Patriotism in a Foreign Land
Our society still predominantly consists of products of the Soviet past, no matter how they live and what they do now. Hence we all look alike as representatives of the same species bred in the same environment. Even such exotic individuals as new Ukrainians, intelligent businessmen, or lawmakers are difficult to identify by their behavior, mentality, vocabulary, and interests. The clergy is no exception: what perhaps singles them out against the general background is the cassock under which lurks the same post-Soviet man. Perhaps this is as it should be until an entirely new generation comes along.
This only added significance to my meeting two fellow countrywomen living abroad. One of them, Halia N., arrived from Buenos Aires, Argentina; the other, Sister Lydia (a nun), permanently lives in Rome, holding a very high office. (Both of them asked not to disclose their last names, while Sister Lydia flatly prohibited writing about her.) They are cousins and came to Ukraine not just on a tour but to make a pilgrimage to the holy places of their faraway homeland, to visit the graves of their kin, and to see with their own eyes how we live, are ridding ourselves of the Soviet legacy, and making use of our independence and freedom.
What I have just written might sound a bit lofty or even incredible, but it is the gospel truth. I hope this short story about Halia N., one of my guests, will in fact demonstrate the truth of what I have stated.
The two ladies, born and raised in Western Ukraine, come from an old noble clan that included not only Ukrainians but also Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. Yet, the dynasty always remained Ukrainian and been distinguished for godliness and a keen sense of belonging to Christianity. Hence the line has produced many theologically educated priests, monks, and nuns. Many lay representatives of this extended family were also highly educated, working as lawyers, engineers, etc. It is worth noting that some members, even of the same generation, often belonged to different denominations: Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic. “Sometimes,” Halia says, “while the husband was reciting the liturgy in an Orthodox temple, his well- dressed wife walked, a laced umbrella in hand, clicking her high heels on the old home town’s sidewalk, to a Catholic church for mass.” In her own family, Orthodoxy and Greek Catholicism were closely intertwined. She cannot recall any conflicts over it.
Halia was brought to Argentina by her parents after World War II when she was only a child. There she was educated, married a Ukrainian-born lawyer, and gave birth to three children. The oldest son has already graduated from a college and works; the younger children combine work and study. Of course, Spanish is their native language, the language of social communication, and medium of instruction. But Ukrainian still remains the language of the home, to quote Halia, the language of prayers and communication with fellow countrymen for the third generation of this family of Ukrainian ОmigrОs. All Halia’s children first learned to speak Ukrainian and only then Spanish; now they are raising their own families, Halia’s grandchildren, in the same vein. Here follow a few stories of the life of Ukrainians in the far-away Latin American country, as told by my two guests.
THE PROCLAMATION OF INDEPENDENCE. When Argentina heard the first news about Ukrainian independence, Halia’s eldest son, a young man who had just launched a career, spent a substantial sum to buy two rolls of blue and yellow fabric and stitched up a gigantic Ukrainian flag. He and his friends, including Argentines, hoisted the flag on one of the city’s central streets, so that all Argentines knew that his homeland had become one of the world’s sovereign states and that Argentinean Ukrainians were not orphans without home or history.
SUNDAY SCHOOLS. Every Ukrainian church in Argentina without fail maintains an interfaith parish school. As a rule, children go to this school for many years and usually spend there the whole Sunday. They are taught not only the basics of the Christian faith and ethics but also the Ukrainian language and civilization: Ukraine’s history, natural features, the biographies of great figures, and folk customs. They learn verses composed by Ukrainian poets and sing Ukrainian songs and carols. Teaching is done by priests and educated Ukrainian nuns as well as by the children’s parents. A curious detail is that the school employs a rather strange method of inculcating patriotism in the young by preparing them for the probable “sacrifices at the altar of the fatherland.” To be more exact, these children observe a fast for Ukraine on certain holidays. This is usually done, of course, symbolically: they give up a cake or a chocolate and are very proud of it. It is this kind of school that Ms. Halia’s son who made and hung the flag of Ukraine attended.
THE UKRAINIAN CEMETERY. The Ukrainian community in Argentina long sought the right to have its own cemetery. The point was not in some religious or ethnic prejudices on the part of the authorities: it is difficult to find a suitable plot of high-cost land. Now they do have such a cemetery, the only one in vast Argentina, with a traditional Christian chapel. It was planned at first that requiems would be sung for the Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic deceased by priests of the same denominations. However, the result was different, for some denominations lacked clergy. Hence now the deceased are seen off to the other world by the nearest available pastor, irrespective of his churchoffiliation.
