A covering of feathers for the terrors of the night

How to struggle with the burden of other people's suffering.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

Evie S. on Unsplash.

It’s one of the sad facts of life: that many of us at some point will see our parents get old and fade away. Sigh. It doesn’t matter how well prepared you are or how much you’ve thought about it before hand, the reality of a fragile mum or an exhausted dad can break your heart.

I’ve talked to my parents about this for years here and there. We’ve done lots of joking about seeing them off with a pink pill in the sherry, or ‘it’ll be a pillow for you Pa, if you’re too annoying’ – type thing. But when they left after Sunday lunch a couple of weeks ago, I had to clutch my husband. He lost his own mother last year… we’re still fluttering around the gap she’s left in our family. And now there’s my beloved olds too, looking diminished and moth eaten and moving at crepuscular speed. Ask Dad how he is these days, and he says ‘Old, dear’, and won’t elaborate further.

I can cope with this when it’s in short bursts. Visiting them for lunch or taking them out on a trip is OK and manageable, and there is still joy in family occasions. Mum’s birthday was full of love, even though she took all afternoon to open her cards and became hopelessly confused about who’d given her what.

But staying with them… that’s hard. Seeing the dust thick over the spare room; worrying about just how long that bowl of leftovers has been in the fridge. I whip about as unobtrusively as I can, scrubbing the bottom of the washing up bowl or putting their jerseys in a wash. I don’t want to be annoying – they won’t accept help and I’m not going to push – but it makes me sad. In particular I hate that my mum is in constant pain from crumbling bones, and that dementia has stolen her mind. Also, that as a consequence, Dad is irritable with her; he who has always adored her so much.

I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain.

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Since childhood, I have struggled with the burden of other people’s suffering. I sometimes wonder if I’m exaggerating when I think about how much I mind, but I don’t think I am. I can only manage if I’m really ready for it. With my counselling clients that takes the form of very firm boundaries, regular supervision, colleagues to talk to etc… but with family it’s much harder. It’s just your own naked, soft-bodied self-shrinking from all the nettles and thorns – like a hermit crab without a shell.

So when I went down to Mum and Dad’s this time, I felt the need to prepare. ‘Put on the armour of light,’ St Paul says, which sounds just the thing. I hardly slept last time, tossing and wriggling through small-hour horrors with my neck hurting and a feeling of tears not being far away. What to arm myself with though?

The answer came in the form of an ancient poem - Psalm 91. I was listening to a Premier Radio presenter who is a pastor – a big, tattooed fellow with rings in his nose and lip – and he said it was his main defence when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. So, I looked it up, and I loved it. It was all about how the Lord will cover you with his wings and keep you safe from the terrors that visit in the night and the pestilence that stalks by day, or words to that effect.

Malcolm Guite (a poet and priest whose writing I love) says you have to treat Psalm 91 with care: it was the one Satan tempted Christ within the wilderness, challenging him to throw himself from the temple roof and God would send his angels to catch him (as it says in the psalm). It’s not to be taken literally, this psalm: you can’t deliberately put yourself in harm’s way and expect to be immune because you’re a Christian, like some of the vehement anti-vaxxers around the world who think faith alone will protect them from lethal diseases. But the message is that if you put your trust in God, he won’t let you be damaged in any important or lasting way by the evils of the world.

I memorised as much of it as I could. And then when I woke in the night – inevitably – with the dread hovering over me, I kept thinking, ‘The Lord will cover thee with his feathers’. I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain and muddliness and Dad’s frustration and my own fear. They were like malevolent ghosts drifting through the dark, menacing and cruel. But Mum and Dad and I, our actual selves, were curled up safely, warm and hidden with the great wings over us.

And eventually, I was able to go back to sleep.

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War & peace

14 March 2023

9 min read

Moscow letter: why Russia critiques the West

Beyond condemning the invasion of Ukraine, there is also a need to understand why Russia thinks what it does, explains Malcolm Rogers, the Anglican chaplain in Moscow.

Malcolm Rogers

The Rev Canon Malcolm Rogers is Chaplain of St Andrew’s, Moscow, an Anglican church serving the international community in the Russian capital.

On 24 February 2022, Russian tanks crossed the border of Ukraine. President Putin believed that the ‘special operation’ would be swift, that Ukrainian resistance would crumble and that the Russian soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. It will go down as one of the most catastrophic failures of intelligence in history and, as a result, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have died, and the lives of millions of people have been devastated.

