Always we hear the same excuses on both sides from the men in power: injustice done years ago, territory taken away, rights that have been trampled, but these are the rights of these governments, not of their people. Ancient bonds between Ukrainians and Russians mean that there are marriages and friendships across the beleaguered border, people on both sides only hoping to live. Maybe those Russians who have friends and families across the border will protest; they have already begun to do so. But are they powerless?
Here in the U.S., we who are powerless in the face of forgone conclusions have only one resource: get down on our knees and pray.
Most people pray to something in times of great danger. I don’t think it matters whether it’s the suffering Christ on the Cross, the Virgin Mary, a Buddhist priest, or that nameless Higher Power some of us found in AA. At the very least, we can devote a few breaths to a power we don’t understand or even quite believe in and say, “Spare them. Spare the women and the men. Spare the children.”
We have a model: The Native Americans among us have come to 250 years of war with a resilience and a courage we need now—as well as the power of prayer and the strength to persist. On this morning’s “Native America Calling” on our local National Public Radio station, a woman named Rosebud recounted the police’s armed intervention in a Sugarbush Celebration she and her native brother and sisters were enacting in Detroit. That city like all the other cities in this country is founded on what was once a native community; one of its rituals evolved around a spring “sugaring”—boiling the sap from maples to make sugar that is then given free to their elders. Armed Detroit police shut them down even though they had permits for their fire.
Rosebud testified that they are going on, gathering at the same spot to share their thoughts and feelings about the violence they experienced and to plan when they will try again.
We who have not been overrun or chased out need that resilience now. This country has never been bombed, never been invaded. But with the out-of-control development of nuclear arsenals here and in other countries, this may be what we are facing, if not now, some day. An expert explained that no weapon ever invented was never used.
Lent is about to begin. Let us all get on our knees, whatever faith or lack of faith we hold and say one of the prayers from the Ash Wednesday service:
Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.
We are all in this together.
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