Celebrating Easter during time of war
‘It’s a shame that it is two Orthodox countries that are in conflict’
In a beautiful church with stunning religious artwork, approximately 35 people gathered at the Protection of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church in Merrillville to celebrate Holy Thursday.
As they entered, the parishioners knelt in front of the alter multiple times and made the sign of the cross. After the Mass began, the parishioners lit candles they held in the pews.
The current Easter season is the first time since 2020 that the church has been able to gather without COVID-19 restrictions, but this Easter season still feels different because of the Russian war in Ukraine, said the Rev. Jacob Van Sickle.
“Now, finally, everybody is back in church and very excited to celebrate Easter in the fullness that they are accustomed to. Even though this war is happening, I think for most of our people it’s on the other side of the world. They know that there are people affected, but they are not personally affected,” Van Sickle said.
Ukrainians and Russians are both Orthodox countries, and the Merrillville church has both Ukrainian and Russian members of the parish, Van Sickle said. As the head of the church, Van Sickle said he does not preach about current events but focuses more on wisdom that could be drawn from current events.
“In my preaching, I try my best not to make it about current events because I think mostly what people spend a lot of their time hearing and watching, especially on the news, is entirely about current events and very little of it tries to cultivate timeless wisdom that should be applied to current events,” Van Sickle said. “I try, in my preaching, to talk about a foundational wisdom that should inform how we digest and react to current events.”
Dating back to the turn of the 20th century, the Protection of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church has Russian roots, Van Sickle said. Currently, the Merrillville parish has three Ukrainian families and about 20% to 25% of the parish is third or fourth generation Russian, he said.
The deacon of the church is Ukrainian, Van Sickle said, and has friends in Ukraine. It is evident “the heaviness that’s weighing on him” right now, Van Sickle said.
“(The Protection of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church) was founded by Russian immigrants, for the most part, but also Belarusian and Ukrainian and just people from that part of the world who all shared a common worship language and similar culture,” Van Sickle said.
The atmospheres at the Protection of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church and St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church amid the war are different. The Ukrainian church members have been open to discussing the war, while members of the Orthodox church hesitated to address the war ahead of the Holy Thursday mass.
On Thursday, three members of the Orthodox church declined to speak to a reporter when told the focus of the interview would be celebrating Easter while a war between Russia and Ukraine was continuing.
“It’s hard on everyone,” said a woman who declined to give her
name.
Nicholas Revak, one of the people who declined to talk ahead of Mass Thursday, agreed to a phone interview Friday. He said the church prays “for everybody involved” because the war “is a tragedy.”
The fact that two Orthodox countries are in a war makes the situation a “bigger tragedy than it otherwise would already be,” Revak said. The war is not based on religious beliefs, Revak said, adding that he supports Ukraine being an independent country.
Revak, who said his heritage is Russian, said he prays for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin for peace.
“It’s a shame that it is two Orthodox countries that are in conflict,” Revak said. “It’s one Orthodox church. We are all in Communion together.”
Van Sickle, who is Dutch, said parishioners likely didn’t want to be interviewed Thursday because they found it distracting as they headed into Mass. But, Van Sickle said, some parishioners are Putin sympathizers and politically and socially conservative, which also could’ve impacted the decision not to be interviewed.
“There is a lot of sympathy among our people for the Russian church. The patriarch of Moscow himself, in the last several weeks, has made a few public statements in support of the war, so that has caused a lot of consternation and a lot of confusion among some people in our church because we have people who, certainly before the war, thought very highly of the patriarch of Moscow and even of Vladimir Putin for being a supporter of the church and against a lot of what they consider like the liberalizing going on in the west,” Van Sickle said.
But, Van Sickle said the vast majority of Russian parishioners are against the war. When Russia invaded Ukraine, “it came as a great shock” to the church that Putin “would attack and start killing people of the same faith.”
“We have a number of more politically conservative (members) in our church who look to Russia as this sort of holdout against Western liberalism and so they have looked favorably upon Putin, and even now, it’s just like in our politics in this country, as soon as you vote for somebody you feel like you have to defend every stupid thing that they do,” Van Sickle said.
“People align themselves with a certain figure politically, it’s like now they can’t possibly see the bad things that they are
doing and they have to make excuses, so there’s a lot of people like that in the church. They can’t just say, ‘well OK, maybe Putin did some good things in the past but this is just wrong.’ We have to be honest about it,” Van Sickle said.
Van Sickle said he addressed the war in two of his sermons because of the comments the patriarch of Moscow made, which defended the war by saying Russia invaded Ukraine to defend Christian values.
“I felt like I needed to address (the war) the couple of times that I did just to clarify this is not OK,” Van Sickle said. “Even if there is ungodly stuff going on, to say that justifies invasion and killing is just absolutely evil. That is not the way that Christ showed us to deal with evil. You don’t fight evil with evil. You fight evil with Godliness, humility and refusing to participate in what is evil.”
Since the start of the war, Van Sickle said, the bishop of the diocese gave all the churches two short prayers regarding the war to be add to services. Van Sickle said he dedicated a sermon to address the war when it first started and again on Palm Sunday.
During Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday, Van Sickle said Wednesday he does not intend to address the war directly. Though, that could change, he said, because he does not write his sermons in advance.
While Van Sickle said he feels responsible to guide his parish through discussing wisdom around current events, he does not focus on informing the parish about the latest information about the war because he doesn’t know the facts from the ground.
“All I know is, this invasion is evil, and it doesn’t matter how you’re justifying it.
Whether those justifications have merit or not,” Van Sickle said. “I do try and help my people think about current events, but not by pointing out what information is true and what information is false because I don’t know that.”
But, the message he will share this Easter boils down to this: “When Christ saw evil in the world, which is supposedly what the Russians see in the West and in Ukraine, that he did not address it in the way that the world addresses things.”
“(Christ) didn’t find his enemies and go out and fight them off and kill them. Instead, he sacrificed himself. He went willingly to his death and in that way exposed the injustice of what was going on around him and brought the truth to light,” Van Sickle said.