There can be no justification for the invasion of Ukraine. But if there is to be any lasting peace in the future, and if Europe is to live even in an uneasy peace with its eastern neighbour, then we need to hear the Russian critique of the West. We may well not agree with it, but unless we engage with it and try to understand where people are coming from, we are storing up yet more trouble for the future.

Sir Laurie Bristow, the former ambassador in Moscow, was often asked what Putin was thinking. His answer was simple: 'Listen to what he says’. People have mocked the long historical narratives in his speeches, but they are not to be ignored. There is no reason not to assume that Putin speaks what he believes. The conflict, certainly in his mind, is not economic but ideological.

The points below are a summary of some of the criticisms of the West that have been expressed in his speeches, in the Patriarch’s addresses and views published in Russian state-controlled mass media. It is possible that these views are now held, at least tacitly, by about 70% of the Russian population.

Putin’s defensiveness

Putin’s first criticism of the West is that NATO was planning to expand into Ukraine and place nuclear missiles there.

NATO, it is claimed, is an anti-Russian alliance, whose ultimate goal is the fragmentation of Russia. Russia, with its size, natural resources, military might and influence is too much of a threat to Western (US) hegemony.

NATO went back on an agreement given to Gorbachev in 1990 that it would not expand beyond its current borders. Since then, it has grown from 17 to 30 countries, and has steadily expanded East, incorporating the Baltic States, and offering promises – although vague – to Ukraine and Georgia that they would one day be able to join NATO.

How we tell history matters. The story deep within Russian consciousness tells of how Russia, as a nation, was held together by the Orthodox faith and by the ‘heroic’ defence of the land against invaders. In the centre of the new main Cathedral of the Armed Forces (consecrated in June 2020, and a powerful symbol of the union of army and Orthodoxy) there is an icon of Christ the Saviour. Around it are four scenes depicting the defence of Russia against the Mongols, Swedes and Poles, Napoleon and Hitler. It must not be forgotten that 26 million people from the Soviet Union died in the second world war and Hitler intended to turn the Slav peoples into a slave people.

The current conflict has become part of this narrative. Ukraine has become the Western Trojan horse. Many Russians have never thought of it as an independent country; for many Kyiv is their physical and spiritual mother. But after Maidan in 2014, which it is claimed was facilitated by western money and information, it is considered to have become a western puppet. As a result of the revolution, a democratically elected pro-Russian president (Yanukovych) was replaced by a pro-western president (Poroshenko), and it has followed an increasingly anti-Russian and pro-Western line. It was therefore only a question of time before, whether openly or in secret, nuclear weapons directed at Russia would have been placed there.

In September 2022 the Patriarch spoke of how Russia, in her history, has only engaged in defensive wars: the ‘special operations’ are perceived by the leadership as defensive. This was a conflict, it is claimed, that needed to be fought now, in order to prevent a bigger war in the future. They are necessary to secure the future of Russia against an aggressive NATO, who have always wanted to break up Russia, and are now showing their true colours by fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. There is a current poster on billboards which shows a Russian soldier superimposed on the image of Alexander Nevsky, who defeated the invading Swedes (1221-1263). Underneath is the slogan, “A time for heroes.”

A cultural conflict

Putin’s second position is that Russia is standing up against an arrogant, even satanic, West which wishes to impose its economic, cultural and moral values on Russia and on other nations.

In his speech to the Federal Assembly on 21 February 2023, Putin spoke of how the West has lost touch with its moral and spiritual roots, has rejected ‘traditional spiritual and moral values’. It has replaced Christian tradition with what is called totalitarian liberal individualism. There is bemusement about gender debates (it is not illegal in Russia to practise homosexuality, but it is illegal to promote it), and a perception that in the West the rights of small minorities have come to dominate public debate and set the public agenda. Western Churches are accused of having sold out to the agenda of liberal individualism, and of losing their spiritual foundations. It is said that, having sown the wind the West will, in time, reap the whirlwind.

Nevertheless, it is claimed, because of its economic power, the West has been successful in exporting liberal individualism and has trampled over other cultures and value systems. Globalisation is perceived as Americanisation. Putin regularly speaks of wishing to create a multipolar world, not dominated by the hegemony of the United States and the dollar.

This is an argument which is persuasive in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is noteworthy that of the 180 nations who were eligible to vote in the UN resolution on 23 February 2023, 141 nations demanded that Russia should immediately leave Ukrainian territory, but 39 countries either abstained or voted against the resolution, including China and India. There has been no change since a similar resolution in March 2022. About 40 countries have introduced sanctions against Russia, representing only 16% of the world’s population (Wilson Center). It is difficult to imagine, given the virtually universal opposition to the invasion in the West, that there is a deep global divide which is growing. As Russia’s doors to the West close, they are opening to the East and South. At St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow, our western members have left the country, but they are being replaced by increasing numbers of people from India and Indonesia.

