A Slice of Life

 

The wonderful month of May is coming to an end. I wondered if I would be able to write a blog post this month. My goal was to finish a translation from German to English; the longest translation I have had in all my years of translation work Fortunately it was neatly typed and I didn't have to resort to using a magnifying glass or dealing with the old Gothic alphabet. What I wasn't expecting was the emotional toll it had on me. These were memories of people who had been forced into exile by the Communist government in Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Their properties were confiscated and they were sent north to perform forced labour under unimaginable conditions. The stories are horrendous. How anyone survived and lived to tell about it is a mystery to me! My distant relative, who also shares my name, did a marvelous job by travelling to Germany, encouraging her relatives to write them and then collecting these stories. I hope that my translation will remind her grandchildren to work for peace. 

Elfriede gifted me with this basket of flowers as a thank you, besides paying me for my work. 

Whenever I look at them I will remember those suffering even today by being sent into exile. My family narrowly escaped that fate in October 1943, the year I was born.

 On May 26 I celebrated my 83 birthday with my four sisters and my family. I am thankful...for having escaped the ravages of war, for my health, for my children and grandchildren, for peace...praying for peace...

A lovely home made card from my granddaughter

My wonderful neighbours had left flowers on my doorstep when I came home from celebrating with my sisters. They are originally from Ukraine like I am. 

 

Friends came for lunch the day after my birthday with well wishes and flowers. We marveled at how far we have come  and how the time has flown by so rapidly since our days at Canadian Mennonite Bible College.

Joy and sadness are so intertwined, especially it seems in the senior years. Below is a photo from my kitchen calendar. It is a birthday calendar my daughter, Christine, designed with photos of family members on the month on which they were born, posing in an outhouse at the cottage where we spend a week each summer. Below is the photo for May. That is the month my son in law, Bryan, and I have birthdays. He  will be 54 at the end of this month and I just turned 83. We had no idea when we happily posed for this picture what the next year held in store for us. Unfortunately, cancer has invaded his body. 

Joy and sorrow go hand in hand and it's difficult to know how to hold them together. My dad had a favorite saying when we girls couldn't stop laughing. Nach dem Lachen kommt das Weinen. Trsl: After laughing follows weeping. I have found that to be true in my life many times!

A few days ago I attended a memorial service for a beloved professor, Waldemar Janzen, who taught me and many others Old Testament and German. He lived 93 years, the last few with dementia. In the bulletin was a German poem written by Eduard Moerike. Below is my translation:

In Him the beginning

Who moves moon and sun

On the blue tent of Heaven!

You, Father, advise me,

Lead Thou and guide me,

Lord, in Your hands

Is beginning and ending!

 

Easter Joy

 

Good Friday comes first, and then Easter. Lent is the time set aside for grieving, and it takes a good amount of time. We have to go through the whole process in order to heal, in order to regain our joy. Donna Ashworth, in her poem Before and After says it so well:

You may find that you begin 

to measure your life

before 

and after

they left 

and that's ok. Just be sure

whatever you do

whatever tiny grain of strength

you have left

that you strive

to fill up the after

as richly

and as beautifully

as they helped you fill 

the before.

The before

is committed to memory now

but the after

is totally up to you 

Make it count

Mary Magdalene did that. She went grieving, to embalm the body of Jesus, to do what little she could to make life bearable again, and she found joy when she met the risen Lord. As did I at our Easter church service where we decorated the cross with flowers. Below is our pastor and a little girl pinning flowers on the cross.

At home I found joy by doing small things. I decorated an Easter tree by hanging little Easter ornaments on my orange tree. 

After our Easter family supper we played a favorite game but used Easter egg candy instead of marbles! That was fun, especially when I could not always distinguish the green color from the blue!

The gift of beautiful flowers is always a cause for joy!

A special Easter greeting , was this photo the little girl on the right sent me. Her father was the linguist with whom Hardy worked  to translate the Bible into Kikongo, a trade language in Congo. She is grown up now with children of her own, but has fond memories of Hardy staying with them. This photo was taken two years before he returned from Congo and we got married, and went back for another 15 years.

