A Confession

Ughhhh. So this "graduated" Russian invasion is turning out to be the bear hug from Hell. Big surprise that, and God help us all, starting with Ukraine, of course. And in the name of everything holy, pray as you've never prayed for anything in your whole life. 

Mind you, as psychologically prepared as I tried to be for all-out war, I wound up stumbling on a discovery that actually surprised me. I never thought I'd find myself feeling seriously, wistfully nostalgic for much of anything about the Cold War Soviet Union. As distinct from our exciting post-Cold War Russia.

Except that, come to remember it, I did feel very much that way, and was very nostalgic. Especially for the post-Khrushchev Soviet Union. 

Not too many years ago, I laid it all out very explicitly in a single post: how much I missed the - for want of a better word - predictability(?) of the later Cold War era. Along with the seemingly more measured, cautious rationality of its principal actors and operatives. Though, looking back on it, a better phrasing might have been the greater political secularity of the era.* And in particular one highly secular assumption, that seemed to be widely shared among both East and West: 

Namely, that there is NO place on earth, and in time, that is so holy, so utterly joined to heaven and eternity, as to be worth risking nuclear war in "defense" of.  Or worse yet, in order to possess it exclusively. Perhaps not even Jerusalem? But certainly not Kyiv. (At all events - as I've posted elsewhere [last 4 paragraphs] - one really has to ask what kind of love is it anyway? that loves most fervently by hovering, clutching, choking, destroying.)

*As opposed to the greater political religiosity of our era, actors, operatives, etc.

My point, in sum, being that Heaven is Heaven, and earth is earth, and it's not that the twain shall never meet; however, that fruitful consummation must always be understood as being in the hands and at the discretion of God, never of Man.

Again, a post-Khrushchev Soviet Union. Neither did I envision it as continuing indefinitely in that pitiful-yet-toxic Brezhnev-through-Gorbachev state. Rather, what I imagined was a Russia "duly de-Communized and de-toxified," as I wrote in the same post (par. 4). In other words, no longer even remotely or aspirationally Marxist; yet still hardheaded, pedestrian and secular enough to grasp that, in this exciting, excitable globalized world of ours, no country can afford to be too sentimental - much less hysterical and confrontational - about some holy ancestral hearthland like Ukraine (Russia's Kosovo?). 

Anyhow, what I felt most nostalgic about was the (best I recall) relative simplicity, clarity and straightforwardness of a bipolar world in which, in any case, nuclear proliferation was certainly far less easy than today. Or so it was made to be, on one of the two sides - the Soviet - if not both?

Still, and however much I'd prefer it otherwise, the fact is that today we live in self-anointedly apocalyptic times (par. 9). Ours is a Great Global World in which, as often as not, the most secular differences of opinion can take on an epically religious, or even sacredly end-time, "heaven-and-hell" solemnity and ferocity. And then we wonder why it's so cussedly hard to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

So of course even now we have those who, whether they love or hate it, regard Putin's Russia as an almost Biblically-fated tool of Babylonian chastisement of a wayward - or at least feckless? - Modern West. And you know, in all fairness to them I can think of no time in history, like the present, when we in the West have been more Biblically wayward. If not apostate in the Christian sense. At the same time, it would be hard to imagine a modern Nebuchadnezzar more brutally blundering than Vladimir Putin, or one more likely to teach the exact opposite of what we Westerners are supposed to learn. Or a despot better designed, if anything, to reinforce and confirm the stubborn waywardness, smugness and sense of moral superiority of the "Israel" - aka America - in question.

In any case, assuming it really is a steadily tightening, and deadly, ring of encirclement that Putin sees himself as breaking out of, he could hardly have chosen a method of breakout more conducive to the self-vindication - if not self-righteousness - of his encirclers. Or a means of "escape" more horrifically dangerous to the peace and security of his own country (to say nothing of the rest of us). In fact I suppose I couldn't have done better myself, if my intention had been to "blacken permanently" the name of Russia in the eyes of the world.

Meanwhile, it appears we Global Moderns have well-nigh reached the limits of a certain nothing-if-not-ambitious, post-secular, post-Cold War project of our own: one we've been engrossed in, if memory serves, for roughly the past generation. I mean the project of trying to bring Heaven down to earth, as it were, by forcibly anchoring it to some place, people, ideology, or Idea-masquerading-as-country of our own idolizing (whether the idol be Washington, Beijing, Mecca, Jerusalem, Brussels, Moscow, etc). But is it really too late, do you think, to do something quite the opposite? 

What if we fervently prayerful Catholics, and countless other Christians, were to turn a decidedly different page in our devotional lives. Suppose that we were to become rather less heavy and solemn, less full of our own hard-won importance, less weighted down by our own works, achievements and sacrifices. Such that, like any child, we almost seemed to have no past at all? (3rd, 4th and 5th pars. from bottom) 

What if we were to become so light and buoyant, so humble and childlike and unselfconscious - yes, even of our great and good deeds - as to be able to float right up, as it were, to Heaven? So that our own feeble prayers might at last be joined inseparably with those wisest and most potent of all human intercessions - those of Jesus' own Mother, and ours? That same Mother of the Church who pleaded with us, in Portugal more than a century ago, to pray - not for the humiliation, devastation and judgment of Russia, however "deserved" - but for its complete consecration to her Immaculate Heart, and therewith its full conversion to her Son. And likewise to believe her, and to trust in Him, for the "period of peace" that would surely follow. Our persistent Catholic disregard of that appeal over these past 100+ years - can we honestly say we've been satisfied with the results? Is not the present spiraling disaster more or less exactly what she foretold? And are we so sure that this same Mary, who so accurately prophesied the conclusion of one war (1918) and the conditional-but-likely onset of another still worse (1939), is utterly powerless to mitigate and defuse, to subdue and cleanse and heal both Russia's present madness, and our own folly?