This commentary is by Michael Caldwell of North Wolcott, a member of the international ecumenical Iona Community. He writes The Radical Center, a syndicated monthly column transcending current fractures in culture and religion.
Shortly after my son Noah, a producer for NPR’s “All Things Considered” evening news program, arrived on assignment in Lviv, Ukraine, I dreamed that I was driving a pickup truck full of tomato soup sloshing in the back bed near the border with Poland. Waved quickly ahead by border guards, I felt privileged to be able to help the growing numbers of refugees, oddly proud of my unusual cargo.
I’d prayed to avoid the bubble of denial about the incomprehensible pain, grief and disorientation of millions of Ukrainians. The dream confirmed that my contributions to Church World Service and the U.N. High Commission on Refugees would make a difference, would bring sustenance and comfort to people in misery.
My unconscious also needed to me to go where Noah went. Although the dream comforted my anxieties to a point, I continued to feel uneasy, not just for my son, but for a world weary of war, a world at risk, every time a military conflagration happens, of unimaginable escalation.
I wondered how Russia could be so barbaric in its assaults on cities and civilians. I wondered why the West didn’t understand why Russia felt backed into a corner after 30 years of muscular NATO expansion into former Soviet territory. I wondered why stale diplomacy hadn’t included key psychological and sociological insight into political and cultural history, sensitivity to the need for “international security,” including the fact that Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was the spiritual heart of old Mother Russia.
This war, to a point, is a civil war between closely related Slavic cousins, caught in the vice grip of a hackneyed geopolitical seesaw.
As Noah drove with his team from Warsaw to Lviv, I searched my old LP collection for Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” threw it on my turntable, turned up the volume, read the liner notes on the back cover. There it was — the detail that unconsciously got me searching for this piece of music: one of the pictures that Mussorgsky observed in a gallery dedicated to his late artist friend Victor Hartmann was “The Great Gate of Kiev.” I lay down with my eyes closed and wept through the triumphal climax of Mussorgsky’s imagined immortality of his friend.
Ravel’s symphonic rendering of Mussorgsky’s masterpiece rewards the contemplative listener with an emotional catharsis evocative of the movement from crucifixion to resurrection. Quite beyond the gallery in St. Petersburg where Mussorgsky wept for his friend was the weeping of two nations in the middle of a catastrophic mistake.
Quite beyond the weeping of these two nations is the weeping of a crucified world that longs so desperately for resurrection that it may finally come when it relegates obsolete military answers to natural political conflict to the compost bin of history.
Approaching Easter resurrection may mean honoring the death of the old order of nationalism, opening the way for a new global order of internationalism. National security? A rising humanity honors it in Good Friday moments, just as it rejoices in sunrise moments of the triumph of mindfulness of a new ”international interest.”
As I hear that Noah is settling into a secure place in Lviv, I feel less anxious. With Mussorgsky, I feel a modest resurrection of hope.
