Collected pieces from stories, writings, essays and sermons
“Humans have bodies, communities do also. A community is something that extends feelings beyond the individual. It stretches as far as our ability to feel the pain of people… Its unity depends on our ability to feel the pain together …
When you lose a friend, a family member, or someone close to you, you lose a part of yourself. You cannot replace that part.. … More than that: you lose yourself when you lose someone you really love. You wake up in the morning, …brush your teeth, make yourself a coffee-but that is no longer you. Each of these movements is now senseless. Meaning is a direction, a vector of your movement, ….When you lose someone you love, that space of movement and direction are gone.
Community degenerates when you cannot feel your neighbor's pain…. cynicism triumphs over compassion….
Cynicism is when we lack a sense of the irreplaceable. Cynicism is the logic that an empty space that can be filled with anything. Cynicism is indifference.
“Shared values require the capacity for compassion. What makes a community is the experience of suffering and rejoicing together (and the ability to do this).”
Voloduymr Yermolenko, philosopher, journalist, chief editor of UkraineWorld.
And still — this life is worth embracing…
To hear a voice of truth within the world.
To rise above the evil, grief, misfortune,
When there is no way to turn aside.
To learn to thank — our God, our time, each other,
For every step, for all that once was ours.
To welcome all that cannot be rewritten,
And treasure life itself… and truly love it.
For real happiness is simply this:
To be, to breathe, to live.
Poet, Lina Kostenka. Age 90
New York Times, magazine, “War Widows, Valentines Day and Last words become poignant symbols of loss.” By Constant Méheut Daria Mitiuk and Gray Beltran
Melaniya Podolyak, 29, and Andrii Pilshchykov, 30, didn’t even have time to marry.
They met in the spring of 2023 when Ms. Podolyak, a media project manager, interviewed Mr. Pilshchykov, a fighter pilot. Better known by his call sign, Juice, Mr. Pilshchykov was a prominent face of the Ukrainian Air Force. He had helped defend Kyiv at the beginning of the war and visited the United States to lobby for the supply of F-16 jets to Ukraine.
Like many Ukrainian women, Ms. Podolyak was initially hesitant about dating a service member, worried that his combat duties would leave them little time together. But Mr. Pilshchykov’s kindness and thoughtfulness won her over.
For six months, she traveled every weekend to see him where he was stationed. During the week, they talked for hours at night, when he wasn’t flying. “I was sleep-deprived the entire time,” she said with a laugh.
On Aug. 24, 2023, they were driving to Mr. Pilshchykov’s base, two hours west of Kyiv. They talked about his possibly moving to the United States for a program to train pilots on F-16s. They also discussed marriage — that would make it easier for Ms. Podolyak to visit him there.
The next day, Mr. Pilshchykov left for a training mission.
ANDRII, I’m at the base
MELANIYA, I’m going to have coffee with a friend
Mr. Pilshchykov was supposed to return in a couple of hours. When he did not, Ms. Podolyak messaged him.
MELANIYA, Babe, Where are you?
Then came a call from an air force acquaintance, informing her that Mr. Pilshchykov’s plane had collided midair with another jet.
She wouldn’t believe it, and sent him desperate messages.
MELANIYA, I beg you , No, Please not this, I beg you.
Two years ago on Valentine’s Day, Olha Chesnokova told Yevhen Volosyan she loved him. They had met a month earlier on Tinder, bonding over music. Ms. Chesnokova, a 46-year-old psychotherapist, said she had wanted “to wait for the right moment to tell him” — but not too long. Mr. Volosyan had decided to join the army, and soon they would be separated.Two months later, Mr. Volosyan, 37, left for the front. He served as a radio operator, sapper and eventually drone pilot, remotely flying suicide quadcopters into Russian forces. The couple married a few months into Mr. Volosyan’s service, with him briefly returning to Kyiv to say, “I do.” Back at the front, he would stay in touch with his new wife through text messages during the day and video calls at night, when darkness grounded the drones.
On Nov. 24, 2023, Ms. Chesnokova texted him around midday.
OLHA
Babe, are you ok?
YEVHEN
😘 sweet kiss 💋💋💋 I’m fine. But 3 drones were lost
OLHA
Oh, I was worrying. Thanks for writing 😘😘😘
They haven’t hit their targets?
YEVHEN
Yes, there were some communication issues… I completely lost control of one of the drones and watched for about ten seconds as it turned over toward the village and started to fly… then I regained control, managed to steer it back, but it ended up crashing in the field
Ms. Chesnokova, reassured, went on with her day, waiting for sunset to reconnect with Mr. Volosyan. She checked in again around 5 p.m., but he didn’t answer.
