Risen Indeed !

Just before Easter, a little boy wanders from the backyard on their farm. After several days of searching, in which the whole community is involved, his body is found in a nearby creek. His parents are heartbroken, their grief etched on their bewildered faces. Their community grieves with them.

Just before Easter, my daughter's friend, who has three small children, is given only weeks to live. She spends the Easter weekend at home, surrounded by her children and her husband, all saying their farewells, basking in love that should have been distributed over many years and is now concentrated in one weekend. Their church community brings them food and also cleans their house so that the family can be together as much as possible.

Just before Easter, two people my age, whom I have known all my life, pass away. These are not sudden deaths, but rather deaths caused by lingering illness. We all knew that death would be imminent, but when it happened it was still a shock. They will never again hug their grandchildren nor see those yet unborn.

Just before Easter, Jesus visits his dear friends in Bethany: Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. The sisters greet him with tears streaming down their faces. Their beloved brother has died. Jesus himself is so moved at their sorrow that he too begins to weep, even though he knows it is not the end of the story. He tries to tell them, but they don't understand.

The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt) by Vincent van Gogh, 1890

(Van Gogh died at age 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.)

Death seems especially threatening when we, as young children, become aware that all of us will die, and again when we get older and realize our days are numbered. In between these times, we live as though death doesn't exist, until someone close to us dies and we are shocked into awareness.

I just finished reading a book written by Sue Klebold, a woman who was especially traumatized when her teenage son committed both murder and suicide. The book is called A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy. Sue's son, Dylan, was one of the two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 who killed 13 people before ending his own life. Klebold's journey is difficult to read, but it made me aware of how we rally to victims and how we condemn perpetrators and their families.

 

How do we deal with death? In each of the instances I mentioned, the community stands beside those personally affected and grieves with them. Even Sue Klebold, the mother of the perpetrator, had people who stood by her in her darkest hours. Mary and Martha had their community too, but they longed for Jesus; he gave their brother back to them.

I am comforted by a passage in the Gospel of Luke (20.34-38) where Jesus speaks of the afterlife to some Sadducees who tried to trick him. About those who have passed from this life Jesus says, "They will be like angels and cannot die. They are the children of God, because they have risen from death.  . . .  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of the living, not of the dead, for to him all are alive."

Christ has risen, and so we shall rise …

The day will come when there will be a remade universe  . . .  when we can do all things, when we shall be those gods that we are described as being in Scripture. To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.                                                 -- C. S. Lewis (in Watch for the Light)

"Heimweh"

The German word for homesickness is Heimweh, which translated literally means hurting for home. In English we are homesick. Our longing for home makes us sick.

My first experience with homesickness happened when I was nine years old and my family left our home in Paraguay to find a new home in Canada. The world as I knew it until then consisted of a small village of 30 adobe straw-thatched houses, 15 on each side of a dirt road. In the middle of the village was the school which served as a church on Sundays. That small village called Einlage (named after a village the refugees remembered from Russia) was the only home I knew. Hacked from the jungle by a people dispersed and longing for home, it was a mute testimony of courage, strength, and resilience. I remember every family that lived in that village. (Gerhard Ratzlaff's book Vater Abram includes a chart with the name of each household; almost half of them were headed by widows.)

Country bumpkin that I was, my world cracked wide open on that trip to Canada. I got a crash course on river boats, airplanes, automobiles, trains, cities, hotels, elevators, white bread, spicy soup, and chiclet gum! All this was very exciting but also confusing. I missed the soft and familiar Plautdietsch we spoke at home. I missed our little village school and my friends. I missed the hymns we sang on Sundays. For a while I was sad, but within a year or two I had almost forgotten because there were so many new things to learn.

Our family moved to a small town in Alberta (Didsbury), close to my grandmother and her siblings who had emigrated from Russia in the 1920s and farmed in the area. We lived there until I finished high school, eleven years after we arrived in Canada. Following graduation, my father persuaded me to go to Winnipeg and move in with relatives (whom I didn't know!). He suggested I look for a job there; the family would follow within a year.

Although I loved my job (in a small Christian bookstore), homesickness hit me full force that year. I did not love being with my relatives and moved out after six months, renting a room in a house across the street from a colleague at work. This woman was very kind to me and I usually spent Saturdays with her family, but I did feel lonely on the weekends, especially on Sundays. I think it was the longest year of my life, even though I had the opportunity to go home twice that year, once by bus and once with friends. During my absence, my little brothers had grown taller than me and my friends had also left home. I was delighted when my sister joined me in Winnipeg a year later after graduating from high school. In summer my family moved to Winnipeg and we all crowded into a small bungalow in North Kildonan. It felt like home and I was happy again.

