Look for the Helpers, Serving Ukrainian Sancocho
Easter Season 2022: Look for the Helpers, Serving Ukrainian Sancocho
How can we dare to be hopeful in a time of war? Try some advice from Mister Rogers’ mother… and look to an underground community in Ukraine
These days, I’m constantly looking for fresh sources of hope in the world. Perhaps you are too. I find them often in Nature, where the divine seems to be hiding in plain sight on a regular basis, just waiting to be noticed, and to give its gifts of nourishment, healing, and hope. In the human realm, I seek out others who act with fierce-gentleness, that vital balance of humility and boldness: a passion for justice, the courage to take risks, and the equanimity to know that ultimately the best passion and courage flows through us more than originates in us.
When the war in Ukraine began in late February, and I felt myself slipping into to navel-gazing despair (a bit pathetic, frankly, given how utterly distant and safe from that war I actually am) I was graced to recall the advice given to dear Mister Rogers by his mother: In times of intense struggle, and even disaster, chaos, or tragedy, when all seems hopeless, look for the helpers. Watch them, doing what they can, in the way they can, perhaps not solving everything, but doing something. And in that, not only creating some good, but liberating others to do something themselves.
In this spirit, no story has struck me more deeply recently that than a group of twelve Ukrainians who dared to secretly celebrate Orthodox Easter on April 24 in a concrete basement, while above ground their city of Kharkiv was bombarded by Vladimir Putin’s army.
If you can, read this story in full [NY Times, 25 April 2022]. I’ll try to summarize here. In February, when the war began, over 300 people lived in this particular building in Kharkiv; over the past two months, all but twelve have either been killed or have left, seeking new life or simply shelter elsewhere. Among the twelve, their motives for enduring in that basement vary, but in the process they have come to share at least two essential things in common: community, and the hope it has created.
A gush of ink has already flowed forth about the current war in Ukraine, and rightly so. Though for many of us it can raise suspicions of Euro-centrism— wondering why other conflicts, equally brutal and unjust, most notably to me the Rwandan genocide, do not or have not received equal coverage— it reminds us that war is always horrific, always inhumane, and always destroys life for generations beyond its “official” end. (One hopes that, as more continues to be learned about PTSD, and generational trauma, we’ll connect the dots and pour more resources—how about we start with just half of what’s spent on militaries?— into ending all war.) In this sense, the news of war should be in our face, must be on our hearts, whenever it occurs. If it’s not, that absence sanitizes war, that silence anesthetizes us, that ignorance sows the lie that it “affects others,” or is “over there somewhere,” smothering our will to resist war in all its forms and all its roots, and guaranteeing it will happen again, and soon, somewhere in the world. Perhaps next time, right where you live.
The story of this group of twelve celebrating Easter struck me as viscerally as a knock upside the head, though increasingly, it has come to feel like an embrace, a kiss. In part, given my Roman Catholic practice, for the uncanny likeness to the apostles who hid from the authorities of state and church after Jesus had been executed. And in part, given the vein of that Roman Catholic tradition, liberation theology, which has felt most authentic to me, because of the radical expression of hope. Hope of this depth has alternately baffled, angered, and humbled me, as I’ve encountered it now many times over three decades accompanying the suffering or persecuted in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and in jails and homeless encampments in the U.S.
Initially, I thought I was seeing Karl Marx’s words become flesh, that peoples’ religion was effectively an opiate; I couldn’t fathom how victims of disaster, or anyone living under oppression, could celebrate or give thanks for anything. I felt the only appropriate responses were anger and confrontation, and anything else signified a weak social conscience or milquetoast spirit. Later, I checked my ego and learned to reserve judgment, wondering, with compassionate curiosity, how it might be possible— beyond my own limited imagination— to celebrate, or give thanks, without denying the reality of suffering or sapping one’s energy to change it. Later still, as my understanding has deepened, I’ve come to stand in awe, drawing strength and inspiration. I have reflected: If this person, or this community— despite overwhelming suffering—can still smile, laugh, dance, feast, share food, give love, or simply get out of bed to face the day, then I can too. If they can have hope, then I can too. And in fact, I must. Because they are not “they” at all. We are all— every one of us— part of Us, a transcendent, inclusive We. We are all one Body, one Family.
This group in a Kharkiv basement brought their hopeful resilience to life, not only by breaking bread together, but by sharing it: giving food away, in a spirit of radical, deeply faithful abundance, to those whose plight was even worse than theirs. The building within which they shelter is relatively accessible, and so various aid workers and Good Samaritans have brought food regularly, enough for these twelve to survive, and to spare. So the group has actively sought out those sheltering in less-accessible areas, and fed them.
It’s as if they were the apostles themselves, looking at the mass of five thousand who had followed Jesus till the end of the day, and came to him, panicked, urging him to dismiss the crowd before folks got hungry, and then rowdy. It’s as if they heard Jesus say, “Give them something to eat yourselves.” To do that, to attempt to feed this crowd, they would have had to set aside their rational mind, their critical analysis, their adult calculations and cautions. To do that, they had to summon and free their Childlike Spirit, as the title character and curly-haired girl— the most rejected people in the community— manage to do in my picture book, The Good Stranger’s Sancocho Surprise. They would have had to surrender to the Holy Mystery. But once they did, those scant loaves and fishes were transformed into a banquet with and through their very hands. From “nothing,” something… and more than something. Enough, and to spare.
Many artists and ministers have said it, and I’ve been fortunate enough to experience it myself: the best work feels not so much like something you create and give to the world, as something created that flows through you, and which you and the world can receive as a gift. A magnificent, mysterious river into which you dip your hands, bring up a cup to drink, and in so doing, leave a bit of your self within it as it flows on. The characters in my writing, fictional or nonfictional, to which I’ve opened myself the most, including the good stranger and the curly-haried girl, have given me this gift, as have many people I’ve been blessed to accompany in their struggles for healing, progress, and justice. And I imagine that had I been among this group of Ukrainians in the Kharkiv basement, I would have experienced it there too, that sense of being pulled into something deeper than you, beyond you, with which you’re invited to participate.
Generosity in the face of scarcity; joy in the face of extreme cruelty and misery; hope in the face of every logical reason to despair… these do not deny suffering and evil, if practied humbly. They chart a way through it.
Our dear Dorothy has written lovingly about sacred banquets among disciples of resistance, so I defer to the last lines of her memoir, The Long Loneliness, to bring us home.
The final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing., and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.
We cannot love God unless we love each other. We know Him in the breaking of the bread, and we know each other in the breaking of the bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet, and life is a banquet too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.