Letter to the Dominican Family in Ukraine

‘Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.’ (Isaiah 40.31)

My dear Brothers and Sisters,

My thoughts are with you on this third anniversary of the brutal invasion of your beloved country. Our Brother Jarosław Krawiec OP, Vicar Provincial of Ukraine, asked me to write a letter to you all on this sad occasion, but it is you who have inspired the whole Order with your courageous endurance during these long years of what Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner, called ‘this most stupid of wars.’ 

You must be afflicted with a terrible tiredness of body and soul. Will this atrocious violence ever end?  You and your crucified country come to our mind every time we sing this psalm:

Will the Lord spurn us forever, and never again be favourable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?  Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?   Has he in anger shut up his compassion? (Psalm 77. 7 – 9)

But God promises Isaiah that ‘those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.’ (Isaiah 40.31) 

The story of our salvation is filled with those who wait in hope. Abraham and Sarah waiting twenty five years for the birth of their promised son; Moses and the people of Israel waiting for forty years in the wilderness to enter the Promised Land, which Moses never does. Simeon and Anna wait in the Temple for decades for the Lord to come. We are still waiting for the Kingdom to come. St John Henry Newman said that a Christian is someone who waits for Christ. 

We do not wait passively, as pawns of history, but with actively, opening the door to the Lord who will come powerfully when we least expect him. 

At the Feast of the Presentation, which we celebrated earlier this month, we see the people of God waiting for the coming of the Lord. It has been a long hard winter of God’s apparent absence, years of humiliation by a brutal conquering power. But two old people (I increasingly appreciate the old!) Simeon and Anna wait for the Lord in patient hope. Anna, especially, has actively waited for decades, yearning for the Lord, keeping hope alive in others by speaking of the redemption that is promised. How are we, like Anna, to keep alive that hope in each other during the long winter of waiting? 

The Lord hears 

During the long years of exile in Egypt, it seemed that the Lord was deaf. The tasks of the Hebrews became even harder. But in the desert, Moses heard the voice of the Lord: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.’ (Exodus 3.7f) The Lord hears our cries and remembers us. We, your Dominican brothers and sisters around the world, remember you. Especially the letters of Brother Jarosław keep your memory alive in our hearts. 

With wars and violence growing all over the world, especially in the Middle East and South Sudan, Ukraine is no longer always on the front pages of our papers. Other images of violence are flashed on our screens. But you are not forgotten. ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me. Isaiah.’ (Isaiah 49.15f).  

‘To remember’ in English also evokes ‘to re-member’, to gather back into the unity of our single body in Christ, one throughout space and time, overcoming separation and death. Jesus said just before his own death, ‘Do this in memory of me’, and that memory embraces all those share his crucifixion. Looking at the sufferings of the indigenous people, Bartolome de Las Casas wrote ‘I left Jesus Christ in the Indies, our Lord, lashed, afflicted, beaten, and crucified, not once, but millions of times.’ All the crucified of the world, including the thousands of your people in these last three years, are remembered in the Eucharist, our great sacrament of hope. At the Last Supper that hope seemed illusory, as sometimes it may to us too today, but Easter morning lay ahead! 

The hope of study and preaching

One typically Dominican way of waiting in hope is to carry on studying, teaching and preaching. The violence that is increasingly engulfing the world seems to be without meaning. We study and preach the Word of God because we believe that the light of the Lord can never be extinguished, ‘the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.’ (John 1.5). 

I remember well the opening of the Institute of Religious Studies of Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Kyiv. It snowed during the opening lecture by our brother Wojciech Giertych OP, and as the Bishop blessed the building, he kept saying ‘It is too small.’ And it has grown, for during the violent meaningless of war, the hunger for truth grows. The deepest hunger in the human heart is that our lives shall be found to have meaning. 

Our brothers and sisters in Iraq responded to the atrocities that have engulfed their country by opening schools and continuing to study and teach. Our brother Lukasz Popko, of the Ecole Biblique, told me that ‘in Gaza, one of our collaborators kept teaching, in a tent, how to restore ancient pottery! Among all the destruction and bombs. And he had at least 10 students! It is the wisest thing to do in the inhumane times to remain human.’ 

