Category: Forgiveness

A Christmas Wish List for My Readers

On By ednafroeseIn Beauty, Christmas, Connection, Forgiveness, possibilityLeave a comment

Writing a blog, which I’ve done for almost four years now, is a lonely affair. I’m not complaining, since writing is almost always a lonely pursuit. Every now and then, though, I do think more particularly about my readers and try to imagine where you might live, or what we might talk about if we could have coffee together someplace interesting–in your country or mine.

Writing about Christmas is an additional challenge because of all the designated holidays that I am familiar with, this one has been written about and sung about and indulged in and celebrated more than any other. Surely everything that can be said about Christmas, concerning whichever grand narrative you choose to focus on, has been said – many times over. A wish list, on the other, can be new every year.

Unfortunately, these days the world seems locked into so many conflicts and stupid flirtations with apocalyptic scenarios that the very act of creating a wish list seems frivolous. One could, of course, go big and like one of my grandchildren, add to the list “the moon.” Why not? Why not ask for the utterly unlikely, such as world peace?

Instead, I will retreat as I often do to the small things, for they matter more than we think: it is out of little actions that our habits of mind are formed, and it is out of our habits of mind that we make the big decisions and the crucial speeches that can change the world. Well, our own small spheres at least.

So, the list:

At least once, in the days before and after Christmas, I wish for you the time to watch an entire sunrise, preferably in a place without street lights and power lines. In my part of the world, the days are very short now, and the sun rises after breakfast, as it were. Take a cup of coffee or cocoa with you and watch the subtle first hints of color transform themselves into a blaze of glory. It is always a miracle, especially when the nights have been long and dark.

I wish for you two uninterrupted hours or more in which to curl up in a comfy chair or wide window seat where you can let yourself become utterly absorbed in a good novel. Preferably a classic or a young adult book that will bring you into a world that has a stable moral centre and in which a happy ending can be anticipated.

I wish for you many warm hugs and I-love-you’s. There might be gifts involved as well, but they aren’t that necessary, are they?

I hope that in your home, your office, your favorite hang-out, there are flowering plants. In my world, that’s most likely to be poinsettias, but maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be near a spectacular amaryllis in full bloom. Or maybe where you live, there are gorgeous flowering shrubs outdoors. Let there be someplace where you can smell the earth and savor the complexity of petals with their heavenly tints.

And this last wish might seem perverse or more like an admonition than a wish: I hope that there is at least one opportunity for a phone call or an in-person meeting in which you can say, “I’m sorry,” and be heard and still feel safe. We are none of us faultless. Without a doubt, there are individuals who need to hear an apology that will open up possibilities for better understanding. Christmas inevitably contains some tough stuff; it’s the fall-out, I suspect, from over-wrought expectations of all sorts. I wish for you one interval of time, however brief, in which hope can arise and love increase.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

One Door and Only One

On By ednafroeseIn Choices, Doors, Forgiveness, hopeLeave a comment

              From somewhere in my memory, a fragment of a children’s song from my Sunday School days surfaced, unbidden:

One door, and only one          One door, and only one
And yet its sides are two,         And yet its sides are two,
Inside and outside,                  I’m on the inside,
On which side are you?          On which side are you?

I didn’t remember the rest of the lyrics; this bit might have been all that we sang. A quick internet search, though, revealed other verses, with equally stark choices. “One Lord and only one” offered the “right way [or] wrong way,” and “one Book and only one” put the singers in “the good place or the bad place.” I’m glad that as a child I didn’t sing about the good place and the bad place because I was already plenty worried about place.    

I hadn’t heard the arrogant certainty of the tone, nor had I paid attention to the astonishing gap between that dichotomy of choice and a God whom we believed to be the Creator of a world with mind-blowing variety and breadth. To be clear, the small agricultural community where I grew up, where almost everyone attended church (the choice of two churches was hardly a choice at all with their minimal differences), had given me no real awareness of a vast universe with infinite galaxies and equally infinite complexity in the tiniest clusters of cells. That came later.

Then I had obediently pointed to myself for “I’m on the inside” and to unknown others for “on which side are you?” while trying to stifle the persistent inner fear that I was probably not on the right side of the door.  