 

Catalano Bruno's "Noémie"

I never again experienced homesickness to the degree I did that year in Winnipeg, away from my family and friends. In 1969 my husband and I left for Africa and that became our home for almost twenty years. We had little access to the outside world, and in many ways that experience can be compared to my life in Paraguay. Ours was a simple lifestyle and we depended on the people living around us for emotional support, practical advice, and help when needed. I missed my family, but not with that terrible ache in my gut. I always looked for someone to replace my mother, but no one could ever quite fill that void. We returned to Canada every three years for a few months during that time and I got my fill of parental indulgence.

In 1984 we moved back to Canada and, although we originally thought we would be living in Winnipeg, Hardy was invited to join the United Bible Societies Americas Translations team which happened to have its offices in the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario. There I finally fulfilled my dream of higher education at the University of Waterloo. Still far from where my parents lived, we did see each other once a year.

In 2008, several years after Hardy's retirement, we moved again -- this time back to Winnipeg where our daughters and their families had by now made their homes. My father passed away in 2005 and my mother died early in 2008, just before we moved.
We will not move again! We discovered that it takes much longer for seniors to adjust to new places and make new friends. We still miss Ontario and the many friends we have there. We go back once a year because one of our daughters and her husband returned to Ontario with their four children (half of our grandchildren!). When we do that, I always ask Hardy to remind me again just why did we leave Ontario? Some people we know call Ontario "God's Country" but I've heard Altona (Manitoba) called that as well (seriously!).

Homesickness is a force to be reckoned with. That is why it is called a "sickness." It is a longing so profound that you can actually become ill from it. I think it usually has less to do with the place you leave behind, and more with the people who are no longer with you, although both play a part. You can long for a place with an ache in your heart, but if your family left it with you and are surrounding you, the place gradually becomes a pleasant memory, something you recall fondly, even to the point of embellishment.
I sometimes wonder what it will be like to leave this world, the only home I have known, and return to the true home from which I came.


"I do believe that we come from God and are returning to God, but we need a softening of the heart in order to see again and find our way home. I know of no way for hearts to be softened other than by a combination of love and suffering."   -- Ruth Patterson

Wounds, Scars, and a Broken Heart

Last night I had a dream in which someone gently touched the scars on my body and asked me why they were there. I replied, "Life gave them to me."

Most people who reach the age of seventy will carry a few visible scars as well as many not seen by the naked eye. Today I reflect on the visible scars and how they might be representative of the emotional scars I carry. They are evidence of both the pain and also the joy I have experienced in my life.

I received my first physical wound before I was a year old, but I have no recollection of the event that left a big raised scar. My mother told me the story.
I was four months old when our family fled Ukraine in October 1943. Our train took us to Poland and from there we made our way into Germany. To keep the infants safe from communicable diseases, the directors at our first camp had a rule that all children under a year must be housed in a separate building, where they were looked after by women hired for that purpose. Each baby was also allotted a supply of nourishing formula. The mothers were allowed to care for their babies during the day but at night they had to leave the building. None of the mothers liked this arrangement. They were accustomed to hold their babies close and nurse them on demand.

My mother and I are in the second row, fourth from the right.

One day as my mother came to see me, a caregiver had placed me under a heating lamp because I had a sore on my left buttock. (The diapers were probably not being changed often enough.) She asked my mother to take over while she went to attend to another chore. Unfortunately, the lamp was too close to my skin, and before my mother realized it I received a big burn. She felt terrible about this and blamed herself more than she did the caregiver who should not have left someone inexperienced in charge.

This scar is my battle scar, a reminder that pain is often beyond my control. I had no choice in the decision to be separated from my mother before I should have been. The emotional scars from that time are not visible but I have a physical scar to prove it. 

I have some scars on my abdomen. They are the result of three C-sections. These scars remind me that joy can be a companion to pain. When I see them, I remember how badly I wanted to have a baby after losing our first child and that I considered the physical pain and discomfort of the surgery worth the joy of having another child.

A third scar is midway between wrist and elbow of my right arm. It is a reminder that pain is sacrificial and worth enduring quietly for friendship's sake. Friends from Ontario had dropped in for a visit with their three boys and I was somewhat in a hurry. I burned myself while reaching into the stove to rescue some grilled cheese sandwiches that were in danger of sliding off the pan. It was a painful burn but I ran cold water over it and didn't mention it to anyone.