Meanwhile the conflict is spoken of in church circles in increasingly apocalyptic language, as Armageddon, or pre-Armageddon, a ‘war of the army of the Archangel Michael against the devil’, a Holy War for the defence of Orthodoxy and traditional values against ‘liberalism, globalism, secularism and post-humanism’ (Alexander Dugin, 27 Oct 2022). Both President Putin and Medvedev have at times used this apocalyptic language, declaring that Russia is engaged in a war against satanic forces.

Understanding Russophobia

Putin’s third criticism is the West is Russophobic, and has neglected the fate of Russians – particularly those in the Donbas, and is guilty of double standards.

In his book on the origins of the first Crimea war, 1853-6, Orlando Figes writes that the immediate cause of the conflict was a dispute between church wardens over some keys (to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). Of such things, history is made! But he also partly blames Russophobia in both England and France for stoking the conflict. He writes of tracts and articles written at the time, “The stereotype of Russia that emerged from these fanciful writings was that of a savage power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, yet also sufficiently cunning and deceptive to plot with ‘unseen forces’ against the West and infiltrate societies”. That could have been written today. For many years, long before the current war, the stereotype of the bad guy in films has either been a Russian or eastern Slav.

Russia’s foreign policy has done nothing to counter Russophobia. There is an understandable huge fear of Russia in Eastern Europe, and Moscow has never recognised or acknowledged any of the atrocities committed in the Soviet era (although, to be fair, it has taken the UK about 100 years to begin to recognise some of the harm that the British empire inflicted on its colonies). And certainly some, at least on the surface, relish in the Russophobia. A man I met in the supermarket (this was just after the Salisbury poisonings) said to me, ‘You don’t need to be afraid of me. I’ve tied my bear up outside.’

The accusation of Russophobia is often levelled at any criticism of the Moscow regime, but among other things, Russophobia is blamed for what is perceived as the neglect of the role played by the people of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany. That may sound strange to us, but it is a huge thing in Russia. For the last ten years, on Victory Day, after the tanks have rolled through Red Square in the morning, there has been a far more significant event in the afternoon, usually neglected by western media. Up to 2 million people have gathered in Moscow, and similar numbers in other Russian cities, for the march of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, to commemorate those who died in the second world war.

Russophobia is also blamed for the fact that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was treated as a defeated enemy, and never given sufficient respect. It is blamed for the neglect of the fate of Russians left behind on the wrong side of the border after the collapse of the Soviet empire. That was particularly true after 2014 in Ukraine, when it is claimed that Russian majority areas such as the Donbas and Crimea were discriminated against. Kyiv refused to implement the Minsk agreement, which would have allowed elections of self-determination and which would almost certainly have been pro-Russia (Kyiv’s response is that Moscow had invaded Crimea, destabilised the Donbas and did not implement its part of the Minsk agreement). Certain incidents in which Russian speakers were targeted by Ukrainian nationalists were widely reported, as were the anti-Russian views of some of the right-wing nationalist groups in Ukraine, such as the Azov Brigade - which has led to Putin declaring that this is a war against Nazis. Putin has said that he will stand up for persecuted Russian minorities.

There is also the accusation of double standards. While the West has condemned Russia’s special military operations, which Russia claims is to guarantee its security, de-nazify and de-militarise Ukraine and protect the predominantly Russian population in the Donbas, the West has embarked on its own military expeditions, most notably in Iraq, Libya and Syria, justifying them in terms of either guaranteeing its own security or extending democracy.

On the edge

Perhaps the Russian critique of the West can be best summarized by Sahid, a taxi driver from Dagestan. We’d arrived in Moscow, a couple of weeks ago, after one of our epic journeys from the UK back to Russia and were exhausted. But he was very talkative! He defended the ‘special operations’: ‘Imagine that you are a peaceful guy, wanting to live a peaceful life. You are sitting on a bench. Someone comes and sits next to you. And then they start to push you to the edge of the bench. At some point, however peaceful you are, you are going to have to do something. You are going to have to either push back or be pushed off the end of the bench’. In other words, Sahid was saying what many Russians are saying to the West, you have pushed us so far, and we are not going to take any more. The tragedy is that, once again, the Ukrainian people – the border, edge people – are paying the price.