We pray for Christian families around the world; may they embody
and experience unconditional love and advance in holiness in their
daily lives.
As I write this in March there are searing images in the media of
families being torn apart by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over
five million souls, mostly women, children and elderly people are on
the move, fleeing the conflict zones where their towns and cities are
being systematically razed to the ground by a cruel and implacable
invading force, some of whose members have murdered civilians.
In just over a month this vast number of mostly women and children
have been separated by the war from their menfolk and placed in
situations of extreme vulnerability. Some agencies are warning that
the situation is a perfect poisoned field for human traffickers to
operate in.
Over seven million people are internally displaced. This means that
ten million have had to quit their homes. The statistic represents a
vast catastrophe for family life in Ukrainian society. Just the effect
on small children, terrified by the chaos around them and
uncomprehending of the fear in the eyes of their parents, is hard to
imagine.
By the time this comes to print I hope and pray that these mothers
and children will have had some relief from their brutal and
traumatic uprooting. Perhaps they will have found safe havens
abroad either with relatives or with strangers who have welcomed
them into their homes. Some might have been able to return to the
safer places in Ukraine if the tide of war turns in the country’s
favour.
Like all wars, this war has not only crippled the country’s
infrastructure; it has also dealt a devastating blow on the domestic
life of the people of the country. To restore normality to family life in
Ukraine will require firstly a just peace agreement which gives the
refugees the security to return home. It will also require a vast
reconstruction programme in order to rebuild the family homes
which have been obliterated and repair those which have been
damaged.
It is simply terrifying that this terrible damage is being done because
of what one historian has described as the ‘ultimate heartlessness
of ideas’. Because of one man’s heartless idea of how the world
should be organised politically, he justifies the violent re-
engineering of a country in order to force it into his mental mould.
That this involves the tearing up of the very fabric of that society,
including the fabric of its family life, seems to move him not an iota.
This is par for the course of the totalitarian mentality – control
absolutely everything and if it will not bow to control, use brute
force.
Against the backdrop of this event, which I think is the last, dying
kick of Soviet totalitarianism, the family can be seen as a potent
symbol of freedom and even of powerful resistance. The family is a
sacred space, a Holy of Holies, a civil and religious institution
demanding the respect and the positive support of the state. Any
state that would treat it with contempt or try to bend it to its political
or economic purposes or even destroy it, is in conflict with our
human nature and with the God who created it and in whose image
and likeness it is made.
This Reflection was also published on The Southern Cross
English