I'm in the process of reading a two-volume biographical novel by Hedy Leonora Martens: Favoured Among Women and To and From Nowhere, the true story of Greta Enns. Greta, a Mennonite living during the turbulent times of Stalin's Russia (1941-1976), carried many more scars than I was called to bear, both physical and emotional. She first lost her beloved husband Heinrich, who was imprisoned and never heard from again. Then she and her children were sent north to Kazakhstan, in the middle of winter, where they laboured under the most harrowing of circumstances.

Greta's courage leaves me reeling, especially when I think how close our own family came to experiencing a similar fate. I can only be thankful.

I am grateful to Martens for the meticulous research she did in bringing the plight of these women to our attention. My father's siblings had comparable experiences when they were sent back to Russia after WWII. We did not get the details of those stories, although some of my cousins, now resettled in Germany, have told us bits and pieces. 

The visible scars on our bodies are just a small indication of the emotional wounds we carry from the traumas life brings us. They remind me of Richard Rohr's words:

Your heart needs to be broken and broken open at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.

Planting in January

One of my favourite Christmas presents is a perpetual calendar in a little cardboard box that contains a card for every day of the month with just one word on it. I love this because it gives me some direction and focus. For example, the word "praise" kept me from being critical and actually changed the way the day went for both me and my husband. 

The word for today is "plant." What? This is January in Manitoba and the deep frost has hit us. Plant what? Out there?

I think about it ...  I guess I wouldn't have to take it so literally. I could plant my feet in the snow and go for a nice brisk walk. Or it could be an indication for me to plant an idea and watch it sprout and grow. 

I'm reminded of Jesus' parable in the Gospels in which a sower sowed seed by the wayside, on rocky ground, and among thorns, and the seed was lost. But when the seed fell on good earth it grew -- yielding thirty-, sixty-, and a hundredfold. Jesus told them about the mustard seed which is the smallest of all seeds and yet grows to become the greatest of all shrubs. Jesus took an illustration from the daily life of the people to whom he spoke and gave it a deeper meaning. The stories he told were simple stories yet had profound meaning about change and growth. He was a master storyteller.

An excellent tool to help people on their way to spiritual and mental growth is the Enneagram. I first learned about the Enneagram in 2008, when we moved to Manitoba from Ontario. The main idea of the Enneagram is that we develop an illusionary self in the first half of our lives. The Enneagram helps us to unmask this illusionary self so that we can become our true selves. Lately, I have been thinking and reading about the Enneagram again. Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert first published The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective in 1989 (in German: Das Enneagram: Die 9 Gesichter der Seele). The English translation of the revised and expanded German edition was published in 2001. This is an excellent resource, if you are interested.

My sisters and I receive daily Enneagram messages electronically. They remind us of changes we need to make so that we can discover who we truly are. In order to be more transparent and accountable, we share our messages with each other. This is a growing experience for each of us.

"We are not human beings on a journey toward Spirit, we are already spiritual beings on a journey toward becoming fully human, which for some reason seems harder precisely because it is so ordinary."  [Richard Rohr]

Peace on Earth

Our humanity is what we have in common but our cultural heritage is a gift each of us is given at birth. And unless we embrace that gift and value the power it is meant to bring to our lives, we cannot realize our full potential.  (Mary-Ann Kirkby)

As I began decorating the tree this Christmas, I wondered where the magic of that childhood joy I used to feel had gone. A German Christmas carol we always sang at this time of year when I was growing up took hold of me and wouldn't let go. I started humming the tune and got stuck on the words. On impulse, I googled it and up came a beautiful rendition of Alle Jahre wieder, taking me right back to those wonderful days. Not only that carol, but many others, one after another, appeared automatically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOuRLRszIcc

I realized what a great gift my mother had given us by singing these songs with us, and I got my Christmas magic back again as I listened to the carols one after another, singing along in joyous abandon!  I remembered how we used to gather around a table on which my mother had placed a small Advent house with a candle inside. The light of the candle shone through the parchment paper windows of the little house. The house had 24 windows and one door. These represented the days before Christmas and the day we opened the door, it was Christmas. Each window had a Scripture verse printed on it and if we memorized it we received some kind of Christmas treat (candy, cookie, or an orange). Treats were few and far between in those days; we were refugees and had just arrived from a war-torn country to finally join our relatives in Canada (October 1952).

I still have that authentic Advent house. It is well used. The inside is blackened with smoke from many candles and some of the shutters of the windows are missing. The sides are taped together. On a trip to Europe a few years ago, I saw one just like it in a museum in Husum (northern Germany). They told me there were none available for purchase.

Although I have many positive memories of my first Christmas in Canada, I do recall one rather painful experience. We had dutifully memorized some Christmas recitations (in German) like we did every year, but when we recited them at the local Mennonite church Christmas program no one clapped. We were met with a wall of silence. We didn't know it at the time, but the church had recently decided not to use German in their worship services. It was the language associated with the war and identified us as the enemy. For years I suffered from stage fright because of this incident.

