"Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness." ~ 1 John 2:9
About eight years ago now a wound opened up in society. This wound is long, bloody, and deep. Usually we respond to our wounds by treating them with salve, by letting the damage heal. But not this one. We have left this wound wide open, and not just. We have treated this wound with salt. As it has reddened and swollen, we have only poured more salt, and more, and more. Every day the pain cuts further into our psyche, yet we give it new strength. We keep hurting, and we never truly wonder why. We reassure ourselves that this pain comes from an external source, that we lie at the mercy of an evil apart from us, that if the menace repented we would be whole. This reassurance fails us because, perhaps held hostage by pain, we misunderstand the wound. We miss that it is fully within each of us. We miss the wound because we are looking out, instead of looking in.
Of course, this wound is not just abstract. This wound is foremost real. It is many hundreds of kilometers long and has stretched and shifted with time, leaving scars – a sea of trenches, minefields, craters, ruined buildings. The wound is marked by the endless burst of shells and rockets and awash with the blood of dead soldiers, of maimed soldiers, of civilians often, though this distinction matters little because soldiers are people, too, and people were not created to await destruction in trenches. Perhaps some among us have been these soldiers or civilians. And we know that these frontline victims always have loved ones who grieve, loved ones whose lives the victims may have risked everything to protect. Indeed, a pall of loss surrounds the wound as far as the rocket has flown – and much, much further.
None of us wished for this suffering, and none of us wish for it to continue. None of us want war. Yet none of us want to surrender, either. We will continue fighting because we believe we are right and that the other side is wrong, despicable even. Because we believe so, we will continue fighting a war we will never win. We will never win because of the nature of the rupture, of the wound. Let this much be clear. It does not matter how many more tanks, pieces of artillery, machine guns are moved toward the frontlines, it does not matter how many more soldiers deploy to the trenches or blood-soaked fields of battle, it does not matter how many more billions are spent on financing this war, nor how many more empty words our governments tell us about each other’s depravity. None of it matters. The wound in our earth, in the fabric of our society, will devour everything.
The wound will devour money, materiel, and men endlessly. It will become heavier. Its gravity will grow. It will keep swallowing people alive until there is no one left to swallow because we would all rather destroy ourselves and the world than be vanquished. We have the means and the will for this destruction. Yes, at this rate, the havoc will come to you and me, if it has not yet. Or perhaps we will come to it. Our turn will come, to fight or to bleed or to cry, and when it does, even if we want to escape, there will be nowhere to go.
We may nonetheless dream of “victory,” certainly. Yet “victory” will only ever be a dream, for the reality of any military resolution will be defeat. The “victors” will irreparably lose sight of redemption. The wound will fade from view, but it will never heal. Grotesquely swollen with the blood of so many of people, the wound will go on festering inside those of us left alive, filling us with that very rotten thing that drove us not to show mercy, but to slay or to let die. While we will not seal the wound, the wound will seal our fate. “Victory” will not bring peace to the world because the wound will keep giving rise to hostility and finding us new “enemies.” Nor, most consequentially, will “victory” bring peace to our souls. It will condemn our souls to hell.
The wound must be closed before it is too late, not aggravated. The wound is vast, of course, and yet we can close it in ourselves, each of us. The healing begins by desisting from hatred. There is so much hatred between us right now. It can be overwhelming, I know. Sometimes it feels like no one is capable of any other emotion. It feels like the hatred fills the horizon, a boundless fiery haze. And the haze fills us, too. We can suffocate, I know. Sometimes I am filled with so much angry hatred that I choke. I struggle to breathe because as I write people go on dying, because everything I read on this situation ignores at least half the suffering, or treats it as deserved, because a human problem is cast in detached political terms, because the right to life itself is politicized, because I search everywhere for shame at the status quo, for shame at the inveterate hatred, but I find almost none.
Yes, sometimes it is hard for me to breathe, yet I gather the resolve to calm down. I force myself to stay calm because I know the hatred is not productive. I know that only compassion will stop people from dying at long last. I know that only compassion will restore a world where children in Donetsk and Kharkiv, children in Luhansk and Kyiv, children in Mykolaiv and Kherson, children further afield but still within firing range in Lviv, Sevastopol, and Belgorod, even children in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, even children in the cities of Europe and the United States will grow up with hearts untainted by hatred. I know that only compassion will prevent the rise of a generation bred on hatred, a generation that cannot envision reconciliation because it will breathe hatred but never notice. I know that only compassion will return us who have gone astray to the grace of God – and we all have strayed, who have looked away from ourselves.
For now, the wound in our world is as crimson and angry as ever. In recent days, more troops have deployed alongside machinery of killing, heavy battle has persisted, more lives have been broken or destroyed. Some people have been urged to leave their homes, while others have been told to stay and be ready to fight. Many have gone to fight without being told. The truth is that it all hurts. It hurts because we are tired, all of us. Those of us in the war zone are tired of the interminable thunder of shells, of the gray smoke in our skies, of devastated homes and offices, of martial law, of evacuations of people we love, of funerals for people who should have lived, of the relentless pressure due to unpredictable rocket strikes or an immense, well funded army standing a short distance away. Those of us outside the war zone but at war nonetheless are tired of the vicarious suffering, of the disruption to our own lives and livelihoods, of the hostility to our state, culture, and good designs for our families and for humanity. So many of us are tired of fearing for our loved ones. So many of us are tired of losing our loved ones. And we have only endured the beginning of what looms.
We want it all to end. I tremble as I write these words because I am so tired and so much want it to end, too. But clearly it is not enough to tire, or to want, or to hope for the best, or to wait for redemption. There will be no redemption, except that unto which we deliver ourselves. There will be no redemption except through one another, through the “enemy.” The wound will not disappear magically or in one day. To restore ourselves we must be prepared to hurt for many days more, because relinquishing our hatred will dispel the illusion of our guiltlessness, and the path to reconciliation is long. Yes, healing the wound will be a painful process. But it will be a different kind of pain. It will be a pain that builds a deeper understanding, a more generous spirit, a stronger faith. Once all of us who identify with Ukraine, the Donetsk or Luhansk People’s Republic, the Russian Federation, or the United States or another Western country have regained our faith in each other and come together in forgiveness, we may finally close this wound in each of us, in our society, in our earth.
Mark A. Bykov has for years upheld communication between individuals separated by the frontlines in Eastern Ukraine. He has loved ones on either side. Mark’s true name is withheld in the interest of his and his connections’ safety.
