Category: Stories

A Mom’s Gifts

Published on by Marilyn1 Comment

Walking along Boston Harbor today, I was struck by the beauty all around me. While the day dawned gloomy and chilly, by noon the sky was the blue of a clear spring day and blossoms and buds had appeared like magic. It reminded me of the children’s book The Secret Garden and the description of springtime.

“Fair fresh leaves, and buds—and buds—tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.”

The Secret Garden

It’s been six months since my mom died and I’ve been thinking a lot about her these past few days. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and it will be my first Mother’s Day where my mom is not present on this earth. I am well aware that in the natural order of things, every person gets to a point where their mothers are no longer present. I am not alone in this. In fact, I am one of those too fortunate people who had their mom for many, many years.

And I also feel the loss acutely. Last year I was recovering from major surgery, so I was unable to go be with her for Mother’s Day. Had I known that she would be gone, would I have cancelled the surgery? I don’t know that I would. I had cancelled it once before and I really couldn’t hold off anymore. I think my mom knew this and gave me the grace I needed.

Memories of previous mother’s days and other holidays, but mostly the visits I had with her where it was just the two of us on a regular weekend loom large and precious. We would go to Lake Ontario and have picnics of egg or tuna salad on fresh bread, always buying Abbot’s frozen custard on the way home. I would read aloud from either a book my brother had begun reading to her, or we would begin a new one. Some of her favorites were books by her friends from Pakistan, her eyes sparkling as she filled in details from her own memories of events relayed in these books. Her routine was to get up much later than I would in the morning so I would fix myself a cup of tea and then have breakfast with her when she got up. Parathas and spicy eggs were a favorite from her Pakistani past, but as time went on, a simple piece of toast or an English muffin was all she could eat.

In the months before she died, it was more difficult for her to get up and get going. Our times included a lot more staying inside with reading, resting, and stories. Audio books were a plenty and I will never be able to listen to Maisie Dobbs books on audio again without thinking of my mom on her recliner, eyes open, mind alert, body tired. Sometimes she would doze off and I would gently wake her to see if she wanted to head to her bed for an afternoon nap. “I should, shouldn’t I?” she would reply, only to doze off again one or two times before going. In between all of this, I heard stories of childhood and beyond. I was taken back to her elementary years, to an older girl Evangeline walking her home from school and laughing and scolding her for having the lofty dream of attending college. “Oh Pauline! What makes you think you can go to college? Your mom and dad never finished eighth grade!” Scarlet, more from the anger that erupted in her than Evangeline’s chiding, she vowed that she’d show Evangeline! And she did.

The stories moved on from childhood to college in Boston, a city she loved dearly, friendships with roommates Maggie and Ruthie, and falling in love with my father. What a gift to those who are older that they get to fall in love again and again through their memories, reliving the joys of those initial days like they were yesterday. Mom and Dad’s love story took place in the city of Boston where, poor as the proverbial mice that roam around churches in search of morsels, they bought five cent coffees and an occasional coke float. While I had heard many of the stories before, there were new ones that emerged, while the old ones were the more precious knowing that the storyteller would soon be leaving us, leaving me.

And the storyteller did leave. She left in the late fall when the golden leaves were creating heavy earth carpets, and the smell of wood fires was in the air. Now it is the spring and I miss her. I miss the almost daily phone calls that were sometimes check-ins and other times heavy with conversation and memories. We loved talking to each other about books – those that she was listening to and others that I was reading. I miss knowing that when I got back from a trip, she would be waiting to talk with me, to ask about it. I miss having her ask me about my kids. “How is Joel?” she would say, and I knew she really cared.

Despite the missing, I would not bring her back for an instant. She is in Aslan’s country, further up and further in, and it would be cruel to bring her back from glory to a place with only glimpses.

In truth, Mom left me with many lasting gifts that I hold on to tight with hopes that I can one day pass on the same – the gift of an enduring faith lived out in stubborn persistence, the gifts of reading and writing, the gifts of delving deeply into the scriptures and daily prayer, the gifts of learning when to speak up and when to keep silent. Most of all, the life-long example of a mom who knew how to love well.

On this Mother’s Day, I reflect on these gifts with a healthy mixture of tears, wistful longing, and gratitude. Though her presence is gone, the gifts remain, and I am deeply grateful. Honoring her is about entering wholeheartedly into the day with laughter, love, tea, and cake, expressing love and thanks to those around me and those at a distance.