 Very likely, the song writer’s intent was to reassure children that all would be well if  they were given clear answers about how the world worked, both now and hereafter. I’m choosing also to assume that the song writer had not considered the long-term consequences of such direct, uncompromising “othering” of everyone who didn’t speak of God in precisely the same way or didn’t even believe in God. After all, this was a simple child’s song, with a very catchy, bouncy tune.  

            The appeal of the door as a metaphor is understandable. A door does indeed have two sides and in a wild rainstorm or a blizzard, the obviously welcoming place is inside. Who, after a long journey, hasn’t arrived to stand at a door and knocked hopefully? When that door is flung open, warmth rushing out to envelope the traveler even before arms offer hugs, all the travails of the journey are forgotten. Then again, another scenario is possible: the house lights are off, the door remains firmly closed.

Doors are, by definition, openings in walls, in buildings, in enclosed gardens, in institutional offices, and so on.  They are a very visible symbol of inclusion and exclusion. They offer a way in, or, if necessary, also a way out.

 When the persistent little ditty of “one door and only one” refused to leave my mind, I began looking at doors. I drove along streets in our neighborhood and others. Camera in hand, I stared at doors – so many styles and colors, so many different yards leading up to those doors. Such astonishing variety in just the doors, let alone the atmosphere that must have been behind those doors, or the greetings that would have spilled out in so many languages.

            This is not the venue to explore fully the nuances of inclusion and exclusion, either sociological or theological, although I do want to mention one book (no regular reader here will be surprised!), Myroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace, which is the best book I’ve ever read on the human need to form supportive communities and the divine imperative to keep those communities open-doored.  Volf writes as the Christian he is, but he points out that all world religions speak of love and the grace of welcoming strangers.

As I have pondered the meaning of the door, with its implied walls and enclosed spaces, I remembered an experience I had years ago, touring the ruins of St. Boniface Cathedral in Winnipeg with other family members. The cathedral, built in 1905-1908, had been badly burned in 1968. Its surviving outer walls had been left as a monument of an old architectural style, and a new church had been built in 1972, partially inside the ruins.

As we walked through the ruins, I began to linger, wanting to be alone, suddenly aware of a Presence. Light was everywhere, including within me.

People had worshipped on this site since 1818 (the ruined St. Boniface Cathedral was the third one built there); over the generations, they had expressed their faith through beautiful architecture as well as through songs and homilies and sacraments. Now the façade and walls stood open to the light and the wind. The solid beauty of the rock belonged to the outdoor gardens and to the open sky. That felt right. It included me, protestant that I am.

            These days as the rockets fall, hurled out of the hatred and fear spawned by the cruelties of centuries, I wish there were fewer fences and more open doors. I wish that the necessary doors (and they are always necessary to keep out insects and unwanted animals and the wind and the rain and . . . . ) could be openings into welcome and understanding. I wish that we could stop dividing complex issues and multiple needs into either/or, good/bad. Even as I recognize that evil does exist and must be dealt with, I wish that we could find enough humility to listen better and to recognize our common human yearnings for love and security. I don’t know how to end a political/religious conflict that is already bathed in the blood of thousands. At least in my neighborhood, I want to learn a gentler language and leave a door open wide enough so that the possibility of community can be glimpsed on both sides.

Consoled by a Smile

On By ednafroeseIn Beauty, Forgiveness, Love, MotherLeave a comment
Photo of my mother. Her hair is dark, carefully waved back from her face in the style of the early 1930s. She wears a simple dark dress with a small lace color and a pendant. Her eyes have a clear gaze and her mouth looks as if she might smile but she doesn't quite smile. Her skin appears flawless.

            According to an entry in my father’s diary, my mother gave this studio photo of herself to my father for Christmas in 1931. They had been courting for a few months by then (discreetly, of course, in deference to her strict preacher father), and would marry in October 1934. With about ten dollars in my father’s pocket and with a single cow (or was it two?) in tow behind the buggy, they rode off to a small homestead to begin a dairy farm and their life together. Their first home, a mere shack furnished with apple boxes for chairs, was so drafty their blankets froze to the wall in the winter nights.  

