My Spiritual Roots
Towards the end of the war, when the air raids were becoming ever more frequent, it became necessary to spend every night in the basement of our house. I recall our family night after night, when the all-clear had been given, emerging from its darkness to stand outside for a while. From the reflections of the fires caused by incendiary bombs, the sky in the direction of the Rhine/Ruhr area seemed to be burning as one huge flame. And I remember how my mother broke down when at last someone brought her the news that our country had totally and unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Forces. Even as a child, it was not hard to sense that this was due to the relief she felt when the nightmare of the Nazi regime was over, at last.
An old German folk wisdom says: ‘Better a horrible ending than horror without an end!’ This is how the probably greatest evil our world ever had to witness in one gigantic orgy of destruction ended. When this nightmare was over, the majority of German people – not merely civilians – must surely have been relieved that the Nazi regime had not won the war. What would have happened otherwise does not bear thinking about.
As far as my spiritual roots are concerned, I did not have any in this lifetime. As mentioned earlier, I had two sisters and a brother. It’s always puzzled me why the four of us had been baptised into the Protestant branch of Christianity, even though I could never detect any evidence that some kind of religious beliefs ever existed in our family. My parents, like many others, must have lost their faith through the events of two world wars. My father was thirteen when the first one started and my mother eleven. Twice over they were part of the miseries and hardships of wartimes and their aftermaths. Without ever seeing any signs of salvation or improvements of the human condition in our world people are bound to ask themselves whether there really is a God *. Can there be one? And if there were one, how can He allow so much suffering? My parents never talked about matters of this nature, probably because the memories of the way they lost their faith were too painful.
This is how it came about that we were brought up completely without religion and when religious education at school was reintroduced after the war, we were exempted from it. Yet, the birthcharts of my middle sister and me reveal that the background we were born must have been a staunchly Christian one. Alas, I cannot investigate the charts of the other family members because it is impossible to assess their birth times. During a recent stay in Germany, I found to my amazement that this time was recorded in the birth register of my hometown for every child when we were born. Alas, although both my sisters had already passed on, because of the data protection act, I could only find out my own time and – with the help of her husband – that of my middle sister.
My mother kept diaries for both my sisters, but by the time I was born, she no longer had the time to continue. Her last entries into both diaries are from 1937, shortly after I was born, so my brother’s arrival in 1939, one month before the outbreak of the war, was not even mentioned. However, the contents of my mother’s notes provided me with some clues. The most important ones were that on the occasion of the birth of her first and second daughter she confirmed that children are a precious gift from God. I do not believe that someone without some kind of religious belief would have expressed themselves in such words. More about the theme of losing faith later.
Recommended Reading:
• ‘Is There A God?’
• ‘Healing Our Relationship With God’
• ‘Losing And Finding Faith’
This article is a chapter from ‘War And Peace Between Nations.
If it has whetted your appetite to read more, please follow the link below:
‘War And Peace Between Nations’