Her husband had bought her a ticket to a concert that night of Serhii Zhadan, their favorite Ukrainian artist, and they had agreed that she would call him from the show, so he too could listen. But he didn’t show up online.
Growing worried, Ms. Chesnokova texted him again.
OLHA
Babe, where are you???
Ms. Chesnokova returned home and waited anxiously. Just before midnight, Mr. Volosyan’s commander called to tell her he had died in shelling. Stunned and in tears, she spent the night trying to grasp the loss. Then the next morning she sent him a final message — knowing it would never be read.
OLHA
You made me a happy person, a happy woman. This was meant to last for a long, long time and you are not to blame
FAMILIES I KNOW
A mother and father of two children are outside our Center for youth and families which is paid for and run by our nonprofit: This Child Here. The father is a fitness trainer, and looks it, lean and muscular but not overly so. His wife is thin and sad. “I'm depressed,” she tells me. “My parents and sister live in Russia. I tell them our apartment is gone; the Russians invaded Kharkiv. All around us are buildings broken or leveled by tank fire and missiles.”
The father opens his phone and begins flipping pictures: building after building, empty shells, blackened, all windows gone. The fitness facility where he worked is a mangled heap of aluminum and shattered glass.
“I tell my parents what is happening here in Ukraine,” she continues,” but they do not believe me. They say its is not what's on their TV. ” I see her eyes filling.
I learn that Tamil's husband was released. His ribs are broken, and his knees are broken. He is silent. He does not speak. He sits on the sofa at home. Olya, our Director of Programs, and I met a woman and her 17 year old son at the grocery store. They picked out what they need, we paid for it and crossed the street to the park where I would take their picture. I asked the mother how long they had been in Izmail. Three days, she said. And then she began to talk rapidly and I was not catching all of it because she was also weeping and Olya was holding her. “What happened?” I asked later. “She was forced to beg for money to buy food,” Olya said, “I had to tell her. You are not begging; this is what we do.”
Tanya is a teacher and mother of one son. “I lost a friend,” she says. “She lived in the suburbs. I worked with this girl; she was a Ukrainian language teacher at school. I saw her name on the news in Telegram, and I started crying because I found out that she was gone. A shell hit the house. She was 33 years old. She went to visit her grandmother, and a cluster shell hit the house - she and her grandmother are gone. The girl was young, she did not have children and a husband, she did not have time to create a family. It was a shock for me, when you know a person, when you worked with her, you drank coffee together, you walked, talked. The person was, and now she is gone. Terrifying. It is terrifying when this happens.”
“Where is humanity in people, sympathy and compassion, which should be in people? After all, this is the life of another person, who did nothing to you, and you come to a strange house with your own rules, weapons to kill. Why are you doing it? For power? It will not bring this pleasure.”
-Robert Gamble
What I tell our people, our workers and volunteers in Ukraine:
“I am an American, but I think of you.
I see you meeting mothers and children who have fled the war, at markets in Izmail, then standing with the cashier while they gather what they need and you pay for it.
I see you standing in the food warehouse in Vilkova, surrounded by boxes, bags, and cans of food and supplies and people coming to get what they need.
I see you at our Centers for Children and families in Izmail where teens are playing board games and the guitar.
Little children are drawing and painting.
Psychologists are leading activities.
Parents drink tea and talk.
You wait. Ukraine waits for Russian drones, rockets, and soldiers.
The fear of these is an invasion into the heart.
The lies told by the enemy are a darkness to cover what is true.
You are a light that shines against this darkness.
In this moment of history, What is true?
Your life is true.
All the flowers are gone. Surrounded by those who do not know where to go or where they belong, what can I tell you?
As you work, help, and live, you are where you belong.“
-Robert Gamble
Tatiana Lonskaya, writing from her apartment at night in Kyiv:
“Words coming from my battery-powered radio ... The endless night marathon, transmitted situations from the de-energized regions and cities. I heard that Lviv surgeons of pediatric cardiology successfully completed a super-complicated heart operation in total darkness.
“A cat had finally been found, which had disappeared from an apartment building in Vyshgorod which was cut down by a rocket attack.
“And somewhere, people picked up a pet rabbit - also near that house. And all over Ukraine they passed this news on to someone who, apparently, was looking for him - the bunny in the heating center is waiting for its owners, crunching carrots... I could not hold back the tears.”
