The Holodomor of 1933, perpetrated against the Ukrainian people, has no precedent in terms of its extent.

All this has come upon us,
Though we have not forgotten thee, or been false to thy covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from thy way, that thou shouldst have broken us in the place of jackals, and covered us up with deep darkness. Psalm 44:17-19

Hope requires the contender who sees no virtue in surrender.
From the cradle to the bier, The heart must persevere.
The Book of Counted Joys

Hope is a necessary component to being human. All tyrants, all who commit crimes against humanity always attack hope and take it away from the victims because they know how important hope is for humans, for remaining human. Hope is indelibly connected to the future and when hope is removed, the future becomes clouded over with uncertainty and pain. Removing hope, removes time, a precious gift from God which enables us to be and to grow and to pray and to forgive.

When we don’t allow ourselves to hope, we don’t allow ourselves to have purpose. Without purpose, without meaning, life is dark. We’ve no light within, and we’re just living to die.
From the Corner of the Eye, Dean Koontz

What hope enables us is to see life and its vagaries from a different perspective. It is, to a certain extent, to see beyond ourselves and beyond our immediate needs. It is to be convinced, in spite of the seemingly contrary evidence, that good does triumph over evil, the final word in creation is not to be given to despair. It is to see value through all the bitterness that life sometimes brings. It is to rejoice in the very depths of our mysterious being and not just to be satisfied by the ephemeral, that which is transitory. It is to place our hope in the One who is greater than we and whose total and final victory we await.

What a horrendous sight it was in 1933 to see people swollen from hunger, resorting to cannibalism, collapsing, dying with no respite in sight. It is almost as if the whole world had forgotten and this made the pain of dying in obscurity even more profound.

…how intimately and inextricably the tendrils of tragedy and joy were intertwined in life. Sorrow was often the root of future joy, and joy could be the seed of sorrow yet to come.
From the Corner of the Eye, Dean Koontz

Hope is one of the virtues of Christianity. And yet, how can we talk about hope when confronted by the sheer evil that accompanied the year 1933?

If we stop calling on hope then we have given victory to those who take away hope. We have hope because we have seen that it is, eventually, the conqueror of all despair and loss of faith. It was with hope that Christ approached the Passion, and we were given a powerful sign to support that hope – the Resurrection. The Ukrainian nation has also been resurrected and has become free some 58 years after the horrific events of 1933.

The darkest night is pierced by the smallest candle and this signifies to us the power of what is good, the power of that which resists evil. But, one could say, how do we know that those who died had not lost hope? And here, we come to one of the central mysteries of our faith. The existence of the Church attests to the fact that we are never separated from our brothers and sisters, even if they have passed from this life. In some mysterious and profound manner, we are united, we are part of each other and it is through this union, that we can hope for those who have gone on before us. We, through the Church, can stand in for them, and hope the hope that others have wrenched away from them during their earthly existence.

All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined – those dead, those living, those generations to come – that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands…for each of us is a thread critical to the strength…of the human tapestry. From the Corner of the Eye, Dean Koontz

This may seem fanciful to us but we have support for this idea in the findings of science. In some mysterious manner, sub-atomic particles, which seem to be so far apart from each other, impact and interact and affect each other instantaneously. If we have this at the inanimate, unconscious level of creation, then is it strange to posit this interaction at the level of humanity?

We are in a privileged position because we have seen historical evidence that the deaths of the innocents of 1933 have not been in vain. There are rich fruits from their suffering among which is the fact that the Ukrainian nation will never again have to endure a repetition of 1933. We are, at last, free and we can impact our fate and this, in no small measure, because of the suffering of those who came before us. It is another irony that those from whom hope was extricated, have gifted us with hope. And what a difficult gift hope can be as we struggle to hold onto it.

My God, my God – why hast Thou forsaken me? are words that come easily to us. Despair is a currency that our world often uses. This is one of those ironies that the ‘gift’ of great tragedy can bless us with hope. This is one of the reasons why we commemorate those who died, we commemorate in hope and in love.

If you do not hope, you will never discover what lies beyond hope.
Clement of Alexandria

We hope because our vision is not limited by what we can see, what the world tries to tell us is the final picture. We know through our faith that there is much more to life and reality than our physical eyes can observe. The lynch pin of our faith and hope is the Resurrection which assures us that eventually, everything will be well.

Hope was almost totally annihilated in Ukraine in 1933. As someone said – there were no birds to sing. And yet, God had given His gifts to man. The earth produced a harvest which was more than sufficient. But men’s hands denied bread to other men.

The concept of bread is one that is central to the New Testament. Christ is the bread of life; he brings redemption through his sacrificial death and we commemorate this as the bread of this world is transformed and becomes the food of eternity and everlasting life. 1933 witnessed a savage attack on Ukrainians but it was also an attack on faith because bread is one of the enduring symbols of Christianity. The atheistic regime frantically and fanatically attempted to exterminate any vestiges of faith and hope. And initially it seemed that evil had won. But the wheels of history and judgement turn slowly but inexorably and hope has once again returned to Ukraine.

I don’t know how, but suddenly, there is no darkness left at all. The sun has poured itself inside me from a thousand wounds.
Nikiphores Vrettakos, Greek Poet

Hope is a signpost for us that what underlies creation is a mystery. Even our studies of the physical properties of the cosmos point this out to us – there is a limit to what can be known about physical creation and this limit does not arise because our instruments are imperfect, but it arises from the fact that there is an inherent unknowability about the basis of reality. Hope blesses us with a future because if there were no mystery, there would be no future and we would be locked into a rigid determinism. Hope is one of the basic building blocks of creation, and without it, we would not have a world of love and meaning.

I know what you will object to and you will be absolutely correct. It is not easy to hope when we are faced with dire situations that speak of hopelessness loudly, drowning out any vestiges of hope. It is not enough to simply to listen to, or read, nice encouraging words because these have a tendency to crumble away when faced with persecution and danger to our physical lives. We must prepare to hope all of our lives so that when we come face to face with threats to us, we will be better prepared. All of our lives should be a preparation for us so that when hope seemingly evaporates from us we have reserves to which we can turn in order to replenish them. And the most powerful reserve building our hope is that of prayer in which slowly but steadily, a new us is formed which will help us to be able to withstand the onslaughts against hope. This is a life time’s work and we should not wait but start this very moment.

More in the next letter.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas