Klymentiya Dymyd Mykhailo Dymyd
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Klymentiya Dymyd Mykhailo Dymyd THE STONES OF MAIDAN Translation by Halyna Pastushuk The “Svichado” Publishing House, Lviv Ukrainian Catholic University, Department of Theology 2014 This text is destined to have a long and outstanding life. And this is not necessarily because its author is a prominent, respectful and beloved priest, theologian, thinker, and civil activist, one of the founders of Lviv Theologian Academy (now Ukrainian Catholic University). And it is so in particular because this text is about the Miracle that happened before our eyes, before the eyes of witnesses of the events described by Rev. Mykhailo. This is not just a Miracle. It is the second Miracle. The Miracle granted to us – those whom the Lord gifted with grace to live, think, feel, and minister in late 20th – early 21st centuries. As a witness and participant of the events of 1986-2014, I began to ponder the phenomenon of this Miracle for the first time in 2010. At that time some Kyiv residents (all Russian speakers, all far from the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church) asked me, a journalist, to (sic!) organize a meeting with His Eminence, Beatitude Lubomyr Husar. They wanted to meet with an almost completely blind man who could nonetheless see everyone and everything. They wanted to meet with an almost completely deaf man who could nonetheless hear everyone and everything. The meeting with the Patriarch took place in the capital Cinema House. He was being attacked with questions for a couple of hours. The questions related everyone and everything. Finally, there came one with a taste of prank in it: you are, so to say, so wise and omniscient, you love everything and everyone, – have you ever seen a real Miracle? On hearing that, the Patriarch, in a typical manner smoothing his immaculate patriarchal beard, said the following: “I have not seen a Miracle as such. Still, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a real Miracle”. The people‟s reaction to these words of the Patriarch will stay in my memory till my last breath. Russian speaking people, focused, in their absolute majority, on material problems – and the number of those gathered without any announcement was about a couple of hundreds (which was in itself a little miracle as for the 2010 Kyiv) – got up from their seats and were proclaiming “Bravo!” all the time while His Beatitute was descending from the stage and leaving the hall. In late 2013 – early 2014 the Lord revealed to us the second Miracle. For me, a historian by profession, it is obvious: both our contemporaries and the next generations will persistently discuss the phenomenon of the Revolution of Dignity. They will collect, summarize, analyze all that is known and what is unknown to us today. They will fail to collect, summarize and analyze only one thing – our feelings, the feelings of the participants, the witnesses, the first historians of the Revolution of Dignity. By God‟s will, yet against my own will, I happened to be the first, the second and the third at the same time. Therefore, I have the least possible right to speak of those events, to assess the text of my master and friend. And that is because unlike our Patriarch Sviatosav, unlike our bishops, priests, monks and nuns, unlike our and “not our” believers, unlike many Kyiv residents, I spent all those weeks and months in safety, i.e. in a warm studio of Hromadske TV. With armed security guards. With hot coffee. With hot water. With warm bathroom. With all those things of which those, with and about whom I spoke in our studio, had deliberately deprived themselves. And I spoke with those who, for the first time in my (and I guess in yours too) memory also WERE PAYING for the right to DIE a Ukrainian. For the right to die a FREE UKRAINIAN. A UKRAINIAN OF ANY NATION AND ANY RELIGIOUS CONFESSION. WERE PAYING AND PAID. Someone – with life. Someone – with money. Someone – with hours and weeks of volunteer work. Someone – with a prayer. Everyone was charged a fee by the Lord in accordance to his/her capabilities – there and then. And the fee was worth Him. For the example of Christ teaches each of us that a filled and fruitful Life is not possible without Sacrifice. It teaches that one‟s unrepeatable, unique life is not possible without one‟s unique, unrepeatable sacrifice. Its highest manifestation is to give out what one values most, that unique, unrepeatable… The Revolution of Dignity of which Mykhailo Dymyd was also a participant, a witness, and a historian, is an outstanding and, perhaps, incomplete illustration of the above said. It is a vivid illustration, vivid evidence of the Christ‟s immortal testament: “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15: 13). And the last thing. Saint Augustin once