“In line at the grocery store, a woman tells me she needs a lamp, but there was none to be found in the store. We are all keeping quiet. Everybody has his own thoughts. The man in the front, who did not participate in this sad conversation, suddenly turns around and puts his lamp box in her basket full of all sorts of household items. 'Take it,' he says. 'You need it much more. I will buy next time.' Kindness suddenly dissolves the protective cork on the heart. And for me, as well as for others in that queue, it is very hard to hold back the tears.”
Nine months into the war, Tatiana Lonskaya wrote to her friend from college years and the years when their children were young. This friend now lives in and believes in Russia.
Tatiana: “Really, what can be done in 9 months? Bear and give birth to a child. Write a book. Watch a television series. Build a house. Open your own business. Sow, grow and harvest. And a lot of other things aimed at development, beauty, life. And you can also send a hundred thousand of your citizens to guaranteed death, so that they exterminate a neighboring country.
In 9 months, a new generation of people was born in our country. We don't have electricity, but we have light. There is no connection, but there is communication, and we are together. .
The soldiers of your country go to death for the sake of death, and the defenders of my country die for the sake of life. And our children, who are now shuddering from the view of the sirens and freezing in the darkness of their homes, they will have a worthy future and the right to live in a free country, unlike yours, whom you are depriving right now ... and have already deprived of a normal future.
You never understood us during this war. You did not understand that fear disappears, but every day help for one’s own and hatred for the enemy grows, and the will to win becomes stronger. And most importantly, you did not understand that it is impossible to intimidate with darkness those who have light burning in their souls...”
LOVE AND WAR
There is a highway between Odesa and Izmail, Ukraine; well paved, but only two lanes. Ukraine is in a frantic state, trying to ship grain out of the country and goods in. Izmail and the Reni are the only ports open. We traveled within a line of trucks. A line of trucks came at us. At every break in that line, our driver passed trucks going our way. I sat with a MacBook in my lap, watching, but not all the time.
At one moment, I looked up to see us passing a container truck. Ahead, a car was coming at us head-on. Cars come faster than other trucks. I was behind the driver, next to me was a woman whom I did not know and had not spoken to, and on her right, was her teenage daughter. From the corner of my eye, I could see the mother also watching the road ahead. It was going to be close. We were still even with the big truck's cab; we could not edge over any more the right. The oncoming car would have to veer onto the shoulder or else. In the 3 seconds before what appeared was going to be impact, the mother grabbed my right hand and the hand of her daughter. Our driver shot ahead and swerved back into line in front of the truck we were passing.
I looked at the woman; we both smiled, and I realized in that moment, this is Ukraine: miles of mediocrity separated by moments of sheer fright. Strangers grabbing hands. The woman sitting behind me in the van leaned forward and said, “We needed this war. It pulled us together”
I would rather have stayed, but my visa for Ukraine was expiring, and I had already paid for my flights, and you know how laborious it can be to change flights, losing money and all. The Russian army invaded Ukraine on February 22, 2022. This was two days later.
I stood on aging asphalt two yards from a single long arm, a pipe really, painted black with yellow stripes: a vehicle barrier. A crowd of people waited behind me, held back by a rope. I could see a smaller group about 25 yards ahead, clustered around the offices of the Ukrainian Customs and Border Patrol. It was my turn to pull a suitcase toward the offices, board a barge, cross the Danube, and enter Romania. In four days, I would lift off from OTP Airport in Bucharest, Romania and fly to Charlotte, North Carolina. On the other side of the vehicle barrier, Oli stood in jeans and a black winter jacket, her blonde hair just touching her shoulders.
Olya and I met on Christmas Eve, nearly two months before, in Izmail, Ukraine. We still tell the story, how I arrived in a minibus, the driver yanked the side door open, and both I and my knapsack fell out. The driver sped off with my suitcase. By the end of that weekend, though we didn't say so at the time, we had each quietly decided to make a life together. I saw her strength of character and resolve, and she was easy on the eyes. Oli said it was my eyes. By the end of April, we were living together, and she was directing all our work in Izmail, Ukraine.
A soldier also stood near the barrier, an AK-47 with a wooden stock slung over his shoulder. You can tell how old a gun is by the stock, and this gun was old. I noticed his lack of urgency, his body facing me, his head turned toward the Danube. I looked at Olya. I did not feel sympathy. I felt respect. A voice inside said, This is important. Film it. Write something in your journal for reading decades later. A cold day of clarity.