I wonder as I write this – what gifts have you received from your mom? Whether alive or no longer here, what do you hold precious because of her?

Eulogy for Pauline Alice Brown

Published on by Marilyn10 Comments

Friends – 9 days following my last post, my mom died. I had the honor of delivering her eulogy. Here is what I said:

It was my profound honor to be at the side of my mom, the woman who birthed me, as she took her last breath and ended her journey in this world.

It is now a profound, albeit daunting, honor to give this eulogy in the presence of so many people who knew her and loved her. It feels especially important to thank my brother Tom and sister-in-law Terry who cared for her and my dad so well, giving them a home during their last season of life. You gave her a home that teemed with life, with family, with grandchildren, with Allison and Paul and Margot, more recently with Tami. Moreover, you provided a gathering place for our scattered family. We are so grateful.

95 years is a lot of years. Last spring, I said to mom “Think about it Mom! We throw away toasters after 15 years, refrigerators after 25, you’re 95!! You’re amazing – so much better than a toaster!” My mom wasn’t impressed.

When I think about the span of my mom’s life, two pictures come to mind. 

The first one is the only picture we have of when she was a baby, probably around a year old. The photo is black and white, and the baby is looking straight at the camera, short brown curls framing a round face with sparkling eyes and a big smile. The second picture is a picture of my mom on the day before she died. She looks tiny in a hospital bed at Advent House. My brothers and I surround her as she gives us orders so that she doesn’t look too awful for the picture. Little binds those two pictures together – except the eyes. The sparkling eyes are the same.

So many stories, so many years, and so many photographs stand between those two pictures. Truth is, none of us knew the Polly of the early stories. For Baby Polly, firstborn to Stanley and Cyrena Ruth Kolodinski became a little girl with a fierce drive that set the course of her life. Those early years are best characterized by  “I’ll show you!” That was the Polly who was in junior high school and talked about going to college. “Hmph!” said her Polish father. “What does a girl need with college?”

Polly didn’t talk back. She just determined in her heart that she would show her father. On her graduation from Gordon college, he was the proudest man in the room.

It was during this period of her life when she heard a large man with a strong Swedish accent speak about missionary work in the country of India. Her heart responded and she made up her mind right then that she would be a missionary. She didn’t have a clue what all that meant, but the fierce determination embedded in her response was real.

The little girl Polly became a young woman who walked back from the Fenway area of Boston one summer night, starry-eyed from her first kiss with Ralphie, the brown-haired, blue-eyed college student who had captured her heart. When her girlfriends excitedly asked if he had held her hand, she looked at them and said “Hmmhmm” – clearly she was not one to kiss and tell. We know the end of that story.

A few years later, she stood on the deck of a ship, looking young and sophisticated, wearing white gloves, a fashionable hat, and pearls around her neck. No one would guess looking at her that she was headed to the country of Pakistan, a place she had never been, to serve a God she had begun to love as a little girl.  Polly was on her way to bear witness to the incarnational love of Jesus.

She writes of leaving the shores of New York in her first book Jars of Clay: (Read page 7 paragraph one)

And so they did.

Pakistan became home and ten thousand stories were lived that included five kids, many different homes, studying and speaking two languages, learning to love well, entering the courtyards and lives of Muslim friends and neighbors, finding an extended family of fellow missionaries and Pakistani Christians that went far beyond borders, and walking with God when there was light and during the dark tragedies of life.

The thread woven through the story is the thread of faith, and no matter at what stage or story you met Polly, you would soon learn of that thread. You would learn of a faith that took her to Pakistan and back, a faith that sustained her during deeply lonely times in Pakistan, where family and familiarity were an ocean away. A faith that saw her through every age and stage of her life. A faith that continually led her to repentance and grace. And a faith that was challenged in these past couple years and months.

If you met my mom in more recent years, you knew her in the winter of her life. You met her during a time when she could no longer serve others in the way she longed for. Instead, she had to call on others to help her. For in recent years, she struggled. She struggled with feeling invisible. She struggled with the feeling she had outlived her usefulness. She struggled to trust God with a body that was no longer serving her well. And she had an increasing ache of homesickness for her forever home. The thread of faith I think sometimes felt thin to her, like it might not hold the weight of aging. Roles were reversed as instead of her encouraging us to stay strong in the faith, it was us encouraging her. Her faith was buoyed through visits for yummy desserts at Phillips European with her dear friend Peggy. It was buoyed through times with her dear JoMarcia, her nurse but so much more. It was buoyed by the family and faith family that loved her.

