Christ is Risen! I would very much like to write many bright, kind, and joyful words today. But I cannot pretend; I cannot portray what I do not currently possess. Therefore, I write about what lies upon my soul. I write for my own – those who will understand. For those who, like me, live on the front line; who every night, and now every day, hear the sounds of drones overhead, the explosions of KABs (guided aerial bombs), and missiles. For those for whom burning houses and collapsed entrances have become the everyday backdrop, and daily deaths have become habitual statistics.
I say to you: Christ is Risen! Easter has come to our hell.
I look at the icon of the Resurrection and I see that this is exactly what is depicted there: Christ’s Descent into Hell. There, the Savior enters the deepest place of human despair. God once said to St. Silouan the Athonite: “Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.” God does not look at our suffering “from above” – He is inside our darkness.
The Easter of Christ takes its beginning not in the radiance of light, but in the silence of the grave. On the body of the Risen Christ, wounds remained. The same wounds are now on our souls, and for those who survived the strikes – on their bodies as well. Like on the body of Christ, these scars are now part of our memory and our eternity. Easter teaches us that one day they can become a source of light. Our life and everything that happened in it will not vanish – it will only change its form.
The house where I spent my childhood is now folded into a pile of bricks. The small town where I went to kindergarten and school, where I first entered the altar, lies in ruins. It is no more. But in God, the logos of this city, His design for it, lives eternally. And when the new heaven and the new earth come, this city with its flowers and alleys will find its place, and the righteous of that little town will live in it.
But now… what is happening in our country, and indeed in the whole world, suggests that a dark, deadly fog is gradually descending upon the earth. It brings with it death, mourning, wailing, and tears. No human being can avoid death. Death is a sort of special soil upon which that which cannot be destroyed by bombs must sprout. Easter is the promise that God will gather every shard of our broken home and every tear to create from them something new, in which “death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Rev. 21:4).
Heidegger said that authentic existence begins when a person realizes their mortality. This is correct, because death is the main meaning-making formula of human life. But in Christianity, this formula is read in its own way. It is not the past that defines the future, but the eternal that gives meaning to the present. Now our suffering ceases to be the meaningless trash of history. It becomes the “birth pangs” of a new existence. Easter says: “Evil is real, but it is not final.”
Christ rises as a Person, with His name, history, and body. This means that our uniqueness is not temporary foam on the waves of existence. We are important to God in our entirety. The Resurrection is the highest affirmation of the value of a specific, unique human being. Living on earth, we create things not to leave a mark in history (which will be erased along with our name anyway), but because creation is the language of eternity. Any manifestation of beauty, kindness, or truth becomes part of the “Heavenly Jerusalem.” Our small, unnoticed fates, like grains of sand, are miraculously woven into the great history of the world, in which everything matters. Every choice we make, every step, and even every thought lies in its own unique pattern in the eternal memory.
When I saw killed children, crushed by slabs after another strike, I didn’t know what could be said to their parents in that moment. And I asked myself: what would St. Seraphim of Sarov say in this case? Perhaps the same thing he always said: “My joy, Christ is Risen!” Perhaps he would point those parents to the sky, and they would see the radiant light in which these innocent martyrs of this senseless war now reside.
What can I say now to myself and to all of us? Only one thing: “Everything that scares us is already defeated. Everything we love will be preserved.” This is the law of the Paschal conservation of energy.
We live in an extraordinary time. Death still takes bodies, pain is still real, but its power is already undermined. We are people who have seen the first ray of sun, even though thick twilight still stands in the valley. We look at the world through the eyes of the One who knows the finale. And this finale is not darkness, but a feast. The stone was rolled away from the Tomb not to help Christ get out of the cave. He did not need that. It was rolled away so that we could look inside and see: there is no death there. There are only the abandoned linens of old anxieties and a napkin of pain folded specially to the side.
The “My joy” of St. Seraphim is not about cheerfulness. In the Christian sense, joy is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of meaning. When grief strikes, it occupies the entire horizon. A person feels that the wall of death or loss is final. But the Risen Christ tells us: “Yes, it is dark now and you are in great pain, but this is not a wall, it is a door.” Grief remains real, but it ceases to be hopeless. You can cry, as Christ cried over Lazarus; you can be afraid, as Christ was afraid in the Garden of Gethsemane; but you must remember that this train is carrying you home. And the windows of that home shine from the future into the present.
If Christ is risen, then any grain of genuine goodness, love, tenderness, and connection between people is not thrown into the “trash bin of history,” but passes into eternity. Grief is the price we pay for love. But the joy of St. Seraphim is the guarantee that the price was not paid in vain.
We cannot save the whole world, but we can return peace to our own hearts. To preserve it amidst the hell of war, hatred, madness, and fear. The fulcrum is within us – it is our faith. Let us remember this formula: “Everything you love will be preserved, everything that scares us is already defeated.”
The city where my childhood passed is no longer destined to be reborn. But in eternal life, a new city will stand in that same place, where kind people will live. And in that city, there will be no more grief, nor pain, nor suffering.
When we encounter another piece of news about death, illness, or the meanness of politicians, we automatically put the tragedy at the center of our attention. St. Seraphim suggested putting the fact of victory over the tragedy at the center by an act of will. This is not a denial of reality (he saw both wounds and tears); it is a shift of focus from the “process of dying” to the “fact of life.” The main secret is that joy is an effort, not an emotion.
For St. Seraphim, joy was not a feeling that comes on its own. It was a position. He believed that a person can choose – to look into the abyss or to look at the light that illuminates this abyss. His “My joy!” is not a compliment to the interlocutor, but a statement of who the person is in eternity, despite all their current scars and mistakes.
War seeks to capture not only territories but also the inner space of a human being. Its goal is to plant hatred, fear, and desolation in the soul. The effort of will here is to say: “You can destroy my house, you can kill or maim me, but you will not force me to become a mirror of your darkness.”
Joy is the preservation within oneself of the ability to see the human, to empathize, and to create despite destruction. It is the affirmation that life continues in us as long as love is alive in us, and not just the instinct for survival. This is our Easter, our victory with Christ, our joy, which no one can take from us.
Christ is Risen!
Archpriest Igor Ryabko
Source: facebook.com