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I was reading "The Ladder of the Beatitudes" by Jim Forest today and I wanted to share a short excerpt from it. It's a wonderful example of the kingdom of God shinning through in a time of war and hatred. Jim Forest is a member of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.

"There is a story told by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko that gives us a glimpse of a sudden experience of the kingdom of heaven- in Russia, in the midst of war, with Stalin ruling from the Kremlin, and Hitlers armies pushing eastward.

In 1944 Yevtushenko's mother took him from Siberia to Moscow. They were in a huge crowd that witnessed a procession of twenty thousand German prisoners of war being marched across Red Square.

Yevtushenko recalls in his autobiography:

The pavement swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police. The crowd was mostly women- Russian women with hands roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick, and thin hunched shoulders which had borne half the burden of war. Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans. They gazed with hatred in the direction from which the column was to appear.

At last we saw it. The generals marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanor meant to show superiority over their plebeian victors. "They smell of perfume, the bastards," someone in the crowd said with hatred. The women were clenching their fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back.

All at once something happened to them. They saw German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty bloodstained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades; the soldiers walked with their heads down. The street became dead silent - the only sound was the shuffling of boots and thumping of crutches.

Then I saw an elderly women in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman's shoulder, saying, "Let me through." There must have been something about her which made him step aside. She went up to the column, took from insider her coat something wrapped in a colored handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of the solider, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now from every side women were running toward the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people"

This is the sort of story most history books pass over- miraculous moments when enmity is replaced by mercy, compassion opens the way to actions of healing and forgiveness, and plain poverty becomes poverty of spirit. The gesture of a single old woman broke through what Saint Paul describes as "the dividing wall of enmity" (Eph 2:14). Her eyes had been opened to see suffering German boys rather than murderous Nazi soldiers. Her response was to give away what little she had, a carefully saved piece of black bread. Was she surprised afterward by what she had done and the flood of gifts others had made in the wake of her small gesture of love? It was a moment when the kingdom of heaven flooded across Red Square."