At 9:40 pm on Sunday, November 5th, she ended her journey.

And today we say a public and formal goodbye to Pauline Alice Brown – wife, mother of five, mother-in-law, grandmother of seventeen, matriarch to a multitude and counting of great grandchildren, friend and mentor to many, storyteller and writer, sustained by and through faith.

My mom once said that she was sorry that she and my dad were not leaving her kids anything, nothing “of value”. I looked at her in astonishment. “Not leaving us anything? Are you kidding? You’ve given us everything we need and more.”

On her bedside stand was the true evidence of what Mom left us for it was there that I found index cards with the names of every family member, prayers that she daily prayed for us. I found a prayer list two pages long with names of so many of you who are in this room. My mom’s legacy is here in this room and beyond. Her obedience, love, and honor of God extend through the generations.

So, tell them – tell them the stories of Polly and her God.  Tell them the stories of family and faith, of who God is and what he has done, for the God who held her stories for all those years, holds all of ours.

Generations

Published on by MarilynLeave a comment 
The train rounds a bend.
The rest of the cars appear
one by one, 
all tied to one another 
far into the distance.
It comes as a surprise
to be tied to things so far back.
Nazim Hikmet in Human Landscapes from my Country

This weekend my mom turned 95. A few months ago, as we were talking about aging and her upcoming birthday, I said to her “Think about it, Mom! We throw a toaster away after 15 or 20 years, a washing machine lasts maybe 30. You’re 95 and you are still working! You are still amazing!” She was unimpressed.

Unimpressed she may be, but it is nevertheless amazing. Amazing to think of 95 years of life and the many lives and seasons within those 95 years. Astonishing to think of the people met, conversations had, and airmiles logged. Bewildering to calculate the number of hours lived, worked, and slept. Even more mind boggling is to think of the amount of humility and forgiveness it takes to live well in a 95-year life span.

The weekend held little time for me to reflect on my mom’s life. It is as I’ve returned that I think about the heritage I have, as I contemplate the beauty of legacy through generations.

When I think about resiliency being tied to knowing you are part of a bigger story, I think about my mom, for she and my dad made sure we knew we were part of something bigger. We knew we were not solitary individuals in the midst of a big world that was out to get us. We knew we had family and friends that were like family. We knew that family stories and lore were important.

There was the story of Grandma K who was pregnant with her second child and on the day of delivery found out there were two babies instead of one. We knew the story of Big Hill in back of Papa’s farm in Winchendon. We knew the tragedy of Grandpa Stanley’s death of a heart attack, leaving Grandma K as a widow with a broken heart. We knew about my Aunt Jean, looking at my mom who was 21 years old and saying “If I’m not married by the time I’m your age, I’ll kill myself!” We knew my Aunt Charlotte left for New York City a week after she graduated from high school to get famous, or at least win a car on The Price is Right – which actually happened. We knew our grandmother loved Ritz crackers, peanut butter, candlepin bowling, and the Red Sox. We knew that our mom and her siblings were first generation immigrants, her dad having come from Poland via Russia when he was a young boy.

Stories on my dad’s side of the family were just as important. From a farm in Putnam, Connecticut to Morningside Baptist church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts there were stories and they mattered.

The stories didn’t stop with my grandparents and great grandparents. Instead, they continued through my parents’ generation, to mine, and now to the next generation who are raising children in a world where family can be hard to come by.

None of these stories were earth shattering. None of them brought fame or fortune. Instead, they gave us the solid understanding that we were tied to things that went back generations. We knew that the stories were happy ones and sad ones, a fusion of grief and joy – those immutable ingredients of life woven through every generation. We knew in our bones that family and family stories were important.

This weekend we stopped for a moment to honor my mom, the stories and memories she holds, and the legacy of faith, family, and friendship that she continues to leave us. Far from being the independent woman she was for so many years, my mom is now in a season of dependence. It is. I believe, her final season and we don’t know how long this season will last. Like a toaster or washing machine, one day her body will stop working, her “earth suit” as one of her friends calls it, will no longer be needed or necessary. Unlike a toaster, her soul and spirit, a life of faith, the prayers she prayed for her big, messy family, the forgiveness she modeled and still models, all of those will last into the next generation.