 As the late-born youngest in the family, I was granted only glimpses of the courageous, hopeful woman in this photo, although I do recognize the intelligent humor in my mother’s eyes. The years of trauma in her childhood had left their legacy: she had been only six when the Russian Revolutions tore apart the Mennonite villages in the area now known as Ukraine; she had been twelve when her family fled to Canada as refugees in 1923. In the charmed early years of their marriage, it would have been possible to forget painful memories and ignore immediate hardships in the joy of beginning anew. Much research since then has made it clear that forgetting is not that easy.  

What I remember mostly clearly about her in my growing-up years and later was her focus on endless work on the farm, persistent fearfulness and constant worrying, an unhappy strain of judgmentalism, and eventually repeated illnesses and depressive episodes, none of which I even began to understand until I was an adult with children of my own. Then, dimly grasping the wisdom of playwright Joanna Glass—“If we are women, we think back through our mothers”—I began to research my people’s history and my family’s history.

 What I learned is material for other blogs, or more likely for unpublished stories for our children and grandchildren. Here I wish to take delight in that soft, Mona-Lisa smile on my mother’s face. My childhood self never realized that my mother was beautiful and gifted and strong. This photo reassures me that she was all of those, perhaps never more so than in her older years when she struggled against the darkness with not much help. For sure, her family doctor knew too little about trauma’s long-lasting effects on the body and mind, and her church was too inclined to blame depression and frightened anger on a lack of faith. The former prescribed drugs, and the latter repentance and prayer. Both were likely unaware of the unhelpfulness of their assumptions about women, yet both meant well—of that I’m fairly certain. It seems pointless now to point fingers back into the past, using knowledge that was then not available.

Nevertheless, she persisted. Not consistently, not always obviously, sometimes counter-productively. Artistic gifts suppressed and desires dismissed eventually turn bitter. When responsibility for her elder care fell mostly on my shoulders, I was frequently resentful and frustrated. I had even less to offer her than those institutions to which she had looked for help. I simply did not understand, either her needs or my own.

Against those memories, I now treasure earlier glimpses of my mother, and I choose to celebrate the gifts that I did see in her: her artist’s eye for color in fabric and in flowers, her instinct for words, her innate generosity, the twinkle in her eyes (a family trait).  

That smile, so barely there? I think it’s love, finding a place in her heart. The commitment is growing, the trust increasing. It is the joy of youth (she is 20 years old), daring to reach toward the future. I did not know her then, but I did see that self, every now and then, in the stories she sometimes told, in the pictures she shared with me. I believe, with Madeleine L’Engle that “the great thing about getting older is that you do not lose all the other ages you have been.” That lovely young woman did not wholly disappear, after all.

The great thing about getting older is that you do not lose all the other ages you have been.

Madeleine L’Engle

  In the on-going processing of memories and learning to understand something about all those other ages I have been, I have been encouraged by reading memoirs. One of the best I’ve read is novelist Elizabeth Hay’s All Things Consoled. All stories of human selves are worth hearing and pondering; very few of them are as beautifully articulated as this one.

[Photo from https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/572851/all-things-consoled-by-elizabeth-hay/9780771039751%5D

Its primary chronological focus is Hay’s year or more of being primary care-giver for her elderly parents whom she moved to a nearby seniors residence/care home. As part of that story, Hay also includes a history of her parents, which serves as background for Hay’s own childhood. She makes all her “characters” (family members, friends) wonderfully human; every chapter reveals greater complexities in the larger Hay family and demonstrates the extent to which we all are shaped and bound (and enlarged) by the relationships that have knit us into the people we become.

Photo of the book cover of All Things Consoled.

Although Hay does not minimize the achingly tense dynamics between her and her parents, she tells their stories and hers with love. Regardless of what might have gone wrong in the past, Hay celebrates her parents’ achievements, seeking to understand without glossing over failures. Such gracious acceptance is what I want to learn. That and the capacity to listen well which is so often the good writer’s gift – and the good healer’s gift.

Photo of a bouquet of gladiola
One of my mother’s favorite flowers was gladioli. I grow them often, in memory and for my own pleasure.