I walked toward the Office of Customs Control, Olya's eyes on my back. With a half-turn, I looked at her and lifted one hand. It was cold outside, and some things would become clear. Days later, they came to me. The first, “Love makes war bearable.” Because of love, it seemed, I could more easily bear the ache: pain of separation, the anxiety war lays on you. I worked it backward, “War makes love precious.” We fear the loss of the one we love.
Carl Rogers said, “What is most personal is most universal.” So it came to me: this was how I felt about all people in Ukraine. Not sympathy, but respect. Love makes war bearable: romantic love, love of family and friends, love of their country, love of and for God. It sounds simplistic if you have a simplistic view of love, but love is always complicated. This complicated love is what carries us through. War makes this love precious.
The Center for Creative Activity is the place where love happens, but we had a lot to learn about love in a time of war. One August afternoon, we asked children to draw pictures of peace. They didn't. They drew pictures of war. On clean white paper, twelve-year-old Anastasia from Nikolaev drew a large red heart pierced by a rocket. On the side of the rocket was the symbol seen on Russian tanks and trucks, the letter "Z". From the heart she drew blood flowing down, like a river and within the blood, tiny victims floating: adults and children, the innocents of Ukraine. She drew a stop sign on the page: a red slash through the Russian flag and the word for “evil.” In large letters she wrote, "No War, No War." Only the “r” was made such that it could also be mistaken for the letter “y,” so the word could also read, “No Way, No Way.” Unsure of whether this had been an appropriate activity, the psychologist decided not to repeat the exercise.
At the summer program, we decided not to push parents to tell their stories of the war. But in the warm weeks following summer when parents began to bring their children to our Centers in Izmail, they spoke more freely.
Still, these stories are mild. Some cannot be told in a worship setting. Careful. The next paragraph is brutal.
“The photo of Andrij after the [Russian] soldiers took him showed things more terrible. I have sorted through hundreds of photos of Syrians tortured during the ongoing war there. Still, I could not look at Andrij’s photo without gagging. His eyes were gouged out, his teeth were knocked clean from his jaw. A metal skewer inserted through his right eye had pushed through to the other side of his left ear.” That came from the essay, “Holding Russia to Account for War Crimes in Ukraine,” in Vanity Fair, by Janine Di Giovanni, the August 24, 2022.*
Another truth, of course, is: War wants to kill you. War kills love. When someone dies, does love die? The dead cannot love back, no matter how strong the love of the lover. But maybe this love becomes even stronger. If they kill enough of us, will we stop loving our country? If they kill enough of us, will we stop loving God? If they kill enough of us, will our soldiers lose this love of such strength that one soldier will sacrifice his/her life for another?
Rockets are sent to kill love. How many rockets will it take? How many to blow out power stations and deprive the country of enough heat and light that people will cease to love each other and their country?
My experience is telling me: there will never be enough.
Here is what I see. In a country at war, we linger longer in the embrace. I feel it every day from mothers, children, staff people. The common greeting was to touch cheeks and make the kissing sound. Now we clutch each other close and with one hand stroke the back. As one lifts another, both are lifted.
Every little thing is significant. The way one person will hold the door for another. The grateful eyes and smile of the waitress who knows about our foundation. Yesterday, a taxi driver refused a tip, “I can't take that. Give it to the children,” he shouted.
In a large room, a community center, women weave weaving camouflage nets to disguise bunkers and equipment. They collect tin cans, stuff them with rolls of cardboard cut from boxes, soak the cans in hot paraffin, then send them to soldiers at the front. Lit like candles, they become hand warmers. Love in a time of war.
In times and places of war, love lives on less. I am the American with three bedrooms, two baths, a sedan and a pickup in the garage. I am content here with two rooms for two. One is the bathroom. The other is for making dinner, eating, sleeping, and making love. Only the bathroom has a door. There is no car: we walk, take a bus, or take a taxi if we really must. I am content with little. Part of it must be the weight of war in the distance, and part of it is the lightness of each embrace. As we lift another, we are lifted.
War magnifies everything, including relationships: you are single; you meet someone new. Normally, you are casual about this, but in wartime, everything little thing can mean a larger thing. Is this who you will spend your life with? Is war an excuse to fall in love? Does war make us hungry for love? I think it does. War sharpens the senses, sight, smell, hearing, intuition. It also sharpens desire.