Death will come to all of us. It is as sure as the sun rising and setting. What of our lives will last for the generations that come after us? I think I have a good example with my mom, with her stories, her life, and her faith.

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. 

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Arguments about Origin – a TCK post

Published on by Marilyn5 Comments

I was exhausted. It was yet another argument about where I was from, arguments that I was beginning to call “Arguments of Origin” – perhaps so that they sounded more academic and less fraught with emotion.

But the reality was, they were fraught with emotion.

This particular argument started out as a benign comment by a friend to something I had posted online. I don’t even remember the original post, but it was about belonging and my connection to my childhood home – Pakistan. In the post I called Pakistan “home.”

“But it’s not really home for you.” she stated matter-of-factly.

“I’m not sure what you mean.” I said “I grew up there, so yes, it was my childhood home.”

“But you’re not from there.” she was not going to let this go.

Fair enough, but it really depends on what “from there” means.

I tried to put a different lens onto the conversation. “Well – where do you say you are from.” “That’s easy” she named a small town in one of the New England states. “Okay, why do you call that town home?” “Well, I grew up there.”

The defense rests their case.

When I returned to Pakistan in 2010, I got to walk through the house we had lived in during my junior and senior years of high school. A tsunami of memories came over me as I walked through the large front rooms, around the verandah, and finally stopped in front of my bedroom door. As I pressed my face against the window, looking into the room where I had spent winter vacations, I gasped. There on the bed was the comforter that my mom and I had picked out so many years before. The previously bright green, pink, yellow, and blue patterns had faded through the years, but there was no mistaking it. I never thought something as simple as a comforter could bring on such a profound sense of belonging. It was, after all, an inanimate object. But in that moment, it was confirmation of a life that I had lived, a life relegated to stories, photo albums, and memories captured in the cerebral cortex of my brain.

Despite 18 years of life packed into old passports, photo albums, old journals, and letters that my mom kept through the years, in many people’s eyes I have no right to say that Pakistan was home, even less rights to saying that I am from Pakistan. My rights to the country are defined by outsiders who tell me who I am and where I am from.

It brings up many emotions and deep empathy for the many around me who, in this era of massive displacement, struggle silently in the same way.

In a beautiful essay called “Reconciling with Less Home: Between Haiti and Me” Martina Fouquet writes:

The real question is who determines where we belong?

Martina Fouquet in Catapult Magazine

Perhaps what people don’t realize about their challenges to our concepts of home and where we say we are from are that the challenges act like a knife cutting to the core of who we are. The knife cuts deep, and we are left with our own origin questions, self-doubt raising its ugly head telling us once again that we don’t really belong. The internal dialogue that we thought we had silenced so long ago emerges once again, loud and accusatory: “You don’t really belong. You aren’t Pakistani. You left years ago.”

“But that’s not really home for you” or “That’s not where you’re really from” viewed as benign statements to many presents as a challenge to personhood and origin to another.

I don’t know what the answer is to arguments of origin, other than reminding myself once again that no one gets to tell any of us where home is. It is uniquely ours to determine where and why. Our stories may not fit into tidy boxes that connect within the experiences of others, but that’s not a problem we need to solve or a burden we need to bear.

Despite awkward questions, arguments, and discussions on home and origin, the paradoxical gift of this journey is that sometimes less home becomes more home, our lives richer for the multiple places we are privileged to call home.

Home is more than just a place where we come from, it is a part of us. And the longer we distance ourselves from home, the less complete we are.

Martina Fouquet

The Stories Behind Our Silence

Published on by Marilyn2 Comments

It’s been quiet here. It feels eerily quiet to me, though for those of you who read – the silence may be welcome. No one needs more noise in their lives. But the quiet feels strange to me because so much of my processing is done through writing.

Whenever my writing goes silent, there is a story behind the silence. I would think that this is true for most of us. Though everyone doesn’t process through writing, we all go through journeys where our inner world and trauma don’t reflect our outward circumstances, where there are stories behind our stepping away from life.

Some things are not for public consumption. In a world that more and more demands our every thought, our every hurt and pain spewed out through whatever public means possible, it feels important to say this.

