My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine, to the children who are being traumatized and to their parents who are trying to protect them, comfort them, get them out of harms way, as they endure the shelling and bombing of their cities. Along with the rest of the world, I have watched the massive gathering of Russian troops and their entrance into Ukraine in an effort to bring Ukraine under the control of Vladimir Putin’s government. The blatant disregard for the will of the Ukrainian people, the bombing of their cities, the growing number of civilians killed, and the largest movement of refugees in Europe since World War II has focused the world’s attention and brought widespread condemnation.
I also feel for the situation of young Russian conscripts who thought they were involved in a military training exercise and would soon be back home, only to find themselves sent across the Ukrainian border into a war where their mission was to kill other human beings, many of whom had deep Russian ties. They were being treated as fodder for a war machine.
And then I think about this war in relation to the wider global reality of war. Our world is at war. Wikipedia names 5 current major wars in which there have been 10,000 or more combat-related deaths in the current or past year, 18 current wars with 1,000–9,999 combat-related deaths in the current or past year, 41 current minor conflicts (100–999 combat-related deaths in current or past year) and skirmishes (fewer than 100 deaths in current or past year).
Afghanistan has experienced 1,450,000–2,084,468 fatalities; Yemen, 377,000; Myanmar, 150,000–210,000; Tigray, 23,600–100,000; Ukraine (beginning in 2014), 13,300+.
We are a world at war. Nations go to war regularly. Autocracies go to war. Democracies go to war. Autocracies and democracies both do wars of aggression. Russia has gone into Ukraine on the pretense of addressing Nazism and genocide. The United States went to war in Iraq on the pretense of addressing weapons of mass destruction. Over 100,000 civilians were killed in Iraq. I felt for the children of Iraq the way I feel for the children of Ukraine. In the case of Iraq, children were being traumatized by American bombs. Whatever nation goes to war, the outcomes are the same: people killed, maimed, traumatized, and their support systems destroyed.
Furthermore, it is apparent that humanity sees little in the way of an alternative. The United States has been involved in war somewhere for most of its history. And a nation’s citizens generally support their nation’s wars, anti-war protests not withstanding. War has had a kind of inevitability attached to it. It is an extreme symptom of our spiritual condition: we are a humanity centered in upon itself rather than in God (who is Love), our true center.
If we have begun to experience a recentering of our lives in God, we must bear witness to what we have come to know which includes a growing spiritual understanding of why humanity chooses war. Given the human condition, war appears to be the only thing available for the people of Ukraine in their situation—and they take it up with courage and determination against great odds. Thomas Merton, in a journal entry for March 1, 1966, speaks to this. He writes these words at a time when the United States had over a 184,000 troops on the ground in Vietnam. He writes of his “sorrow at the fabulous confusion and violence of this world, which does not understand God’s love.” And then he states what he must do: “I am called not to interpret or condemn this misunderstanding, only to return the love which is the final and ultimate truth of everything, and which seeks all [humanity’s] awakening and response. Basically I need to grow in this faith and this realization, not only for myself but for all.”
It is the experience of God’s love that allows us to step out of the inevitability of war and of killing one another. This love encourages us to not “sign up” for war but rather witness in word and action to the spiritual reality of an unconditional love that Jesus says is capable of loving our enemy. Operating from this love means, in Jesus’ words, praying for those who persecute us and, when hit, rather than returning the same, turning the other cheek. But this love does not only mean not reacting to another’s aggression with the same kind of aggression; it also means confronting evil, confronting injustice. Jesus called out injustice. He was a “sign that was opposed.” His words and actions were subversive to the established order, and they brought about his execution. The unconditional love of God involves being willing to die for the sake of others.
We have seen this kind of action, at times, on an individual level, and we got a sense of this kind of action on a social level in the non-violent action of the civil rights movement. We do not expect it on a national level. There would have to be a massive spiritual awakening for that to happen. So, we do not spend time “condemning this misunderstanding” of how to respond to aggression, but rather witness to “the love which is the final and ultimate truth of everything.” Jesus said that he did not come into the world to condemn the world but to seek and to save the lost. In a world that condemns itself to war and death, those who have experienced the unconditional love of God must live more deeply in it and bear witness in word and action to that love so that, in Jesus words, we are a light in the world, a light that reveals the only alternative to war.