A Breath of Fresh Air

My monthly blog post did not happen in February and March is well on its way! We are in the season of Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday on February 18 and ending April 2nd. The first Sunday in Lent I delivered a sermon on the raising of Lazarus. The week before that, I attended the memorial service of a dear friend. The news daily reported the atrocities of war, the killing and maiming of children, the grief stricken wailing of their parents...These were weeks of once more visiting the island of grief...I reminded myself that lent is all about remembering and grieving and that spring would come soon. But it didn't want to come soon enough... 

Then came a lovely reprieve. My daughter and I attended an intercultural art exhibit at Canadian Mennonite University. Four artists, from four different cultures displayed their work together. It was so refreshing to see different people from different cultures sharing their work. Ray Dirks(on the right of the photo below)and his wife, Katy, spent several years in Congo when we were there, and Ray has travelled to several other places since, meeting and appreciating artists of various cultures.

Four artists, from four different cultures

 

         Tibba: Three Pillars of Sikhism

 Lodha: Prayer for Saving the Environment          

Ray Dirks

The painting by Ray Dirks, above, was not part of the exhibit. My daughter was thrilled to find it in one of the Thrift stores in Ontario! I told Ray about it and he chuckled as he said, "my art work turns up in the strangest places!"

Gareth Brandt combines art and history in this wonderful book. The foreword is written by John E. Sharp, whose son, Michael, spent the last years of his life in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was abducted and killed at age 34, while working in the Congo. My heart ached when I read this. 

Two modern Anabaptists on a wild ride!

When our grandchildren were younger they thought their grandparents were quite courageous to do this! 

At times our life resembled such a plunge!

This year marks 25 years since I received my PhD from the University of Waterloo, another reason to celebrate!

My daughter looked up her father's name on ChatGPT and I was surprised at how accurate the information was! My favorite lines:

Schroeder's work is characterized by a "quiet tenacity" and a deep commitment to bridging cultural and linguistic divides through religious and historical texts.

I end with a quote by Paul J Wadell from his book Becoming Friends:

"Human beings are inherently and inescapably social beings who need to live in deep, intimate, enriching relationship with others...Through such relationships we grow as human beings and are drawn out of ourselves..."

"Ring Out, Wild Bells"

 The title of this blog post is from the poem "In Memoriam", written nearly 150 years ago by English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. He began the poem at a time of personal grief, having lost his best friend, Arthur Hallam, very suddenly and unexpectedly. The crisis, experienced in his young adulthood became a test of his faith and forced him to come to terms with it. Tennyson's life spanned a time of social and political upheaval and he spent a lifetime  writing the poem. Plagued by doubts, Tennyson focused on the reality of human love as evidence of a higher reality.

It seems we are living at a time of social and political upheaval as well. The Liberty Bell has a crack. 

The Philadelphia Public Ledger carried the following story on February 26, 1846:

"The old Independence Bell rang its last clear note on Monday last in honor of the birthday of Washington and now hangs in the great city steeple irreparably cracked and dumb. It had been cracked before but was set in order that day...It gave out clear notes and loud, and appeared to be in excellent condition until noon, when it received a sort of compound fracture ...which put it completely out of tune  and left it a mere wreck of what it was."

To me, that liberty bell is symbolic. I am reminded of a quote from Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem":

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." I am praying for the light to get in there!

In a recent article in the Winnipeg Free Press entitled "Truth and trust: necessary but elusive"" John R. Wiens writes that "truth is essential for trust, and both are critical to democracy....it seems to me that real trust between people is impossible without a commitment to mutual respect and reciprocal truthfulness." 

That is the ideal I hope for. We are humans and we are flawed and all of us have difficulty living up to the "ideals of truth and trust" but let us not be like the Liberty Bell, giving in to what is happening and remaining silent bystanders.