Yet, too often, people insist on the story. They seemingly can’t give grace without the details. It makes me wonder how we can grow to be the kind of people who can honor the silent stories, giving grace for behavior and actions that don’t reflect what we know about the person’s life. How can we honor the stories behind the silence, knowing that people must feel safe in order to share? How can we become people who don’t operate off a sort of voyeurism, insisting on the hard ingredients instead of offering unconditional comfort?

It was a number of years ago when I first discovered the difference between outside circumstances and silent stories. It was in trying to figure out how I could help a friend. Her outside circumstances were seemingly ideal. A “put together” family – the kind that takes pictures of all their kids with blue jeans and white shirts on a pristine beach – a good job, beautiful kids, talent beyond believability. But behind her perfect smile was an undefinable sadness. At first I was impatient and frustrated. Of all the people I knew, she was the last person who seemed to have a reason to be sad. It was in the midst of frustration, that I felt a strong rebuke and challenge to look beyond these seemingly perfect circumstances. I realized that there must be more to the story then her observable beautiful life.

In truth, I should have been quicker to identify this. I say this because I too have been judged as one who has “nothing to complain about.” Judged for being a baby who can’t cope with the perfect life I’d been given. There were silent stories behind my observable “good” life. Stories that were difficult to share, and even more difficult to live.

The stories remained silent until I trusted a friend enough to reveal them.

Whether others give us freedom for silence or not, there are time honored and tested verses from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes that offer space for these seasons of silence:

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

May we strive to be people of the seasons. People who honor all of the times in our lives, including the stories behind the silence – may we be people who offer the gifts of grace, comfort, compassion, and hope, all given without expectation, without insisting on details. And through these gifts may stories be heard, silence give way to a voice, and above all, the seasons of hope and healing be restored.

A Childhood Erased

Published on by Marilyn11 Comments

In June, the boarding school in Pakistan where I spent my childhood is closing its doors. No longer will children respond to the gong of a bell that goes off for meal times. No longer will high schoolers gather outside the hostel, shyly sitting with The Boy that one has liked for so long, hands brushing against each other through the conversation and laughter of their classmates. No longer will staff and students alike have to shout over the roar of monsoon rains on tin roofs. The pine trees will no longer hear the whispered joys, sorrows, and prayers of students. Steel bunkbeds will no longer capture early morning tears of homesickness. There will be no more chapel, no more tea time, no more study halls, and no more graduations. Never again will the school song, so long ago penned by my father, be sung in that setting.

An era will be over, and with it – part of my life will seem erased.

Last night with my younger daughter and husband I watched memories of Murree, put together by my dear friend Paul. I got to experience the thick fog of Jhika Gali, and the hairpin turns of roads. I heard one last gong of the bell and laughed as a monkey, captured perfectly on film, ran toward me and then away.

I have known about this closing for some time. The school was founded in 1956, a wonderful and admittedly rare happening where missionaries of every denomination got together and worked to build a school for the children of missionaries and nationals who were serving in Pakistan and neighboring countries. This year, after 65 years of service, the doors to the school will close. The last class will graduate. Murree Christian School will no longer be a concrete place with walls and windows, students and administrators. Instead it will be relegated to memories in people around the world and, surprisingly, a wikipedia page of its own.

My friend Robynn and I occassionally text back and forth about our school closing. Ten years apart, we had similar experiences at MCS. Times of sorrow and sadness to be sure – but that is not the only story. Our stories are stories of much laughter and learning, of grace and growth, of the pure joy of youth. About two months ago I texted to Robynn “Our childhood is slowly being erased.”

The closer the closing ceremony comes, the more I feel an urgent sadness that needs to be voiced. MCS holds so many stories. I somehow never thought that this day would really come. As my dear friend Robynn says so well:

Deep relationships were formed. Faith was nurtured. It’s difficult to capture in words what this hidden place has meant to many now literally scattered the world over.

Robynn Bliss

To be sure, we live in a different era. The school has dropped in size to a miniscule number. Staff are hard to come by and finances more so. Schools cannot stay open simply to be receptacles for childhood memories. In fact, the beauty of the times I visited back after graduation lay in the fact that it was still a living, vibrant place. New students and staff that (shockingly) did not know me had their own memories and events, their own life stories. A terrorist attack shortly after 9/11 changed the school in unimaginable ways, taking away the freedom that we students from the seventies had. Dwindling class sizes made it the more difficult to justify the cost of keeping up the buildings and grounds. Less people were comfortable sending their children to boarding school. There are many reasons to close and the decision to close was more difficult than I can imagine.

