Franz Jagerstatter

Yesterday I mentioned a death of a friend. Today, from Holland, via New York and Detroit, I heard that Gordon Zahn a long time scholar and peace activist had died here in Milwaukee at a local nursing home. I had heard of Gordon but did not know him in his glory days when he was a scholar at Boston University and co-founder of Catholic Peace Fellowship and Pax Christi. I got to know him after he retired, returned to his home town of Milwaukee and moved into assisted living at the same place where he died. I would visit him when I visited some of my retired Jesuit friends who lived on another floor in the same building. In the early days of our conversations he told me about his youth and days attending Riverside High School and his experience as one of the first conscientious objectors of World War II in Milwaukee. His memory of his peace activist days was foggy at first and eventually faded away due to the dementia that accompanied his Parkinson’s disease. In fact by the time I got around to reading his most famous book “In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter”, he was asking me questions about the book. I enjoyed my visit with Gordon even the last few times, when he slept though most of our one-way conversation. These visits reminded me of my frequent visits to my father in the last year of his life when he was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. I was surprised by how much my father and Gordon could communicate even though they gradually lost the gift of language. In his last days my dad told me, without words, about his wish to die, like my mother had before him. Gordon communicated to me a strong will to live and be active although there was not much he could do besides sleep and eat. Both men were hard workers, Gordon in the intellectual world and my dad in the physical world. They seemed to me both driven by their work. Gordon lived with the dementia longer probably because his brain had been well exercised over the years. My dad was known for his ability to build, fix and make things. Once his physical ability left him his loss of mental ability really depressed him.

What I learned from my father was the benefits of hard work, really sticking with something until you did it. What I learned from Gordon was that the spirit of persons outlives their mind. From both I learned that the value of a human person is not in their physical or mental ability but in being who they are and living in the present.

In today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper there is a story about a scientist who works on the study of “forgiveness.” His programs teach forgiveness to very young children in the central city of Milwaukee as well as in Belfast. One of the first lessons a child learns, via a Dr. Seuss story, is the value of each person, no matter how large or small they are. Maybe this is the lesson Gordon, a peace activist, my dad, a hard working father and my friend Chas, a person with a great sense of humor have taught me: The major lesson in life and death is that all human life is sacred and valuable and has little to do with what a person does but everything to do with who they are. All are beloved. Forgiveness frees us to live in the present, to be all we can be and to love.

Tomorrow it is back to observations on growing power but again today I needed to focus on the power of life in growing power.

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