I HAVE in my chapel a Russian icon. It shows two monks standing in prayer and guarding a monastery with towers, domes and churches, surrounded by a massive fortress wall. The two monks are Savvatii and Zosima, who in the 1430s, along with another monk, German, founded a little monastic community on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea which was to become the northernmost of Russia’s great monasteries, and a centre from which the Christian faith was spread and renewed.

Pilgrims made the hard journey north to the holy place where Savvatii and Zosima were buried, which, by the 16th century, included the great cathedral of the Transfiguration towering over the rest of the monastery and a beacon for boats approaching over the often treacherous White Sea.

In 1921 Solovki itself was closed and the monastery, damaged by fire, became one of the terrible gulags of Stalin’s regime. Intellectuals, priests and foreigners, lumped together with criminals; 850 were crammed into the ruined cathedral, stacked like firewood, in damp and cold, and with the stench of rubbish and excrement. Lice, bugs and vermin abounded. Where the altar once was hung a portrait of Lenin and the words, “We are showing mankind a new road.” The minority of women prisoners were subjected to sexual abuse by the guards. Putrid food, torture by being exposed naked to mosquitoes in the summer, frostbite in winter, forced labour in logging, or digging the White Sea-Baltic canal in which tens of thousands perished — for two decades this gulag of evil and torture replaced the monastic life of prayer.

Today the gulag has gone, the cathedral is being gloriously restored, and a new monastic community lives in Solovki. It is a place of pilgrimage again, and this summer I made my own pilgrimage to it, journeying from Moscow to a holy and powerful place, the place of prayer and transfiguration founded by two monks seeking God in the desert of woods and lakes in the north, and a place of memory of human suffering, torture and martyrdom.

At the heart of the Christian understanding of God is the faith that the God who allows human beings made in his image the freedom that is necessary for them to love, is the one who in love enters into the darkness and evil that such freedom also permits. Crucfixion/Resurrection is the deep inner rhythm of the life in Christ which is at the heart of the Church. Solovki which seemed annihilated and crushed by the tortures of the gulag is now a place of resurrection, of hope born out of an incredible despair.

Somewhere this resurrection faith, to which Solovki is a standing witness, touches the terrible darkness and evil of Beslan, a very ordinary Ossetian town which I passed through once on a journey from Georgia. Innocent children, teachers, families broken-hearted and grieving, caught in a web of evil and destruction — the scenes we have witnessed will haunt all of us.

There are no easy answers to this problem of evil, no way to live in the face of it, except the way of that deep conversion which is repentance, a turning away from darkness and evil, to the resurrection life of new creation. The cost and victory of God’s love in the Cross of Christ, which next Tuesday the Church will celebrate on Holy Cross Day, is where we see the God who stands alongside us, and enters into our human suffering, in a gulag in the White Sea or in a school gymnasium in Beslan. “Out of the deep have I called to you, O Lord — Lord, hear my voice!” “If I go down to Hell, you are there also.” “Nothing can separate us from the love of God” for, as the Russian church sings on Easter night: “Christ is risen! and the demons are fallen.”

It is this faith alone which is the source of our hope, and the kindling of our love. Without this there is only the continual rekindling of a cycle of hatred and violence, creating that web or axis of evil which can only divide and destroy. Easter faith and resurrection life point us to that goal of our human life together, which is shalom, the deepest peace and communion, the life of the city of God, which is by grace God’s gift to us.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe