Ann Arbor, Michigan to Western New York State Day 82-82

 

Ann Arbor, Michigan to Western New York State Day 82-82

     I have fallen a bit behind schedule so rented a car for a day to bring me from Ann Arbor to Buffalo.  I keep forgetting how big New York State is.  Buffalo is twice as far from New York City as it is from Detroit.  Culturally, geographically, and politically Buffalo is part of the Midwest.

    I visited Drs Eileen Groth and Gordon Lyon in Hamburg, New York.  I had known them while at Florida State and they moved north at the same time Denise and I did. Gordon works for the New York Supreme Court and Eileen is a professor of European History at the State University of New York in Fredonia.  In the aftermath of the tragic death of their son, Eileen has been working on a book on The Religious Life in the Gusen Concentration Camp she shared with me an article expressing some of these observations taken from the Journal of Church History and Religious Culture.  In the first sentence she writes of the struggle to resist dehumanization and maintain a sense of identity and dignity is a crucial force in the lives of survivors.

     She now teaches the course in holocaust studies and is working as a volunteer to glean from fragments of documents those who perished in the camps.  We went out to dinner in a local pub and I have been left pondering how our personal, individual tragedies might create within us greater compassion.

    Later that night I pondered psalm 51 “Create in me a clean heart, and renew an upright spirit within me.”  I fear that the remainder of this year and next year will be a time of great social turbulence and polarization.  I am seeking my resist the dehumanization of this time and maintain a sense of identity and dignity.