Meeting the New Teacher - Part I of Three

Shalom, my friends! Let me introduce myself. I am Jairus, and my home is in Galilee, Capernaum to be exact. Capernaum is a busy town on our Sea of Galilee. I am privileged to have the honour of being one of the leaders of our local synagogue. This is a serious responsibility. The synagogue is our local place for worship of Jahweh and the teaching of our Law. We have to be ever vigilant for correct teaching and interpretation of our Law - and staying away from politics. This last is because of the Romans, who occupy our land. They do not stand for anything that smells of rebellion.

Now, especially in Galilee, it seems our people are prone to breeding rebels. Some of these individuals have also made claims of being The Messiah. According to our holy writings, The Messiah is a descendant of our great King David, who will someday appear and free us from all oppression and restore Israel to its former glory.

I had heard of someone who was being referred to as a new rabbi. Some were even beginning to ask if he was The Messiah. But I am getting ahead of myself.

In the first place, this new teacher, oddly enough, was from Nazareth, a small village northwest of here from where no one of note had ever come. That should have been enough to quell ideas of his being The Messiah, as our prophets have written in our holy writings that he was to be born in The City of David, Bethlehem, way south in Judea. I had heard through the grapevine that he had been a top student of our teachers in Nazareth. He had been slated to go for advanced education after his bar mitzvah but then his father died. Instead, he took up his father’s trade of woodworking to support his family. That was quite a sacrifice but also a noble thing to do. The life of a rabbi would certainly have been preferable to the hard work of a carpenter. 

But then, I guess when he judged his family was capable of surviving on their own, he had left home. I had heard about his turning to teaching. He had even begun to gather around him some followers, as proven rabbis do. However, this young man had no track record yet that would have been thought to attract such disciples. Furthermore, these were not young men noted for being students, for their academic ability. They were fishermen! An odd choice for a rabbi if you ask me.  What’s more, I had heard he had performed what actually seemed to be miracles – such as healing the sick and casting out demons. Some of our people claimed to be able to do these things too. However, they had to take training as to how to do this, which was not free. As a result, the services they offered their clients, who were obliged to go through all sorts of rituals, necessarily allowed for the exchange of money, sometimes considerable amounts of such. Well, this man – his name was Jesus by the way – was reported to perform healing and exorcism on first meeting an individual and merely by his word, free! 

People were beginning to flock to where he was on a regular basis. Apparently large crowds followed him at times, seeking healing and freedom from unclean spirits. But he was also teaching, words said to be a powerful message of the need to repent and seek forgiveness, similar to another recent preacher who had appeared in our midst, one called John the Baptizer, so called because he was baptizing people who repented of their sin and wanted to turn over a new leaf. But this Jesus seemed to be adding a new twist to this message. He was saying that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. This phrase alone was enough to make one wary of what might yet come of him.

Thus, I was somewhat on edge this particular Sabbath Day when I saw a crowd approaching our synagogue and near its front, was a man, striding along, occasionally stopping to place his hand on some poor supplicant and, evidently, from what I gathered, performing some healing. Some people were calling out things like, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” So, was this the Jesus I had heard about?

I was at the door of the synagogue when this Jesus approached. He stopped and, raising his hands and turning his face heavenward, seemed to be mouthing a prayer. Such a look of peace and determination seemed to then envelop his face. Then he looked straight at me with a look that was both gentle and powerful. Don’t ask me to explain that combination but that’s what I felt.

He bowed to me with clasped hands, walked in and sat down near the front. I quickly followed, almost pushed along by the throng. I conferred briefly with my colleagues and we agreed that, since this man was gaining recognition as a rabbi, the only polite and correct thing was to let him read the scripture and teach. One of our elders then handed him a scroll, from which he read and then began to teach.

In spite of ourselves, we were quite taken aback by his teaching. He did not go on and on reciting the sayings of rabbis from the past to explain the passage, like so many of our young teachers do. And he was so well-versed in the scriptures, the Torah! He quoted freely from it to support what he was saying. In spite of myself, I could not deny the power and authority with which he seemed to speak. It was actually quite refreshing, if I do say so myself.

Suddenly, he was interrupted by a shout, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know how you are, the Holy One of the God!” We had all turned to look at where the disturbance was coming from and could not help but catch our breath at those words. Jesus was indeed being addressed as if he were the Messiah! But the voice was coming from a disheveled figure in rags whom we all recognized immediately as someone possessed by an unclean spirit. He should not even have been in our synagogue. I was about to summon some of my colleagues to see if we could get him removed. However, before we could do so, this Jesus stopped his teaching and approached the man. Facing him square on he said in a loud clear voice, “Be silent, and come out of him!” The man fell to the floor in a writhing convulsion, shrieking and then lay still. We knew the demon was gone. Jesus reached down his hand and pulled the man to his feet. The man turned in a daze and left the building with his friends. 

The teaching session was over though. Everybody was talking at once about what they had just seen. They were amazed at the authority we had just witnessed. Some wondered who this was and what kind of new teaching this was. It was unheard of to simply command the spirits like this and see them obey. My own head was spinning from what I had heard and seen. Part of me said I had just seen one of our laws broken. Our rabbis had taught that healing was work and not to be performed on the Sabbath. However, before I could do anything further, Jesus and the crowd were disappearing down the road. I heard later they had gone to the home of one of his fishermen followers and that he had healed this man’s mother-in-law. What’s more, after Sabbath was over that evening, the house had been filled with people seeking healing and deliverance from unclean spirits. What indeed was going on here?

