Month after month, my Ukrainian friend posts pre-invasion photos on Facebook: a rope-skipping child with golden braids; a glowing young mother, cradling her newborn; a just-engaged couple with fingers intertwined. Underneath each post, their names are listed, plus the dates, manner, and location of their deaths. Though the photos are heartbreaking, people rarely comment.
For what is there to say? If the senseless waste of promising young lives were not enough to mute us, a moment’s reflection on the brutality so often employed by their killers surely would be. Even worse is the specter of total annihilation that lurks around slaughter on this scale. If this could happen to them, we think, then perhaps the nihilists are right: life itself is ultimately meaningless.
The Gospels insist otherwise—not only do we matter, but we go on! As the Orthodox Christians sing on Easter morning, “Christ has risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.” No matter how cruel or ignominious our departure from this world may be, our personhood can never be erased. That golden-haired Ukrainian child lived among us. For a brief, shining moment, that newborn nestled in her mother’s arms. They are ours and we are theirs. And the promise of Christianity is that they, and we, will live again.
“Awake and sing, you who lie in the dust,” proclaims the prophet Isaiah. “For your dew is a dew of light.”

Paula Huston

Paula Huston is a longtime Camaldolese Benedictine oblate and the author of ten books, including The Hermits of Big Sur and One Ordinary Sunday: A Meditation on the Mystery of Mass. For more information about her work, please see paulahuston.com.