What does an adult do when they feel their childhood is slowly being erased? The tendency would be to grasp at whatever I can to keep the picture of what I had. Instead, I open my hands and I give the pencil back to God. From the beginning it is he that wrote the story of MCS. It is God who gave the vision, God who sustained the decades of life, God who loves the people who entered and left the large, stone building to forge their way in a world beyond.

As I have thought more about MCS closing, I have released the idea of my childhood erased. That is giving the closing of a man-made, though wonderful, institution too much power. Instead I’ve thought about the stones of remembrance that I take with me from my childhood and this place that shaped me.

The idea of stones of remembrance comes from the Old Testament book of Joshua. The Lord tells Joshua to choose 12 men, one from each tribe. They are to go and pick up a stone from the middle of the Jordan River, at the spot where the priests were carrying the Ark of the Covenant. They were to carry the stones to the place where the people would spend the night. There they would put them down to serve as a sign. These were stones of remembrance. They served as a sign to the people present and to future generations that God was there, that he was faithful, that he did not leave his people.

What are the stones of remembrance in my life that connect to MCS? What rocks can I point to, stones of surety that declare “God was here.” What can I list that point to a life of faith, built on a stone foundation?

My stones of remembrance are imperfect people who taught me how to forgive and fellow students and dear friends who taught me what it was to press on. My stones of remembrance are the laughter that drowns out the memories of homesickness and the growth that leans into discomfort. My stones of remembrance are brothers who share blood and friends who share memories. My stones of remembrance are rocks of trust and knowing that somehow, all would be well.

I am gathering the stones, I am putting them down in writing, so that I too can tell future generations “This is what shaped me, this is why I am here.” Because it’s good to remember.

At every graduation and important event, we sang our school hymn, voices raised to the rafters of the old church building turned school. Some of us sang with immense talent, others just sang. Though all were lost in those moments in their own thoughts, never knowing that most would look back on these times and the song itself with deep longing. I leave you the final verse here – a reminder that no closing of anything is powerful enough to erase childhood.

Lord with thanks and praise we honor Murree Christian School
May her life and fame and service for thee ever rule

Built upon a firm foundation, in God's hands a tool,
Shaping lives of dedication, Murree Christian School

Fellow MCSers, what are your stones of remembrance?

Disturbing Stories and Bearing Witness

Published on by Marilyn3 Comments

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

Eli Weisel

When we hear people’s stories, when we are present through listening to events in their lives, we are bearing witness. Bearing witness to the moment that changed their lives. Bearing witness to why they have pain. Bearing witness to the deep struggles of the soul that come out in stories, when we are willing to listen.

Bearing witness means that we are showing that something exists; that something is true. To listen to the survivor of rape and abuse without judgment but with love and belief is saying to them – “I believe that this happened. I believe that you bear the cost.” To listen to the refugee with their story of losing home, family members, walking miles to safety, finally arriving at a crowded, disease-ridden camp is to validate their experience.

Sometimes we are unable to bear witness in person. Sometimes the situation is far away and a writer or journalist brings it to our attention. This was the case for me recently when I read the horrific stories of abuse and torture that are taking place among the minority Uighur populations in China. The BBC is bringing light to these atrocities so that we might bear witness. So that we may not be silent. The headline reads “Women in China’s “re-education” camps for Uighurs have been systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured, according to detailed new accounts obtained by the BBC.” followed by a note that the reader may find the account disturbing.

More than a million men and women have been detained in what is described as a “vast and secretive system of internment camps” in China’s Xinjiang region. The camps are set up for the “re-education” of the Uighur people and other minorities in China. All freedoms have been taken away and these groups face detention, surveillance, forced “re-education”, and forced sterilization. Documents state that China’s president has given and edict to respond to Uighurs with “No mercy.”

A first hand account from a woman who was interviewed for the BBC special report revealed this:

“Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US, said women were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.”

Sometime after midnight, they came to the cells to select the women they wanted and took them down the corridor to a “black room”, where there were no surveillance cameras.

Several nights, Ziawudun said, they took her.

