Ukraine: break our hearts

{ thoughts on invasion, and our arrogance }

Image of explosion in Kyiv, the Ukranian capitol, on Thursday, February 24, 2022. Photo from CNN, posted by the Ukrainian President’s office.

Last night, one of my favorite gentle giants (aka UAA basketball players) sat at my kitchen table as the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine broke online. Together we watched video on Twitter… of missile launches and explosions and armored vehicles on the move… and he taught me something without meaning to.

Ognjen is from Serbia. He was 3 years old in 1999, when the NATO bombing of Kosovo occurred. He remembers the sound of the warning sirens, and the bridge that was destroyed by NATO forces five miles from his small town. He knows the cost of war in ways that I do not: in the loss of human life, in the economic struggle that follows, and in the way it shapes the culture of a nation, for better or worse.

It struck me last night as I listened to Oggie, and watched his visceral response to the news of invasion, that those of us who have grown up Christian here in the United States tend toward arrogant detachment when it comes to war. We gather information, and we calculate the economic rationale, and argue about which of our leaders should have done what and why and when, and critically dissect our nation’s options to respond.

But we have never watched actual missiles streaking over our homes, their destination unknown.

We have never been shelled.

We have never watched our neighborhood gas station erupt into a fireball.

We have not stood, absolutely helpless and impotent, and watched foreign tanks & troop transporters rolling down our freeways.

We have no idea what “invasion” really means. 

And in that ignorance, we are also — many of us — devoid of true compassion. 

We cannot comprehend, so we do not cry.

We do not know how to weep with those who weep, or mourn with those who mourn.

May Divine Love forgive us for our callousness… and then break our hearts.

. . . . . 

Consider this truth, friends: human beings are killing other human beings today in Ukraine. 

Real people will die, and have already died: people with ambitions and passions, people with handwritten journals and gardens and children and lovers and friends they drink with on weekends. Real people that bleed. Real bones that snap. Real families, like yours and mine, will scream and cry their losses into the void. And the greed that motivated their death cares nothing about their tears, or their nationality.

And we have a choice to make, those of us who sit comfortably removed from the chaos.

We can be hardened, or we can be human.

So just for a moment — for one blessed, sacred moment of human solidarity — I say fuck the cold calculus of economics and sanctions and national sovereignty and global hegemony and military intervention and whose oil comes from where.

We must — at least for a few fleeting seconds — allow the full force of human suffering to drop into our hearts, and feel the weight of it: the discomfort of living in a supposedly-civilized world where the powerful still grab for resources and the small are still crushed in the teeth of the beast — Russians and Ukrainians alike.

Why, you may ask? Why bother with this exercise of feeling needless pain? Why bother, when we are individually powerless to solve the problem or DO anything to relieve the suffering?

Because we are not fully human in this world unless we FEEL.

Because we cannot fully participate in the radical, world-changing Way of Love unless we are first moved, as Jesus was, by compassion.

Because every single practical movement toward peace and justice — toward the blessed Kin-dom of God — begins with prophetic lament: with the heartfelt recognition that THINGS HERE ARE NOT AS THEY SHOULD BE.

We here in the United States will never learn to beat our swords into plowshares unless and until we are pierced by the reality of war: a reality that — by virtue of our birthplace — we ourselves have never lived.

Nothing changes unless we allow our casual, arrogant detachment to be shattered…
so I pray that your heart is pierced today.

May it break wide open.

Amen.

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What rises in your heart and mind today, beloved? Please add your own laments, prayers, and feelings in the comments. Welcome to the Table.