The New Year is an occasion to reflect and make resolutions – to ask ourselves if we are on the right path.
Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance offers a quiet visual parable for this moment. In the book I cited last week, Andrew Graham-Dixon suggests the woman represents Mary, sister of Martha, weighing not gold but her own conscience. Behind her is a painting of The Last Judgement.
As we face another new year of war, polarisation and distrust, we need reflection beyond personal self-improvement. We need to pose the question Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky put to his fellow Ukrainians: How can we put our house in order?
Sheptytsky is someone I was introduced to last August while visiting Kyiv. Not in person unfortunately. He died in November 1944. He had lived through the First and Second World Wars, and the Holodomor during Stalin’s reign of terror, when Moscow starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the 1930s. He was the Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Orthodox church which straddles the spiritual faultline of the Great Schism by relating to Rome. He was seen to be the most influential figure in the entire history of the Ukrainian Church in the twentieth century.
Writing amid the upheavals of empire, war, and national rebirth, Sheptytsky insisted that lasting renewal began with personal conversion, not with institutions alone. A society cannot be healed, he argued, if its citizens refused to examine their own hearts. Moral decay at the top was sustained by moral indifference below. Before demanding justice from others, we must ask whether we live justly ourselves.
Quiet architecture
For Sheptytsky, this inner ordering radiates outward. The health of a nation rests on the health of its families, and that rests on the integrity of persons. Truthfulness, fidelity, restraint, and responsibility are not private virtues; they are the quiet architecture of public life. When homes are ruled by fear, dishonesty, or neglect, the state will eventually reflect the same disorders.
Self-examination does not mean withdrawal from the world. On the contrary, Sheptytsky warned that piety divorced from social responsibility becomes a betrayal of faith. Justice, mercy, and humility—echoing the ancient words of the prophet Micah—must shape economic life, political decisions, and the way power is exercised. Compassion without justice sentimentalises suffering; justice without mercy hardens into cruelty; humility without courage slips into passivity.
Soul-searching must also extend to our political choices. Some of us may have supported or voted for leaders because they promised to restore what was broken in society but who in practice have pursued policies marked by discrimination, habitual falsehood, abuse of human rights, self-enrichment, vengeance and contempt for justice and truth. Yet instead of prophetic witness and repentance, we have seen silence, rationalisation, or outright defence of behaviour that stands in stark tension with biblical norms. We have seen widespread reluctance to name moral failure in political leadership—particularly when that leadership promises our group power, protection, or cultural advantage. This absence of repentance for the support of such rulers is striking.
Spirituality and meaning
Sheptytsky respected authority but refused to sanctify it. Leaders, he insisted, are servants of the common good, not its owners. Citizens, whether believers or not, therefore have both the right and the duty to hold power to account—peacefully, truthfully, and persistently. Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality; it is complicity. A Christianity that blesses power while refusing to call it to repentance risks becoming chaplain to the very abuses it once resisted. When evangelical leaders demand repentance from society but exempt those they support politically, the credibility of their witness erodes.
Soul-searching of another sort is what Robert Schuman called for when he said the European project must not just be economic and technological – it needed a soul. Jacques Delors, when president of the European Commission, called religious leaders to search for Europe’s soul, i.e. spirituality and meaning – without which he warned the game would be over. We sense a new focus for us in the Schuman Centre this year, on the challenge these two Fathers of Europe left us: the search for Europe’s soul. In particular with Ukraine as a laboratory for us all. What will it mean to rebuild that war-torn nation on spiritual and moral foundations?
As we step into this new year, soul-searching is not a luxury. It is a necessity. It asks uncomfortable questions of us as individuals, as families, and as nations. Are we building communities, or retreating into tribes? Are we demanding integrity from our leaders while excusing its absence in ourselves?
Sheptytsky believed that even in the darkest times, moral renewal was possible—if people were willing to begin where they stood. This year, may we put our own house in order, and in doing so, help lay foundations of justice, mercy, humility and truth sturdy enough for the year ahead.
Till next week,
