This year, the three major faiths marked their holiest days celebrating Easter, Passover and Ramadan. For the observant, it is a time to reflect on their lives, families, friends and neighbors.

Here in this region of the world my sainted mother-in-law calls “God’s Pocket,” we watched the forsythia start to turn from a scraggly, snarly mess into a glorious spray of golden sunshine.

Daffodils and tulips peeked their plucky green noses through the garden mulch, giving us a preview of a cascade of blooms.

We will have flowers if we can convince Bambi not to turn the garden into a salad bar.

Not so for families who live on the other side of the world in a nation called Ukraine. It is a nation that was not even on our radar two months ago.

Once again, the drums of war woke us up, shaking our psyche like a blender mixing fruit, ice, juice and other goodies into a tasty smoothie.

Suddenly, things that consumed our attention seemed petty. I refer to those objecting to wearing masks, and the audacity of our elected leaders ordering us to wear them to protect our family and friends from a deadly pandemic that took the lives of almost one million Americans, seemed sort of petty.

After all, for the first time in memory, our TV sets showed us the horrors of war. Not the Hollywood version of brave, good-looking heroes saving the day and wrapping up victory in a couple of hours.

We saw modern homes, apartments and shopping centers blasted into smoking rubble.

We saw mighty tanks towed away by farmers driving American John Deere tractors. We saw families fleeing their homes as elderly grandfathers and grandmothers tip-toed through the rubble of their neighborhoods.

We saw churchyards dug up for mass graves to bury the bodies of parishioners who would have been celebrating Easter inside the building.

We saw the image of a people fighting to save their homes and towns.

Last week, the Ukrainians fired off a couple of missiles that turned a 600-foot long steel ship, the flagship of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea, into a hunk of metal resting on the bottom of a body of water that may have been created by what the Bible calls the great flood.

Ironically, just two months ago, sailors on that same mighty warship demanded a handful of Ukrainian border guards surrender or risk being killed or captured.

The world was amazed when the guards replied with a derisive obscene comment we all understood even though we don’t speak or understand Ukrainian or Russian.

Then last week, the defiant Ukrainians sent a powerful message back to that ship.

Russian officials denied Ukrainian rockets damaged the ship. They claimed it was an accidental fire that somehow cooked off the ammo locker.

I guess a knucklehead sailor was smoking in a restricted area. Right?

Then the Russians hammered Ukrainian cities in retaliation for the ship disaster. Wonder what they did to the sailor who smoked when the smoking light was off? More than that, I wonder what happened to the guy who drew the short straw and earned the right to inform President V. Putin that his mighty ship was on the bottom.

In retaliation, Putin ordered the Western nations and the USA to cease sending weapons to Ukraine. If not, he warned, something bad might happen.

This time, the Ukrainians and their allies didn’t shoot back with an obscene statement of defiance. Instead, they defied his orders as huge transports unloading millions of dollars worth of heavy weapons did the talking for them.

No one knows what will be next. All of us worry about the next chapter.

Whether by accident or on purpose, in the next months, the Ukrainian situation could explode into a major world war.

If that happens, maybe, just maybe, it will silence the loudmouths on the right and the left who seek to divide our country for their political gain.