“Perhaps this is the most unforgettable scar on me forever,” she said.*

We should be disturbed and awakened by this. When we lose our ability to be distressed and disturbed we lose our humanity. That we as humans can perpetrate this kind of cruelty shows our desperate need for repentance and healing. That we can allow this cruelty shows the same.

Bearing witness is more than just hearing the stories. It’s entering into stories. Entering in with body and soul. Entering in with empathy and kindness. It’s entering, and in our entering offering hope and healing. The account in BBC is not a story I want to enter, but it’s a story I must enter. I may be helpless to do something physically, but I am not helpless to pray all of God’s mercy on the women who have been so deeply hurt.

Whose story will you bear witness to this day? To a friend who has tried a hundred times to tell you of their pain, but you have dismissed them? To your child who longs to communicate something about who they are, but is afraid to tell you? To an old woman who once lit up a room with her dance step and her smile? To a paralyzed young man who is dismissed, ignored because he sits in a wheelchair? To an angry coworker?

Or perhaps to a news story far away, that you may never enter in person, but you can enter through prayer with the words “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have Mercy on the Suffering. Have Mercy on the Hurting. Have Mercy on Your Creation.”

“But witnesses incur responsibilities, as anyone who has ever seen a traffic accident and had to go to court to testify, knows. In the new world of globally televised war crimes, the defence of ‘not knowing,’ or neutrality, will dissolve for everyone. To be a witness or bystander is not a value-free choice but, inadvertently, a moral position; and in this sense the ‘guilt’ of people who live with the memory of crimes committed by members of their families, or communities, has been unwittingly extended to everyone who watches appalling pictures on the news.” Erna Paris in Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History

[*Source: BBC News Special Report on Uighur Detention in China – © copyright 2021 BBC]

Finding My Way on the Freedom Trail

Published on by Marilyn4 Comments

This morning I met with a dear friend at a coffee shop along the wharf in Boston. Blue sky and warm temperatures had us both exclaiming with delight as we sat outside drinking coffee and eating croissants. Our conversation went from Afghanistan to Islam to culture to cultural schizophrenia to the U.S election to Boston and back around again. Though much younger than me, we share our hearts during these times together, finding solace in mutual understanding.

We said goodbye by the bridge that separates the North End of Boston from Charlestown and I headed back home.

I soon found myself in an unfamiliar park and was just about to check my phone for directions when I spied the brick path that identifies Boston’s famed Freedom Trail.

Family and friends who come visit Boston always ask us about the Freedom Trail. Boston’s Freedom Trail is not a hike in the woods as some mistakenly think when they first arrive. Instead, it’s a path that winds through the city taking you to famous sites along the way. Every step of the path leads you into a story from the past and you find yourself immersed in America’s beginnings and fight for freedom.

Churches, museums, graveyards, and a ship are just a few of the treasured sites along the way. The trail begins at Boston Common and takes you 2.5 miles to an ending point at Bunker Hill Monument, an 11 minute walk from our house in Charlestown.

I smiled with relief as I found the Freedom Trail. I now knew where I was! I had a reference point and could follow the path. Instead of feeling a sense of confusion and disorientation, I felt safe and secure. If I just followed the brick path I knew exactly how to get home.

As I walked I thought about how weary and lost I have felt. I thought about the disorienation and lostness I feel when I sink into the abyss of discontent fueled by social media and the isolation it can create. I thought about how tired the world feels with this pandemic. And then I thought about the freedom that a known path allows, even when it winds and twists and turns.

I think a lot of us are feeling lost. We don’t know how to plan and how to walk forward. While the pandemic and the changed plans that it has brought is part of the reason, each of us have our own private reasons as well. These public challenges just make our private worlds more complicated.

Weary. Lost. Frustrated. Sad. Angry. Confused. Disoriented. These are just a few of the words that I have shared with friends and they have shared with me about this time. How do you find your way when there are so many twists and turns?

This sense of feeling lost is when I know I have to go back to the beginning. My life is recentered by remembering that my story, small as it is, is important and fits into a bigger story. As the Freedom Trail is to American history, so is my story to this bigger story. It’s small, but remembering it can remind me how to get home. I have churches and graveyards, ships and museums in my story as well.

As I remember my story, I remember who I am. More importantly, I remember whose I am.

The solid brick path of the Freedom Trail showed me the way today. Somehow, it also centered me in my story. As I walked the trail, I remembered who I was. The Freedom Trail brought me home.