Easter in this war situation – is there a side aspect to this story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ or has it remained the same as before?
The message itself does not change: it is the resurrection because death has been defeated. But there are situations when this message is heard especially. And during the war, transformations take place: shallowness, which reigns in people and causes various conflicts, could go deep during this time, so that we understand what is the value of life – the gift that has been given to you, and why it is so important. But great conflicts are escalated precisely by human shallowness, which brings to the surface all the insanity that is going on right now.
Palm Sunday, or Palm Sunday, begins the Silent Week – Jesus’ Way to Transfiguration. The road to Easter leads through Calvary. This year, the first day of Holy Week was March 25, the day of commemoration of the deportations. This is the beginning of the road. Palm Sunday was happy and bright. The people welcomed Jesus in Jerusalem with rejoicing because they were waiting for a deliverer and a king. But their expectations did not match what they saw, for Jesus spoke in much deeper categories. His message: I have not come to rule you temporally, I have come to show the Way, to restore the relationship with the Father. The change in spiritual content clearly changes the reality of being from darkness to Light.
And what happened on Good Friday?
Pontius Pilate was a representative of the occupying power, a local governor, and he brought Jesus to him, who had been accused. Pilate passed through them and asked: Do you want me to sentence him to death? I can do it, but I don’t find any fault with him, – he said. Judge him for yourself!
Bruised and bloody, Jesus was brought before the people – the same people who had welcomed him with cheers. “Crucify him!” everyone shouted. Terrible bloodlust. The crowd had a choice – to punish a murderer who killed a Roman soldier, or Jesus, who was not guilty, but who offered people a radical new way to get out of all the filth – internal and external. No, we don’t need that, said the crowd. We don’t want to hear it.
That was the shallowness I mentioned. And I also talked about this with the Ukrainian soldiers.
How did you talk to them?
A soldier and a fighter. What is your motivation? What is the motivation for people from different parts of the world to go to Ukraine and fight against the Russian occupiers? Noble feelings? Defend? To kill? Adventure? Adrenaline? If your actions are motivated by killing, then it is wrong, it is sick. Because the fighter is the one who defends. I talked about all this with one Ukrainian soldier, he was very young. His inner world was dark. He said: I will kill all the Russians.
I said, hey, dude, what are you fighting for? Even if you fight against those monsters who kill the people closest to you, if you go against them with the same, you are no different from them. A fighter is one who knows values, especially the value of life. Killing is the ultimate limit with which you can change something. But then your fight must be honest, clean of blind hatred, with the knowledge that it is an extreme misfortune – to kill.
These are natural feelings of revenge. I understand him.
But let’s look at it from the other side, from the historical side. Ukrainians were also on the side of the Red Army during World War II. They served in the Soviet army even after the war. Ukrainian soldiers were also in Latvia. There were also those among them who turned their weapons against the Latvians who were fighting for their independence. There were also Ukrainians who in 1949 escorted people to cattle wagons. And I said to the Ukrainian soldier: it is possible that your grandfather also escorted my family. Should I hate you for that?
So what is this message of freedom? I can be free from hate, I can create a new environment where we can find reconciliation. But it is far from easy. Also, it takes two parties to settle. I cannot accept the fact that civilian occupiers live here. Yes, they were born here, they are citizens of LR, but are they loyal to Latvia? And if they laugh in my face about the events of 1949, how can I find reconciliation? I can create conditions that will not allow hatred to enter me, but I will not allow it to get to my head either.
There is such an episode. Jesus is about to wash the feet of his disciple the apostle Peter. He (Peter) says: you will never touch my feet! You will not humble yourself, because your feet are washed by slaves! If you do not allow me to do this, then you will not have a share in the kingdom of heaven, – said Jesus. This is where the great transformation takes place, that we put the humanly created hierarchy in front of what Christ brings: if you do not get over the dung of your own creation, then you will remain in your own dung. You can create your own illusory bubble that you will win, but it will be in time. If you get over it, if you create your new perspective – then everything will happen.
Why can we be united in times of great difficulty? We get over the big, dark things, but not the little things. I remember, a couple of years ago, a boy disappeared in Liepāja. In Karosta. Walking around there at night would be suicide. At that time, the Russians together with the Latvian girls went looking for that boy. There were no problems with language, nationality, or life views. Because there was a goal: to find the boy.
One Russian says: vot, poigiom tuda, potom tuda (now let’s go there, then there – Russian). I watch, the girls stand and blink their eyes – they don’t understand anything. And then that Russian says, with difficulty, of course: vot, now… let’s go there – s nami vmeste… to search. And then nothing else mattered.
Then define now what is the value of your life?
The value of my life is not to break, mine and destroy, but to cross myself and create the environment in which my potential enemy could experience the moment when he agrees and says: ok, let’s do it together!
Do you think that this could actually happen?
It seems like a utopia… If we are not ready to start from scratch, then nothing will happen. Look what is happening in Poland. The Poles are starting to get grumpy. And what is the reason? Economic, political reason? Things unspoken for decades, I think. One of them: the Volyn massacre in 1943.* No one has tried to apologize or talk about these things. The roots of this have to be sought much earlier, because Ukrainians as a nation were very oppressed and humiliated there: Ukrainian schools and Ukrainian culture were cut out there like with a knife.
Poles know, of course, that there is a terrible, unjust war going on across the border, but this Volhynia thing is still not solved. Therefore, talking and forgiveness are needed – from both sides.
