One year ago today, your life was cruelly taken.
I cried when Alexei Navalny returned to Russia on the 17th of January 2021. I thought of Palm Sunday when Christ entered Jerusalem a week before the Crucifixion, where they would put him to death for his revolutionary love, his voice, his wisdom.
Outside the Moscow prison that night, Alexei's wife Yulia Navalnaya told the crowds who had gathered there, "Don't be afraid." Не бойся.
I cried Friday morning, 16 February 2024, when I saw that this beautiful man was dead, his Thursday joking self, however gaunt and bent, turned suddenly cold and quiet forever by Friday morning. They put him to death.
Do not be afraid, he so often said. ничего не бойтесь."Don't be afraid of anything."
It's hard, Alexei. We are afraid.
I went to the Soviet Union in 1978 to try to understand this madness, this cruelty of deception, the ashes of World War II still smoldering in our collective consciousness. Now so many decades later the barbaric violations of Kyiv and Gaza are denied by the very people who perpetuate the horror.
Perhaps the crippling fear must be constantly seasoned with hope and faith in ultimate truth?
Bishop Tutu did say goodness will prevail.
Is this what kept you fearless and calm, Alexei?
18 FEBRUARY 2024
I'm so angry at you! You left your family, your worldwide résistance, to go back to this insanity, where you gave up control to madmen who despise you. You left your children, your beautiful wife. You left all of us, waiting for your next grand video, your next disguised call to a useful KGB idiot, your wonderful humor towards all that is deceitful and corrupt.
You went willingly back to the capital of the land, rode in on garlands and fronds, gave yourself up to the local Pilate, joked and smiled with the prisoners crucified at your side, and gave up the ghost.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Your memoir, now published...I don't want it! I don't want to read it. I want your vision of the future. I want you as Mandela, straightening up from years in the prison cell, walking tall toward the presidency of a new land, the promised land, the beautiful land, the future hope of all who wait and pray....
"I may not get there with you," said Martin Luther King Jr., the night before he died.
Bishop Tutu did say goodness will prevail. I know you believed this, that ultimately truth will out, that there is only one truth, one goodness, one world known to us as humans, all of us fallible imperfect beings on this one planet, hoping and praying for forgiveness and mercy.
That we must never give up. That we shall overcome. That still we shall rise, that still we shall lift up our voices and sing.
Господи, помилуй. Lord have mercy. Kyrie eleison.
"Don't be afraid of anything!" You said this so many times. ничего не бойтесь.
Thank you.
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"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
John 14:27
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16 FEBRUARY 2025
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