Visit to Ukraine
The Light Was Not Extinguished During the Night of the War
Fifteen days visiting cities plunged into darkness and “islands of resilience”: Brother Benoit tells SIR about a Ukraine that is wounded but not defeated. Young people showing solidarity, committed churches, families suffering from Russian attacks. Amid the cold and fear, hope becomes a daily choice and a tangible sign of freedom. “We told the young people we met: ‘We have no message to convey to you, except that of our spiritual solidarity through prayer and our presence. It is they, and all the people we met, who have been a message to us!’” Brothers Benoît and Andreas, from the Taizé Community, have returned from a two-week stay in Ukraine. The SIR news agency reached them by phone so they could tell us about their trip, which took them to the cities of Lviv, Ternopil, Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Poltava, Zaporizhia, Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Kolomyia. They met with leaders from all the Churches—Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Latin, and Protestant. This trip followed another visit that the prior of the Taizé community, Brother Matthew, accompanied by Brother Francis, had made in December, on the eve of the European meeting in Paris that brought together 15,000 young people from all over Europe, including a thousand from Ukraine. “Upon returning from that visit,” recalls Brother Benoît, “our prior, Brother Matthew, emphasized how much these people had become for him living signs that light can truly shine in the darkness and that the darkness had not succeeded in extinguishing it.”