observed that the Lord sends many blessings unto us but our hands are full of hodge-podge junk, and that it why we are unable to receive His blessings. Hundreds of thousands and millions of Ukrainians of various nationalities and various confessions, before our eyes, threw away the junk and started to Serve. To serve their Motherland – Ukraine. The people. The families. The colleagues. The friends. The blood brothers. Themselves. Their children. They have served nicely and selflessly. They have also served you who are reading today Rev. Mykhailo Dymyd‟s text, as well as those who will be reading it in 20, 50, 100 years. This text, therefore, is destined to have a long and outstanding life. And that is why we, participants, witnesses, and the first historians of the Revolution of Dignity pronounce with special feelings the words: Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory to Ukraine! Danylo Yanevs‟ky There is a time to cast away stones, and there is a time to gather stones together. The stones of Maidan mean a lot to those who were present on it physically or spiritually. The stones of Maidan, for many of us, became a symbol of protection against the forces of darkness, a symbol of striving for the rule of truth, a symbol of breaking the mendacious past. The stones of Maidan smashed the potency of banditry which after twenty years, due to our drowsiness and resignation, had already started to gain a state-level status. The stones of Maidan were thrown at the defenders of evil by those who were standing for the Christian values of Europe, forsaken by Europe itself. They were doing it with a hope to return and then, having gathered those stones, to lay them down as the cornerstone of a new Central European state. Many were promising themselves to return once everything would come to an end and to gather their stones for constructing a new life, – a life illuminated with the Maidan experience. The evil forces, though, having lost on Maidan, unleashed war hoping that military perturbations would destroy the memory of Maidan, that the stones of Maidan would be removed, and that everything people were striving for would be forgotten, that the Maidan activists would perish on the front line and would not be able to gather the stones for constructing a new state. Fortunately, this intention will not be implemented due to such books like this one. Rev. Mykhailo Dymyd was prudently marking his stones. While working daily with the people of Maidan he was trying to preserve them – the stones of Christ‟s Spirit, invisible for those inexperienced in faith. Each day during liturgies with intention for the success and strength of the fighters, for the truth he was pronouncing the Word of Gospel, trying to discern the act of Christ and His Spirit in the history of the people that were striving for the truth and were ready to give up their lives for this. The priest was trying to mark both the place of casting and the stone itself which was cast by him into the hearts of good and evil ones hoping to break any constructions of evil and provide construction material for the spiritual foundations of a renewed Ukrainian, a member of the Christian European community of peoples. I hope that for those many that were casting their stones on Maidan this book will become an encouragement to find time to address their Maidan experience and gather those stones in order to put them into the foundation of their new lives constructions. Rev. Vasyl Rudeiko, PhD Vice rector for Scholarly Issues, Ukrainian Catholic University [the following passage is also used as book promo on the back cover of print publication] The fact that a Human Being creates Future is obvious; some, however, are not aware of this because their space of freedom is sometimes limited or even closed. They are looking but cannot see. What people experienced on Maidan is the Future living now within them! It is stronger than the past and the death; it is a touch of Eternity! Everything presented in this album is just a timid look at the experienced things which united the participants of the Uprising of Spirit into one nation and elevated to their shared heights. Each personality is a conglomerate of positives and negatives which get manifested in weakness but when a person brings a selfless sacrifice for his/her neighbor – then we all touch the divine. This is the gift which awaited all participants of Maidan – heart metamorphosis! Each of us received it consciously or unconsciously from his/her Creator! That ineffaceable and eternal seal! Gratitude for normality! The world saw the human being in its greatness of spirit! Maidan of Dignity is already in the past! The Present and the Future is what we are able to experience again! Today we also can and should create through serving our neighbor at the place where the Lord put us to serve.