Losing Our Mother III – Forbidden Memories

When the family moved to Saskatchewan it had already begun to unravel, as families do. I had moved out in July ‘67, and before Les moved to join the family for Grade 12, we lived together in downtown Winnipeg for the ‘summer of love’ as some called it (hippie days, remember?). Loretta had left 4 months earlier when she had married Dave Kroeker from Saskatchewan. Then, at the end of the summer of ’67, she and Dave moved to Saskatchewan.

Our relationships with our younger siblings then depended either on correspondence or visits, which were not frequent. Nor did we use the ‘phone much. We had not grown up with one so were not used to doing much of that. But that was the way with all families in those days, especially when separated by geography, as we were now. 

Later in life I realized that we were beginning to repeat the pattern of my father’s family of origin. They too had moved about and thus negatively affected relationships between especially younger members of the family. I was often aware of the lack of closeness between us and our parents after we left home and I think father just never had a model for how one related to adult kids as we think of it now. His father was also separated from him most of his adult life, except for visits, which might not even always have been annual, one way or the other.

Thinking again of our father’s instructions to us when our new mother arrived, I thought recently of his grandfather. He lost 4 wives and remarried in short order after the first 3. Perhaps my father had some knowledge of that which played into his quick remarriage. Mind you, his first marriage had been a rapid affair of some necessity too. He wanted to go back ‘north’ to complete his Conscientious Objector term during WW II, but as a United Church minister, not a teacher like his first two years. This seemed to require him to be married. He then came ‘south’ to visit his parents at Easter of 1945, at which time he met my mother. Their parents had become friends as grandfather Brandt had moved into the district to teach and Grandfather Enns (my mother’s father) was a school trustee. The twoyoung people discovered they had a mutual interest in missions. My maternal grandmother had been quite taken with my father and seemed to do her part to promote interaction between the two. Mother was 24 at the time and perhaps grandmother, who married at 19 (a common age in her time), thought she was getting on and needed a spouse. Anyway, some 5 weeks later they were married and 6 weeks after that they were headed back north as newlyweds.

As one grew older though, one begins to remember things more often. It seems to be natural thing that occurs with aging. There is more to our past life than our future. We began to share stories when we visited one another. Our youngest brother Tim, who had been 7 when mother died, wanted to learn more about her. To do so he made a movie with his video camera – a new thing in the 1980’s. He interviewed each of his siblings and our father. Viewing it recently (it is on-line here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5wq713I08), I was surprised, given how things are now, how freely father spoke of his first wife, our mother. Tim even took the video to a film festival in Yorkton, SK, but I can’t remember if it placed in awards.

Anyway, in the fall of 1986, we had a family gathering at our sister Loretta’s farm in Englefeld, SK. It was actually in part a 22^ndanniversary of our folks’ marriage, cake so decorated and all. Tim wanted to show his completed ‘Our Mother’ project to the rest of us so we all sat down to watch it. Suddenly our stepmother (I rarely use that term, unless to distinguish her from our biological mother in conversation or writing, because of the negative connotations it so often has) jumped up and ran crying to an upstairs bedroom, saying, “After all I’ve done for you, I’m still not your mother…” or words to that effect, with that meaning. We were all stunned. Father and Loretta followed her up to try to calm her and settle things down. The family gathering continued.  

However, intended or not, we got a message: No more talking about your mother in front of this mother. Hence, the ‘chapter’ title. As I have sometimes said in later years, after becoming a child psychiatrist and learning more about families, there were no manuals for blended families, no guides in those days, as to how to deal with all of these issues affecting our families. So, we simply resorted to silence, except when in the company of one another, and sometimes our uncles and aunts, as long as Mom was not round (Speaking of identifiers, ‘Mom’ is often the term we use for our stepmother; the more respectful and formal ‘mother’ is more often reserved for our biological mother). Indeed, as we got older, on the occasion of getting together, or having contact in other forms, with kin and friends who had known our mother, we would sometimes outright ask them for their memories of our mother. 

We learned we could not ask such at ‘home’ though. When something was said in conversation about Mom or mother, our stepmother sometimes misunderstood and her unhappiness if it was our biological mother who had been referred to was evident. The spirit persists though; one wants to know one’s story, where one came from. Too often even when talking to father in an attempt to learn about our shared past, sometimes looking at photo albums to help sort things out, as soon as mother was in earshot, it was time to close the photo album, to change the subject or be quiet. 

Now, we five older siblings also have two half-siblings from this second marriage of our father's. So, in some ways, that complicates things even more. One does not want to negatively affect them and their impression of 'their' mother by talking of our mother,  whom they know nothing or very little of, in front of them, or in correspondence including them. Just one more reason to keep quiet. Unfortunately, the eldest of the two, our brother Steven, has already pre-deceased the rest of us. He was the one who still lived near our parents, so his absence creates more pressure on all of us distant sibs (in more ways than one as you see now) to 'look after' our aging parents. 

So, sadly, we five have accepted that the reality seems to be that there are many things about our past, about our mother, we will never know. We have learned to live with that, even though we wish it were otherwise.  

How much different things could have been. My wife Anne and I have read the book “A Good House” by Canadian author Bonnie Burnard (I had to ‘google’ this to ‘remember’ it all as we no longer have the book, and there is a review here https://bevcurran.wordpress.com/2017/10/04/a-good-house-by-bonnie-bernard/). This is the story about where a stepmother comes into the picture but she is a wise woman. She knows that really, she has nothing to lose and everything to gain if she helps ‘her’ children keep the memory of their real mother alive.  If only our stepmother had thought that way.