A personal meditation on #Ukraine - March 2022

One of our group has supplied this personal point of view on the invasion of Ukraine and their personal reaction to it.  It was written as a 'note to self'.

Don’t be angry about Putin (or Johnson, or injustice anywhere) to the point of being miserable. That will just make you difficult to live with. 

We are made for co-operation — to operate with others — and co-operation is facilitated by acting for the other, acting out of compassion. Wiping each other’s tears. Being ‘leaning posts’.  Providing what is most needed in the action of mending.  We are made for the good that we can spread, and we feel fit and well if we act in line with that, our natural nature. 

What makes us well, strong, resilient, courageous, is to be who we really are.  And who we really are is that we are in relationship and we are made for goodness.  

So don’t give in to the shock, the cognitive dissonance, that suggests Putin’s actions break every common human rule.  This act of his is not a change to anything.

Don’t worry that you don’t understand why Putin has done what he’s done.  Don’t even think about his failures as a human being.  Don’t try to understand him as a person.

Don’t look over the garden fence, because you have, as the Desert Fathers and Mothers would say, a corpse already, in your own living room.  Try instead to understand your own person.

There will always be wickedness in the world. There will always be things that are suddenly, irretrievably, lost or broken. There will always be things that tempt you to outrage and smouldering misery. 

There will always be people who break the rules, for reasons you can’t understand; rule-breaking that makes you very angry.  You will never be able to fix that.

You will never be able to fix those people.

You can only fix yourself, by reframing what has happened, and what now lies before you, and by trusting the natural order of things for the rest. 

The only thing to do is to try to spread compassion, even in the face of oppression, violence, greed.  Work on your own compassion, and trust to God for the rest.

This is no appeasement.  And it is no easy task.  Being a light in darkness, or a vulnerable citadel on a hill, demands steadfastness and trust. 

The easier path is to falsely imagine that going in, guns blazing, will eliminate the problem.  It won’t, and it will introduce more problems. 

Seek inside yourself for your own source of natural compassion and act from that. We are meant for goodness.  We are wired for it.  Do not let Putin, or anyone else, move you away from the place in yourself that is the source of compassion.

Find a way to stay in your own natural compassion, and act from there. 

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If none of that helps, and if you must, then think of things in terms of time, in terms of the long-term.  Things always come round in the end.

Do not go into Ukraine to kill.  Better that fewer people are killed now, fewer holes torn irreversibly in the human fabric; better that the current burden of pain, in all war’s forms, is shouldered by someone — even by those who didn’t deserve to have to shoulder it; better those things, than that you, over and above them, in your own life, and in the ripples coming from your life, increase the burden of anger and hate that the world has to carry. 

In the end, through people’s natural justice and natural compassion, things will be turned around.  No dictatorship can last forever.  Once people have decided to be free, nothing will prevent them from becoming free. 

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Or if role models help you, there are these.

Gandhi, whose peacefulness freed India from the imperial British.  And Mandela, whose decades of incarceration changed him from a terrorist to a peacemaker. And the Dalai Lama, who under other circumstances would have been a peaceful leader of a small Himalayan nation; but who through the violent theft of his country became one whose compassion and wisdom illumines the entire world. 

You might even think of the figure of Jesus, in the oppression of Roman occupation.  The narrative of his silence and non-violence, in the face of certain and gruesome violence towards his person. The legend of his dying words of forgiveness.  

If persons can do this, can live from their place of compassion, while risking losing everything except their determination against violence, and can make a difference in the world, then so can you.