March 28, 2021

DASH’S DEN

For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: They pierced my hands and my feet. – Psalm 22:16

Dear Humans,

Ilya Repin (1844-1930) was regarded during his lifetime as the greatest Russian painter of the 19^th century. By 1918, after the Russian Revolution, Repin was an old man. He saw that Russia was dead. He emigrated to Finland where he died.

In the spring of 1921, a great famine in the Ukraine (The Povolzhye Famine) brought about by drought, the ravages of WWI, and intentional mismanagement by the Bolsheviks, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 5 million Ukrainians.

The new communist government accepted millions of dollars in foreign aid, especially from the United States. However, Lenin, Molotov, and Stalin used the famine as an excuse to enrich the coffers of the Communist Party and to seize property from the Russian Orthodox Church. As for the Ukrainians, they resorted to eating their pets and then their children to stay alive.

By the end of the year 1921, Repin had completed this large painting which he entitled Golgotha. In the painting we are brought to the site of the Crucifixion: a washed-out flood plain in post-WWI Ukraine; trash fires and smoke in the distance; devoid of human activity. A bloodied cross lies on the ground. We are to presume that the body of one of the crucified thieves has been taken off, no doubt to be cannibalized. Starving dogs lick the blood of the dead off the wood and dirt. But these dogs are no more evil than the cannibalizing Ukrainians! (What have we dogs ever done to deserve such reproach?) They too – we, too – will soon become food for another.

Repin’s painting haunts the memory. My Dad remembers it, since it was and still remains on display at his college Art Museum. Looking at it made him feel sick. In its ugliness Golgotha warns humanity: The only food of value to the starving, whether human or dog, or to a human race which starves for justice, is the Bread of Life who hangs upon a cross. Without God, Man is but Satan’s instrument. Proclaimed in sober blotches of paint, Our Lord speaks to us:

My Kingdom is not of this world.