A Last Hope
The Women Of Ukraine
The young women of Ukraine, holding their babies, crouched in dark basements and dank subway corridors, strong, articulate, courageous, determined, these women just may change the world as we know it. As these pictures and testimonies soak into our minds and souls, nightly, just perhaps, against all the terrifying odds of brutal power, the world may be forced to rethink what power is all about. In the midst of all the talk of a collapsing civilization, surely these images give us a glimpse of where we ought to be headed.
Naïve? Oh sure. Idealistic? Well, I suppose. Fuzzy-headed pacificism? I don’t think so, but I find myself ready to risk the labels. I’m ready to start over, imagining another kind of hope.
There was a brilliant article this week in Common Sense by Peter Savodnik, a very pessimistic article, asserting that we are on the verge of losing civilization as we know it. It has been a long time coming, and there is plenty of blame to throw around, but
Vladimir Putin knows how much daylight there is between hard geopolitical reality and American rhetoric. . . . We prefer to hew to the old platitudes. They make us think that we can rewind or undo or make things better if we just say the right things.
It’s time to face the hard realities. Civilization has collapsed, Savodnik claims.
It is time to imagine . . . a new order, jungle-like, shot through with the fevers and hatreds of the world as it had always been before. Uncivilization. . . . What has changed is not the barbarians of the world, but that we gave up on the justice of our cause.
Well, I’m not ready to give up, though these sobering thoughts send me scrambling for new places to start over.
Tish Harrison Warren, in a thoughtful piece in the current online CT, reminds us, hard as it is to accept, that the power of God’s justice still reigns. Warren finds herself praying the “imprecatory Psalms”:
Each morning, I’m praying Psalm 7:14–16 with Vladimir Putin in mind: ‘Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends.’”
I am willing right now to pray that prayer too. We yearn for God to sort things out. We desperately want to claim once again that God will make things right in the end.
But I am also sure these women in the subway corridors are not sitting around, philosophically, militarily, geopolitically, contemplating the un-civilizing of our world. They know more than the rest of us about a shattered world. A brutal uncivilizing power is the nightmare in which they crouch. As these women dream about making it back to the security of their homes, back to the joy of family dinner tables, back to a tender moment putting a child to bed, well, their dreams must be our dreams too as we begin to rebuild our civilization. What is it that will give us a new hope? It has something to do with these dreams of home, remembering the family dinner tables, holding helpless children who trust the arms that hold them.
Remember when Jesus announces “my power is made perfect in weakness.” Remember too when the Apostle Paul proposes a radical new way of living, that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” “Oh sure, we are told, “this is the way to become a doormat.” Powerless, weak, ineffective.
But isn’t this the starting point, a new point from which to begin again? Isn’t the most basic starting point to imagine a world when power actually seems weak in the eyes of the world? Is it too much to think that love and joy and humility and gentleness, far less self-focus, far less obsession with our own success, far less scrambling for power over others, far less dependence on the brutal power that kills and demolishes, isn’t this precisely where we need to start over.
I have new confidence that the images of these women, tenderly holding their babies, gazing out into the terrifying chaos, are seared across our imaginations as we seek to rebuild our civilization. We can only hope, and pray, that the women will find their way back home. Maybe this will give us a chance to start over too.