In Canada, many refugees will be experiencing Christmas for the first time this year and next. I wonder how we can make this a time of joyful remembrance for them in spite of all the sadness they have gone through. We hope they will soon adapt and enjoy the freedom their new home country offers. Acculturation will happen gradually but that time of adaptation will be very crucial to their well-being. In the meantime we want to affirm, accept, and embrace together with them their family traditions and their way of life. 

I have been reading a fascinating book about a refugee who defected to America in 1967. Her name is Svetlana Alliluyeva. She is Stalin's daughter. Here is an excerpt from the book jacket:

Born in 1926, Svetlana Alliluyeva spent her youth inside the Kremlin as her father's power soared. Eighty-five years later, she died alone and penniless in rural Wisconsin. Revealed here for the first time, the many lives of Josef Stalin's daughter form a riveting portrait of a woman who fled halfway around the world to escape her birthright.

In the Kremlin Svetlana had lived a privileged existence, compared to that of the starving masses (including our family) created by her father's ruthless regime. Her life was much like that of the average American--a comfortable home, good schooling, summer cottage vacations, etc. However, Svetlana was not immune to tragedy. She lost her mother to suicide, and her father's merciless purges claimed relatives as well as her lover who was exiled to Siberia. When she defected, she left her two young adult children behind.

Svetlana searched all her life for the kind of world described by the prophet Isaiah in the passage below, a time when the whole world will be at peace:

                               The wolf will live with the lamb,

                               the leopard will lie down with the young goat;

                               the calf and the lion will eat from the same trough
                               and a little child will lead them.

                               The cow and the bear will graze in the same pasture;

                               their young will lie down in peace

                               and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

                               Even a baby will not be harmed if it plays near a poisonous snake.

                               Neither animal nor human will hurt or kill on Zion, God's holy mountain.

                               The whole earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
                               as the waters cover the sea.

                                                                                                           (Isaiah 11.6-9, alt.)

My challenge for 2016 is to work at keeping Isaiah's vision alive!

Kairos Time

It was nearing the end of October and I was getting the winter blahs. Because the fall season seemed to last longer this year than other years, it was even more difficult to accept the fact that we would soon be enveloped in snow and ice. Those of you who have experienced winters in Manitoba know what I mean!

To top it all off, my husband Hardy had just been diagnosed with a mysterious illness called cold agglutinin disease. This is an autoimmune reaction to cold temperatures in which the blood's antibodies begin to destroy red blood cells, causing anemia. Although
we lived in the tropics many years, Hardy loves to go outside in winter and actually enjoys shoveling snow. The doctor's advice: go south for the winter and absolutely no snow shoveling!

That created a spark of joy in me, but it didn't last long. Hardy was reluctant to accept
this advice; he couldn't entertain the idea of someone else doing the snow shoveling.
How could we afford to go south every winter and  pay someone to shovel our snow?!
I concluded glumly that I would end up doing the snow shoveling and Hardy would stay indoors, something neither of us would enjoy very much.

Reflecting on the implications of all of this at breakfast that morning, I glanced out the window of our kitchen and from the corner of my eye I saw something bright blue against our drab grey fence. It was a surprise I had not anticipated.
(Several years ago I had purchased a small plant called monkshood and placed it against the fence in our back yard. It grew tall and spindly but never bloomed. I wondered if perhaps I had planted it in the wrong spot. Maybe it needed sun all day long instead of just in the morning.)

Now, after all this time, at the end of October, it was blooming! I couldn't believe my eyes and ran outside to verify what I thought I had seen. Not only was the monkshood in bloom, it also had buds on some of its other branches. How could a plant begin blossoming this late in the season? I thought this was unheard of, so I googled it. I learned that monkshood usually blooms in September. Since this plant had never yet flowered, and since it did so now in late fall, I considered it to be a small miracle sent to cheer me up at a time when I needed it!

On the top right of the photo you can see the yellow leaves of our maple tree, 

proving that this is indeed late autumn.

On the lower left you can see a few more flowers and the lower right shows some buds forming.

A blogger friend, with whom I shared this experience, called it a happening in "kairos time" instead of in "chronos time." (The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens.)

We are now into November and all the flowers have gone, except the monkshood. It is a reminder to me that even at the bleakest moments in my life there is hope, if only I allow myself to see it and grasp it.

PS:  I almost forgot to mention that I also learned that monkshood is a very poisonous plant ... !