So, we wait in hope by never giving up our belief that in the Word of God we may glimpse the ultimate meaning of our joy and sorrow. This is a meaning which we shall only fully know in the Kingdom, ‘for now we see in a mirror dimly; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.’ (I Corinthians 13. 12). 

Every student – and every disciple is a student – who mediates on the Word of God, and listens to others eager to understand what is in their hearts– is a sign of hope. Every school is a sacrament of our hope for the coming of the Lord. 

These long years are times of light and darkness. Often the searing light of explosions and fire, of bombs and drones. Often too of darkness, when electric grids are destroyed and whole cities are robbed of all light and warmth. But in our study and preaching we glimpse the one who said ‘I am the Light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’ (John 8.12). This is the light that will never be extinguished.

Waiting in hope by making peace

I was moved when Brother Jarosław said in his most recent letter: ‘The Pope put on the card [brought by Cardinal  Krajewski]  a quote from St. Leo the Great: “Natalis Domini, natalis est pacis”. I was very moved by his emphasis that the Nativity of the Lord is also the birth of peace. For this reason, I preached during the homily that every one of us can be a builder of peace. We have already received that gift from Christ in His Nativity. He is in our hearts, and we should share Him with those around us.‘

Even now as I write peace negotiations as said to be beginning. But what peace will it be? Gaudium et Spes reminds us ‘Peace is not merely the absence of war; nor can it be reduced solely to the maintenance of a balance of power between enemies; nor is it brought about by dictatorship. Instead, it is rightly and appropriately called an enterprise of justice’ (78). Will these negotiations lead to ‘an enterprise of justice?’  Or are they just about the self-interests of the great powers?

But whatever the powers of this world do, we actively wait for the Lord’s peace by making peace now with anyone from whom we are alienated, within our families, our neighbourhoods, our religious communities. This way we open a small door for the Lord’s peace for which we pray in every Mass and which we share in the kiss of peace, the peace which the world cannot give. 

After the second World War, a French Dominican went to celebrate Mass in a village that was deeply divided by those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who had fought in the resistance. As he stood at the altar at the beginning of the celebration, he saw their enmity. So he said to the congregation, ‘I will not begin this Mass until you have all exchanged the kiss of peace.’ For a time, nothing, happened, and then a courageous person crossed the aisle, until it became a flood of peace. To whom must I cross an aisle to offer the Lord’s peace?

We open the door to the Lord’s peace, by every small act of kindness that refuses the logic of despair or violence.  Every meal served at the St Martin Center is a small sign of the eternal banquet prepared by the Lord for his people. 

The whole Dominican Family is in solidarity with you as you wait actively for the coming of the promised peace, with deeds that refuse the triumph of evil and the logic of self-interest. The Lord’s peace has already triumphed on the cross. The victory for goodness has been won. May the joy of that victory touch us even now. 

When a political rally in South Africa against apartheid was prohibited by the government, Archbishop Tutu led a service in St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town. The soldiers and riot police were sent in, bayonets drawn, to stop it. Tutu addressed them: ‘You maybe powerful — very powerful — but you are not God. God cannot be mocked. You have already lost.’ Then coming down from the pulpit, he went up to them smiling: ‘Therefore, since you have already lost, we are inviting you to join the winning side.’ Everyone started to dance. 

Somehow, in God’s inscrutable providence, even these terrible years of suffering will bear a fruit, as the cross of Good Friday led to the dawn of Easter life. This may seem unimaginable now to us, and yet the Lord is sowing the seed of something new and good even now, though some of us may never see it in this life. The victory is won, even if we cannot imagine what form it will take. 

With gratitude for all your preaching and witness, even in times weariness and darkness, we give thanks to you and to the Lord who is ever at your side.

Your brother in St Dominic

Timothy Radcliffe OP

February 24th 2025+