Every day, I hear stories: women who fled the war, women I meet at the markets and pharmacies to pay for what they need, mothers I meet each day at our Center for Creative Activities. With their eyes and faces, they hold my attention like their life depends on it, saying, “Thank you, Thank you,” then telling me what happened to them. Always, I am speechless. I am the American. What can I say?
I pay a psychologist to meet with mothers and listen to their stories. Send me these stories, I say. I read of mothers and children, living two, five, six weeks in a dirt room or basement of an apartment building, then crawling under gunfire or shrapnel to reach a shelter, riding in a truck, the engine on fire, yet roaring down the road to escape mortars and missiles. A sister is raped, then killed, her face mutilated so that people will not recognize her.
I know a psychologist. She is lovely and compassionate, not a psychotherapist, she listens, comforts and assures. Maybe others can say, “All will be well,” but not the American. Has he ever known a time when all was not well?
Ira is a petite woman with a serious face and black hair tied into a pony tail. She wears jeans and a black polyester-filled jacket. She has three children and a husband now in the army. I see her with her children at least once a week, either at our Center for Creative activities or the grocery store where Olya and I buy food for their family. She comes each Sunday to the meeting of mothers. She is hungry for this love and attention.
One afternoon, our program for mothers concludes at our Center for Creative Activities. The other mothers have left. Only Ira remains, standing at arm's length in front of me. Before the invasion, she tells me, she and her husband owned five apartments in the city of Mariople. Four are gone, as is their car, crushed beneath. Entire buildings collapsed from rocket and tank fire, then were leveled by Russian bulldozers, dead cars and bodies beneath them. This strategy makes identifying ownership of residences and identifying the dead more difficult. I want to say, “It's terrible, horrible what the Russians did.” But that feels inadequate. Blame on the Russians does not equal the enormous loss for Ira and her husband. What do I say?
I've done it more than once, with mothers I know, their eyes filling, the weight of war in the distance. No doubt, crossing misconduct boundaries for clergy. I step forward. As one lifts another... In the firm but gentle embrace, I whisper what I truly feel, if only for that moment, “I love you, I love you.”
-Robert Gamble
* “Holding Russia to Account for War Crimes in Ukraine,” (Vanity Fair, by Janine Di Giovanni, August 24, 2022.
THE DRONES OF AUGUST
Just after midnight on the morning of the 1st of August 2023, more than a dozen Shaheed (Kamazazi) drones were launched in clusters of three or four from a Russian ship on the Asov Sea, east of Crimea. They crossed the Black Sea, and then turned onto the Danube river toward the port city of Izmail. At approximately 0230, drones hit the fuel depot, igniting 400 tons of petrol. The double bang hit the windows, and I was on my feet.
I heard a sound in the sky, like a moped, only higher in pitch, a buzz, getting louder. Suddenly AK-47's opened fire, a chorus of automatic rifles. The buzzing shifted; the drone took a dive. It was a sound you have heard in every war movie with airplanes in a tail spin, a descending whine, then Boom!
Later, I went out. I saw fires, one close to my apartment, the other about a mile away, much bigger with black smoke rising in the city lights of the night sky. The offices of the Port Authority, the commercial offices, forty thousand kilos of grain and four hundred tons of fuel were destroyed or burned.
A friend recently asked me, “Was there a time in all that when you were afraid?”
I told him, “You never believe it will be you.”
It's only in the last five seconds when you hear that sound shift into a dive and getting louder, that you suddenly feel naked and ultimately vulnerable. You feel weightless, lifting, like there is nothing to hold on to.
There's nothing between you and that drone. Nothing but naked you and what you fear.
There isn't time to hate ... or think the words you would say to those you love.... you are speechless.... you actually feel a clumsy moment of guilt.... “Dear God...” Then BOOM! You made it.
I think those five seconds are among the most real and truth-filled seconds of one's life.
Life in Ukraine for common citizen is about waiting for drones.
Most times they go somewhere else, or never arrive.... it's like the play: Waiting for Godot. Nothing happens.
But every night, you crack open your windows so that shock waves from an explosion won't break them. Just in case.... And you wait.
Oleksander Sherpa, the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria wrote, “The feeling of defeat, historical brokenness is a century-old background of our history. Picking wounds is our routine. .... [but now], Ukrainian has a chance....”
“The war has already made us different.”
“This epic drama, .... this heroic resistance of the Ukrainian David to the Russian Goliath reminded people that there are things bigger than vanity. Good and evil. Freedom and slavery. Life and death.”