Kindness is Kindness in Any Language

Recently, while attending a reading at the McNally Robinson Booksellers, I had a chance encounter with someone whose parents we remember well from our time in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). He told me that his father had written a memoir. I was not aware of this and asked if there were still any copies available. The following week I found the book in my church mailbox. Eagerly I began to read In Search of Identity: The Life and Times of Peter J. Kroeker. A large section of the book describes the family's work in Africa. Since their time overlapped with ours, I found this part of Peter's memoir especially intriguing. What I remember most about Peter and Ruth is their kindness and gentleness, particularly toward the Congolese, and how perturbed they were when they saw other expatriates treating the nationals in a demeaning manner.

Peter and Ruth Kroeker and their younger children (1971)

One example of their kindness is described in the book. The home in which the Kroeker family lived during their time in Congo was situated next to a warehouse which was guarded by a Congolese watchman day and night. He had his own little hut on the premises. Every night Ruth would bring him a plate of food and he was very grateful. One day Ruth went to the market to buy bananas. Just as she was about to pay for them, someone behind her handed her some coins. It was the night watchman. Another time he brought a fresh pineapple to their home. Ruth did not refuse these gifts as she realized the value of reciprocal giving. The night watchman and Ruth did not know each other's language; their common language was kindness. As her son Mark writes in the memoir, "Kindness is kindness in any language."

This story reminded me of an experience I had in our first years in Congo. We lived on the second floor of a two-storey apartment building on the main street of the provincial town of Kikwit. Below us was the mission bookstore and the Bible translation office where my husband worked with his team of translators. The children and I spent a lot of time on our balcony, where we had a good view of the busy life below. Every morning we saw a young boy heading toward the translation office. He had only one leg and used a stick to propel himself along. At the office my husband would give him a coin and he would head off toward the bakery to buy himself a baguette; it was his one sure meal of the day.

One day I was busy with the baby when I noticed my two-year-old daughter was missing. I looked everywhere in the apartment and couldn't find her. Could she have slipped out the door and down the stairs unnoticed? She would have to maneuver quite a few steps. Glancing down from the balcony, I couldn't believe my eyes. There on the sidewalk, in front of my husband's office, sat the young boy with the baguette. Beside him was our little girl and in her pudgy hands she held half of the baguette. Both were munching away, eating their breakfast and enjoying each other's company. That young boy taught me something about generosity. We gave from our plenty; he gave from the little he had, probably his only meal of the day!

We don't always realize how far-reaching a small act of kindness can be. This became evident to us just recently. We received an e-mail from a person we had not heard from for over twenty years. Kanga was a Congolese teenager who liked to hang out at our house. He came almost every day for several years. He was eager to help with chores such as gardening, building a tree house for the girls, running errands, etc. We assisted him in small ways with food, a daily shower, and other needs he might have.

In his e-mail, Kanga thanked us profusely for what we had done for him. He told us that, because he had spent so much time with us, he had had the opportunity to learn English. (I never heard him speak a word of English, neither did he ever request an English lesson from me!) Following our return to Canada, he applied to work at the American School of Kinshasa (TASOK) and was accepted because of his English skills. He went on to get a teaching degree and was hired by expatriates from India and Pakistan. He credited us for his success in life. We had no idea!

Looking back at my own life, I recognize simple acts of kindness that made a big difference to my well-being. As new immigrants to Canada, my parents worked hard to feed and clothe their eight children. My father worked nights at a dairy and we had no vehicle. Winters were very cold and we had a half-hour walk to school.

Our neighbours offered us a ride to school. Whenever the temperatures dipped below zero, four of us went to their house and stood in the hallway waiting until they had finished their breakfast; then we crowded into their car, almost on top of each other. Their kitchen, with its combination of cigarette smoke and pancakes and bacon, smelled nothing like our house!  [I didn't know moms were allowed to smoke, and at our house we always had porridge for breakfast. Pancakes were for lunch or supper and, on the rare occasion that we had meat other than liver, it would have been for Sunday dinner!]

Another family, who did not even live in town, offered us a ride to church every Sunday and sometimes my sister and I were invited to their house on the farm after church. We got a ride back with them in time for evening services. We felt so privileged to be part of their lives. Their farm house was probably quite ordinary but to us it seemed rich and beautiful. Their daughter had a bedroom all to herself and she had so many toys! And for evening snack we had hot chocolate with marshmallows!

The customs and habits of these Canadians were different from ours, but it was their kindness that remains with me. 

The Syrian refugee crisis we hear about in the news these days brings with it so much sadness and heartache. It is easy to become overwhelmed, to throw up our hands and say, "What can we possibly do in the face of such calamitous events?" 

Mother Theresa says it well: "Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love."