliament, delivered from his spartan wartime office in Kyiv. The European parliament replied with a motion saying that EU institutions should “work towards” granting Ukraine the candidate status the Ukrainian president has asked for in all his wartime conversations with European leaders, “but on the basis of merit”. Merit? Honestly, what greater merit could there be than being prepared to lay down your life to defend dignity, freedom, democracy and human rights?
* * * An unimaginable hell:
“It never stops. Every five minutes there is a mortar landing or artillery shells. Some buildings have been hit by multiple rocket systems. In the town there is not any building which has not suffered from direct or collateral damage. Some buildings have major destruction, some less. Many are destroyed to the ground. People don’t have water, gas or electricity because of the bombing. They use all kinds of their weapons upon us, rockets, artillery and mines.”
* These are the words of Dmytro Lubinets a local MP, from the small town of Shchastia, Ukraine. He reported that moments after the attacks brave local people ran out into the streets to carry the injured to safety. Others, equally courageous, run forth and tenderly carry the dead into the few places that remain standing. Acts of love in a nightmare situation. Humanity shining.
The small towns and villages in Ukraine are being left in total ruin:
It is in the small towns and villages of Ukraine that the illegal tactics of terrorising civilians for military aims, honed in Syria and then brought back so close to home, have reached a grim apotheosis. In many places 80% of the town or village has been totally destroyed. Russian forces in these smaller towns appear to show that they are willing to leave behind a wasteland on a massive scale, as they did in Grozny and in Chechnya. Neither humanity or heritage stops them.
Attacking civilians and the infrastructure that supports life - including hospitals and schools – is illegal under international law. It has no strategic advantage for an advancing army. But it is extremely effective at breaking the morale of a resisting population.
For many residents of these towns and villages, their lives are as shattered as their homes. Their suffering is now being seen as an unimaginable template for the damage Russia will inflict on others as Moscow tries to pound larger towns and cities into submission. What we are seeing is an absolutely horrific reminder of what the Kremlin can do to a people who don’t break in the face of its aggression. Are there no limits to this cruelty: to this spreading evil?
* In the past, it was possible to destroy a village, a town, a region, even a country. Now it is the whole planet that has come under threat. This fact should compel everyone to face a basic moral consideration: from now on, it is only through a conscious choice and then a deliberate policy that humanity can survive. Pope John Paul speaking many years ago at Hiroshima in Japan.
* As we allow ourselves to feel our pain for the world, we find our connection with each other. Joanna Macy, writer and activist. *