“The sacred war ... brings two new factors:
“First. Thousands and thousands gave their lives for Ukraine. In Christian reality, sacrifice is the cornerstone, ..... [this....] changes everything: the scale of values, the sense of power, political language, everyday language, the bar of tolerance for sin.“
“Second, Ukraine has already won - it was not afraid of the power that the whole world feared and fears. This force (Russia) broke its teeth against Ukraine.”
“It is right now,” he writes, “(if you have the strength) don't sprinkle your head with ashes... grit your teeth and move forward.”
There is a speech of hope, and it is not a pat on the back. It is a speech that acknowledges darkness and fear and at the same time. It takes the elements of these two and reframes them as in such way that they become the imperatives of a hope that overcomes darkness and fear.
It doesn’t help to hate. Grit your teeth and move forward. Let yourself stumble on words to say to those you love. Look for things greater than vanity. Feel that moment of guilt, because no one can love enough. Say it out loud, “Dear God” and go…
Then, Boom! A window opens onto the things most important, real and truth-filled in your life.
It was Masha the mother of Iliya and Alecia who said it. “You didn’t just give us what we need. You did the impossible. You made us family.”
Robert Gamble
A POEM
I want to tell you about the fate of Ukrainian women. Because I am proud of every Ukrainian woman. Every one who lives despite everything.
Some left Ukraine with one suitcase, with children, a cat, documents and photographs, and left behind a home that still dreams at night. They sleep in a foreign country, but create a comfort that smells like home. They smile at new people, and quietly look for their own with their eyes.
But most Ukrainian women stayed.
They wake up to the sirens of alarm, put their hand on their child's head and say: "Everything is fine, sunshine..." They cook borscht in the dark, when there is no light again, and hide their tears in the steam above the saucepan.
Ukrainian women continue to live and wait from the front for their sons, husbands, brothers. They pray for them and sincerely believe that prayer can save a loved one. But they still shudder at every phone call, where they do not know whether to rejoice or fear. Because every day could be the last day when the family was with their husbands.
I want to talk about those who did not wait for their relatives from the front. Who stands by the cold cross and whispers: “I told you to take care of yourself…” Who wears black not because of fashion, but because of memory. And who learns to live with this silence every day.
Every day we are infinitely grateful and proud of those who fight. Who in a bulletproof vest, with a machine gun, with a scythe under their helmet, and with eyes that have all of Ukraine in them. Who is not afraid of death, because they have already seen it too close.
And those who heal, save, sew, bake, collect, donate. Who does not have time to cry, because someone else needs her hands. Who feeds the world when she herself is hungry for love.
I am proud of those who have lost everything: home, job, loved ones, faith and still grow flowers on the window sill. Because life must go on, even when it hurts.
And those who give birth to children in bomb shelters, and sing lullabies to the roar of missiles. Who takes a child in their arms and whispers: “You will live. You must live.”
I am proud of those who laugh. Who joke so as not to go crazy. Who celebrates her birthday with anxiety, and still puts a candle in the cake. Who paints their lips to remind themselves: “I am alive.”
And those who are silent. Who can no longer talk about what they saw. Who simply puts their hand on their heart and looks into the distance.
We are the ones who know how to bury and give birth at the same time. To cry and smile. To be afraid and still go.
To love even when the heart is in ashes.
And when they ask me what keeps Ukraine going, I answer: She.
A Ukrainian woman.
With hands that smell of bread.
With eyes in which God lives.
With a heart that beats instead of thousands.
We will endure. Because we are she.
And she is love.
The one that is stronger than death.
Olya Balaban,
Olja Lucic
WHERE THE BIBLE SPEAKS OF UKRAINE
The Gospel of Matthew, in the birth narratives of Jesus, Herod, outwitted by the Magi, was furious and gave orders to kill all male children in and around Bethlehem, two years old and under.
A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
Anna Carter Florence teaches preaching at Columbia Seminary. She recently published, A is for Alabaster, 52 stories from the Bible.
About the words from Matthew, she says, “Those who first read Gospels did not need any introductions to Quirinius, Augustus, and Herod, any more than we need introductions to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
And in that list, I include Vladimir Putin, who fearing the kingdom of Ukraine, her growth and success, ordered a war and the massacre of innocents. Voices were heard in Bachmut, Mariople, and Kherson, mothers weeping for their children because they are no more.
In the opening chapters of Lamentations, we read:
"How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
"Young and old lie together
In the dust of the streets.
It is the picture of Ukraine. The stories of families I meet, posts I read on the internet, the news from Ukraine are full of lamentations.