PRISON. Halia is a sincere believer. Having a good and loving husband, fine children, and grandchildren, she was still convinced that a convent was the best place for her. Long ago, her parents categorically opposed her taking the vows, and she, the only child in the family, did not dare disobey them. Yet, faith and some kind of mysticism are an essential part of her life, and Halia regards many important events as a direct intervention of Providence, the Hand that leads her. This happened, for example, twenty years ago, when she chose to do full- time missionary and charitable work at a women’s prison (first it was a men’s prison, but when the bishop saw Halia during a visit, he said she was too young and good looking). Halia’s is quite a complex mission: she did not confine herself to establishing a chapel with a full-time priest in the prison. She herself teaches the inmates to pray and repent sincerely of their misdeeds, tries to furnish the women with a permanent occupation, buys them embroidery cloth, teaches them to work, and, moreover, to look after the children born in the prison, i.e., the children who live in a stone enclosure until they are four without knowing in the least about such things as trees, grass, a street, domestic animals, and open spaces. Before a child is sent to an orphanage, Halia brings him/her to her house with a garden, flowers, and a dog to exclude any possibility of a shock. Her house has also become a halfway house for women who have served their sentence, especially for foreigners (mostly convicted for drug trafficking). The women, leaving the prison after a ten to twelve year term, feel absolutely helpless without money or anybody to go to; they have forgotten what is a street, a crowd, or public transportation. Halia invites them to her home for some time. She looks for a job or buys them the things they need, food, and tickets to go home. Neither her husband nor the children resent the constant presence of some strange and even suspicious people and the fact that a sizable share of the family income is spent on the newly released foreign convicts. All the necessary expenses have been borne by Halia’s husband, a prominent lawyer.
THE UNITY OF CHRISTIANITY. Halia is a convinced champion of the unity of Ukrainian Christianity, perhaps owing to the religious life of the Ukrainian diaspora, where different denominations cooperate, sometimes even against their will, and share in a way the same flock. This is why, when Halia first visited Kyiv in the early 1990s, she, an active person, made an attempt to persuade our divided churches to grasp the simple and obvious truth: it is better to unite than to quarrel. She visited Patriarch Filaret, several bishops of Ukraine’s differing Orthodox churches, and even went to the Phanar in Istanbul, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch. All in vain. We, who live here, know only too well how many attempts, even governmental, were thwarted in this way. The failure does not embarrass Halia. She asks everybody, known or unknown to her, to pray for unity because “if many people pray sincerely and crave passionately for the unity of Christians, it is certain to come about. We have our state, and we will have our Church.” Visiting Kyiv monasteries, Catholic and Orthodox alike, and leaving gifts there, the guest from Argentina always asks despite the skepticism, to offer the same prayer (Russian scholar Lev Gumiliov proposed the term passionate for this kind of people).
KYIV PILGRIMAGE. Halia said Kyiv had made a sad impression on her when she first visited the city in the early years of independence. It was especially distressing to watch people on the streets: they were downcast, markedly stooped, and poorly dressed; each of them carried either an awful bag or a bucket (this struck her the most, for some reason) or the ubiquitous Kravchuk cart. They were impolite, devoid of the faintest signs of traditional Ukrainian manners. There were empty store shelves and long lines; shabby, never renovated, buildings in the heart of downtown, potholes in the roads and sidewalks, crammed city transport vehicles, and a poorly lit dirty railway station with Soviet period graffiti.
We have already forgotten all this; we take a critical attitude toward change, focusing for good or ill on the shortcomings alone. But the foreign guest was happy as a child, walking down the streets of festive springtime Kyiv: in her opinion, Kyiv has markedly changed for the better. The city seems to have been reborn and taken out a new lease on life: it is making great strides and adorning itself. “And look at the people, at the way they walk: unrestrainedly, freely, and standing up straight! Look at the women and girls: how beautiful and tastefully dressed they are!” (Gogol would say, “This is not a province, this is Paris itself!”) Incidentally, the number of pretty women on the streets of Kyiv invariably strikes all the foreigners I know: they never fail to remark on how many of them there are.
Halia also took a fair view of the new monument on Independence Square: she thinks it embodies femininity and romanticism, she is happy that woman became the symbol of the Motherland. The columnar frontage is also a good idea because it resembles a temple, a Christian church. For you cannot possibly put a cross on the monument in a country where the whole population is not Christian.” And how exulted our guest was when once in the evening she saw through an electric bus window the rebuilt St. Michael’s Monastery! Halia remembered the special kind of sadness and emptiness that always reigns at the place where a church once stood for centuries: she recalled tennis courts in place of the cathedral (“What subtle profanation!”) and kept saying this was the best symbol of our revived Ukraine: this church displays history and the good will of our government. Even the neighboring building of the former Ukrainian Communist Youth League Central Committee (now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) now looks “not so ugly.”
Another observation of my guests is about the way Kyivans speak. They claim this aspect also shows a marked improvement compared to the completely Russian-language Kyiv of the first years of independence. Now you can always hear Ukrainian speech in the streets, and many people switch from Russian to Ukrainian if addressed in it. We were lucky enough to meet such people when we strolled through the city.
I understood, of course, that Halia was a great optimist and often indulged in wishful thinking, seeing her beloved city, Dream City, through rose-colored glasses. But why are we, the natives, so reluctant to admit that life is really changing and in many respects not for the worse? Why are we almost proud of our mistakes and antiheroes and practically unable to praise anything, let alone anybody? It was extremely difficult for me to restrain myself and not to object to each word of hers, not to dispel her illusions, not to persuade her that everything is not as good as it might seem.
My dear guests have now gone. Sister Lydia to Rome, where she works hard for her homeland whatever she does. Halia is returning to Argentina, to her family and the Ukrainian Sunday school, for which she bought a great many good books and maps on Ukraine and Kyiv (“I never even dreamed of this, for Soviet maps were strategically secret objects!”), and to the hapless female convicts of various nationalities and denominations.
How will their next visit to Ukraine be in a few years time?
