This vision of a greater Russia was recently echoed by the Patriarch of Moscow, in an ominous warning that Russia would be obligated to intervene should the situation in Ukraine devolve into civil war. Indeed, over the past year, the Patriarch has led a parallel campaign for an ecclesial hegemony that would subsume all Ukrainian Orthodox under his authority. The presence in Maidan of priests from each of the Orthodox churches — including those within his jurisdiction — is a bright sign that the attempt is being thwarted.

Politics aside, it’s hard to deny that the images beamed to the world from the opening of the Sochi Games were anything short of stunning.

Of course, removing the Olympics from political context is a challenge steeper than any we’ll see in its events. And in the case of Sochi, the context is limned with welts of conflict.

When the last camera is packed and carried off to the next big thing, we may find that what was unveiled so impressively last week was more a testament to Russian stagecraft than proof the Russian nation has risen from its Soviet ashes to a greatness the world is obliged to acknowledge.

At the same moment, other images — at times smuggled to viewers from Maidan Square in the neighboring capital of Kiev — were telling an unscripted story in stark contrast to the orchestrated optics of Sochi.

Among the most powerful were of priests, standing in the icy breach between masses of protestors and government forces, each straining the leash-limits that keep Ukraine from the nightmare of civil war.

To Western eyes, these blokes, of long beard and foreign vestiture, might seem eccentric.Who are they, why is their presence tolerated, and what are those things they carry?

As for who, they are the sacerdotal face of Ukraine’s major churches in the Orthodox tradition.What we mostly see them carrying are icons, the sacred images intrinsic to the Orthodox liturgical witness. Why has everything to do with who and what. For in Slavic culture, religion — particularly the experience of Orthodoxy — does not dwell on one side of an imagined wall never prescribed in that fruit of Magna Carta which are the American founding documents.

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