Last night, I did something I’ve rarely done recently.
I went to church. And to an evening service. In the middle of the week, even. 😇
A service held at Saint Mary's Ukrainian Orthodox Church on Fullertown Ave. in Allentown.
My purpose was to attend the town hall to follow, an event to feature Susan Wild (for whom I campaigned despite my (at that time) Republican registration) and other local officials.
Sadly, I wimped out of attending the town hall after the "brief prayer service" that was to precede it. I should have realized that "brief prayer service" has a different meaning in the Orthodox tradition, where a friend once told me a wedding service took about six hours.
This was fully an hour long gorgeous, ancient, and intensely spiritual ritual complete with vested clergy (including the officient, Western Eparchy Hierarch and Consistory President, His Eminence Archbishop Daniel), candles, incense, an astounding choir singing exotic solemn baritone hymns in a language (Greek? Ukrainian? It wasn't Latin. And it sure as hell wasn't Russian - more on that later).
Also, the congregants and visitors stood for the entire time. (I wasn't warned about that!)
I struggled to my feet as everyone rose to acknowledge the bishop (or so I thought), and then remained standing. And remained standing. Everyone (including little children and elders with canes) stood for the entire hour.
The only reason I didn't sit at about 40 minutes was that I decided I'd be God double-damned if I'd be the only one in the filled to capacity church who sat while I was sitting four pews behind two Ukrainian soldiers in battle fatigues who had been so seriously wounded that had to be evacuated to and treated in America.
Needless to say, they didn't sit.
Neither did a couple of other soldiers in fatigues that I saw. Not sure if they were Ukrainian or, more likely, Ukrainian-American troops from the parish. The one guy I saw had one little kid by the hand and another on his shoulders. For the whole service. Standing.
As far as I could tell, the vast majority of those that came to the service went downstairs afterwards to the fellowship hall to engage in the town hall, but I was beat. And I had problems hearing what was said - including the modest bits that weren't in Ukrainian.
And I was furious.
That brief, sixty minute dip into Ukrainian culture shifted my understanding of the historical context of the war.
Yes, it is the largest conventional arms attack on a European nation's sovereignty since World War II. The war where my Scout leaders and other elders fought fascism in Europe and the Pacific.
But this conflict in which free people fight to retain that freedom against a pitiless dictator with such huge advantages in manpower and weapons is so much more.
Putin's Russian Federation is not just attempting to steal a nation’s homeland and its resources and kill those who stand in their way.
Putin is determined to extinguish the reality of Ukraine. Its culture and its people’s group identity: everything this "short prayer service" embodies in microcosm - the iconography, the incense, the liturgy, the language, and Ukraine’s tradition and history.
It is ethnic cleansing.
And the result of our recent coin-toss, margin of error election has caused us - has caused me - to join Putin's axis of autocracy: a pariah country in the eyes of our former democratic allies who stood beside us and spilled their own blood when we were attacked on September 7th.
And what Putin has done to a formerly free Russia, President Trump and "robocop" Elon Musk fully intend to do to America.
To myself. To my family and friends. And their children and grandchildren. To all of us.
I am furious.
As to missing the town hall, I probably called it right.
I suspect whatever significant exchanges happened at the town hall will probably get some coverage in the news.
But, for the service itself, you really had to be there.
Bill B
