chernobyl

A piece I wrote to share as part of a now-cancelled event. I began this piece well before I knew anything about a pandemic, but it strikes me now how life is always asking us to choose our narrative, and our God. Since we’re all having to keep our distance right now, I thought I might try to close the gap a little by reading you this piece myself. It’s nothing fancy, but we don’t need anything fancy right now, do we? We just need each other.

Peace to your hearts and minds today.

xo

tonia

When I was 15, part of the Soviet Union poisoned itself with a nuclear meltdown.  I saw it on the news and then I went to church-school, where no one was surprised to find the book of Revelation coming true.  I come from a people who memorize the King James Bible and expect to be afraid.  We trained for fear in the basement of the church-school.  Mostly, for the day when someone would burst into the classroom – likely Soviet – and demand renouncement of our faith on pain of death.  How fitting, then, that the apocalypse should begin in the U.S.S.R. 

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,

and made a barren circle 1500 miles wide where no life would be able to live for 20,000 years or more. 

Selah.

Not long after that

I grew up and learned that no matter how much Bible you can recite, religion is a reflection of the people who are practicing it, and so, bears returned to the fields of Chernobyl, along with wolves and dogs and endangered horses and other animals who never got the news about the apocalypse and received something more like a paradise instead, which is the story of a whole different kind of God.   

The thing about the different God is that disasters happen all over the world now and I never go to bed satisfied.  Instead I have this tender feeling right in the middle of my chest, like everything, everything is so precious and loved and I want to take it all in my arms.  Like the butterflies, and the bees, that have never returned to Chernobyl, who are more fragile, who have wings that are only strong for air, who hover around paradise, always wondering if it is safe yet, to go in.