If we analyze such things and then understand what values we want to keep and increase, we need to know what the dry residue will be. It is one thing to say nobly: I want freedom. But what is my path to this freedom? Bloody? Murderous? Is it clean? If there were no cretins who, because of their inferiority, are obsessed with conquering the whole world, our lives would be much more peaceful.
Yes, here in our neighborhood, in Russia, there is such an abnormal one. Besides, he has bombed the entire nation with his bootstraps.
An unhappy nation. I have often thought about what comfort zone means. Then we definitely think about something good, pleasant. Why, for example, is it hard to get a bum out of his comfort zone? If you offer him to solve his problems and start a normal lifestyle, he will say – go away, I’m fine here. We say: unhappy person.
Then we can conclude: something in a person has degraded so much that he does not understand where the value of life lies. The same is happening with the nation.
I used to have a terrible hatred for Russians. A crippling hatred. And then the old woman said to me: “If there were no Russians in Siberia like there were, we would not survive.” You see, there are good people too. But the nation as a whole… The nation is unhappy because it feels good in the insane world in which it finds itself.
That “Russian world” is shallowly disgusting. But when you dig deep, when you talk to these people one-on-one, you get the feeling that they start to hear. Then a distant, as if forgotten, feeling appears: yes, it would be good to get along… But then what can we do, we have a tsar here – a bakushka, he decides everything for us. If we say anything, we will be poisoned or put in jail. That’s why Ukrainians already say: you Russians have no desire for freedom. You don’t know what to do with that freedom.
They just don’t know what freedom is.
That’s why I say – unhappy people. Many want to return to the Soviet Union. When they are asked – what was the value of the Soviet Union? – they answer: they were afraid of us. I remember an old Russian TV scene where a Russian grandmother was taken to Germany to see how WWII veterans live in a nursing home. She was shocked by the excellent conditions of the nursing home: “No mi že pobegilii.” (But we did win – in Russian)
My grandfather once said: “When a cat is born, its eyes open after a couple of days. Russia cannot get rid of them after a hundred years. And will never open.” Of course, there is also an intelligentsia in Russia, there are people who want to live a bright, orderly life, but there are few of them. A few days after the start of the war, a spontaneous protest rally against the war took place in Moscow. About two and a half thousand people took part in it. From a city of 12 million! A splash in the ocean. Sorry.
Now, after the terrorist attack in Moscow, everyone is in shock: madness, innocent people have died. Insanity, of course. But the same residents of Russia don’t know why they don’t see that in Ukraine their “kids” are killing peaceful residents every day. They killed more than 300 people in Bucha, how many more in Irpen and elsewhere?
Here we come to the word connection “innocent people”. What was the attitude of those who died in “Crocus” towards what happened in Buch, Irpen and elsewhere in Ukraine? Mostly – indifference. Can we then consider them as innocent people? The words of the Holy Scriptures come to mind: “There is none righteous.” To break out of this insane vicious circle is the Easter event where we must see ourselves for who we really are. People kill the one who has come with the message to experience a new, renewed perspective of being – a Peace that is higher than human temporal understanding. And then the correctness kicks in: What kind of god would allow his own son to be killed? They don’t understand that God gives his son so that shallow people can finally see themselves in the mirror.
To get out of it all, you have to get on the platform of love. On the Path of Unconditional Love. Once that happens, there is no room for hatred.
You recommend loving your enemy? How can I feel that love?
I have two options. To go to Ukraine and vent my hatred towards the eastern country or to help the people of Ukraine who need my help as much as possible. On the other hand, hatred destroys, it prevents you from becoming truly happy. Better imagine: your enemy is a pathologically ill person, yet he could experience healing.
You are an idealist. You imagine that your enemies will transform. Well, it won’t happen.
I was in a state of hatred for so long that I felt: it is destroying me. Even today, I could pick up a gun and go to work. But I know it will destroy me to the core. I will remember my grandfather again. He joined the police battalion in 1942, after which they were transformed into two divisions of the legion – the 15th and 19th divisions were formed. Grandfather ended up in the 15th division. And 40 years after the war… I was very young then, I had a Ukrainian nanny, she had a husband Pavel, a Belarusian who had fought in the Red Army and, like my grandfather, went to the front at the age of 18. And they both – my grandfather and Pavel – talked without hatred. About fishing, about everything else. Two enemies – on opposite fronts. But they felt no hatred towards each other.
The times of the free state began, grandfather’s health was already quite poor, and Pavel suffered a lot. When opis died, Pavel cried…
All of this made me think about what my values are. What I have experienced and what those two men experienced at the front – blood, shit, horror… You involuntarily climb out of those hateful things, looking for something to cling to. And they both said: no matter what you go through, just don’t go to war. But now a whole bunch of crazy people are shouting: to the monks, povtorik! (we can repeat – in Russian). Repeat what? Millions dead? Putin, who urges you to do this, is sick in the head, but you accept him as a god.
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To be continued. In continuation, whether we are ready to act for the good of the country; whether we are ready to increase each other’s benefits, how easy or difficult it is to do good things; how to convince people to turn to goodness; why should ukraine be helped.
*The Volhynia massacre was ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ukrainian rebel army – the mass destruction of Polish civilians in Western Ukraine, in the territory of Volhynia, which was part of Poland until 1939. It happened from March to July 1943. The purpose of the massacre was to prevent potential Polish claims to the area based on the wishes of the Polish minority. About 60,000 Poles were killed in the massacre.
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Tags: Christ rule temporally spiritually
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