ahhh, youth….

“Inner strength is our most powerful weapon”
Hans Scholl

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents,
the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love.
When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
Sophia Loren

(a curious killdeer / Mackinac Island / Julie Cook / 2017)

Today’s headlines are rife with the misdeeds, shenanigans and out right barbarism
of our younger generations…

Just today there was a heinous story about a group of teens, ages 14 to 16, who had actually videoed a disabled man drowning in a retention pond in Florida…
Worse, they did nothing in the way of offering assistance or getting help—

And what is even more unconscionable, they later posted the video online
where they are heard mocking, cursing and ridiculing the drowning / dying man.

This latest incident comes on the heels of the continued reports of the ongoing
unrest raging on many of nation’s college campuses. Ever since November’s election
we continue witnessing students protesting, rioting, marching and simply
causing all manner of mayhem in the name of their presumption to a freedom
of expression.

Now don’t get me wrong…not all our youth are bad, spoiled, hateful or even evil.

However it just seems that those who do as they should, who do what is right, who
strive to be positive examples are never the ones highlighted, recognized or
applauded for taking the higher moral road.

My editing friend at Plough Publishing House has sent out another book recently…
At The Heart Of The White Rose…Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl
Edited by Inge Jens

I doubt my publishing friend is aware that four years ago I had actually
written a post about this youthful brother and sister duo.
It was a post written after reading the book
A Nobel Treason–The Story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Revolt Against Hitler.

I often think about this young brother and sister especially when I see the stories
about our own young people today.

I often think about the ultimate sacrifice this bother and sister made during
their own generation’s time of madness.

I think of their conviction and bravery.
I think of their selflessness.
I think of how they chose to fight for a cause without violence or temper tantrums.
I think of how they never backed down once they were caught and tried.
Never ashamed of what was really the Truth and what was a lie.
They never acquiesced, never gave in, never gave up.

I’m just starting the new book.

It’s a collection of letters and diary entries.
An intimate window into the lives of two ordinary kids who simply wanted to live,
grow and learn…
yet who opted to take a stand against a very real evil—
not something merely perceived or imagined.

They risked everything.
And in the end, they lost everything.

And yet their story which is decades old remains most relevant to this day.
Perhaps even more so given our own precarious time of anger and angst run amuck.

When we look around to our own current day’s madness…
I pray that we may remember that there will remain those who know right from wrong
despite the maddening times claiming otherwise…

here is a link to that original post……

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/a-noble-treason/

Do not be deceived:
God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.
For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption,
but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap,
if we do not give up.
So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone,
and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand….
Galatians 6:7-11

Hope from the flowers

“What a lovely thing a rose is!… Our highest assurance of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

Crazy thing—this sweet little demure rose belongs to a small potted rose bush which sits out on my front porch. It is the small little rose bush I reported on, and wrote a post about, back in May–the one my son and his bride-to-be bestowed upon me for Mother’s Day. It was a beautiful petite white rose bush. And of course the tiny white roses reminded me of the young German resistance movement championed by Sophie Scholl, her brother and a handful of youthful friends, which lead to the creation of the White Rose Movement.

Time moved on and Summer came and went. Fall came and went. The small rose bush hung on. Winter has arrived settling in upon us like an old thick heavy blanket with the poor little rose bush having maintained its position on the front porch since May. Days have turned into weeks and my forgotten little friend out on the front porch has weathered first the dry hot days of a Georgia summer and now the freezing temperatures of a wet cold dreary winter. This poor little rose has gone days without much water, care or attention—and yet, it holds on and perseveres.

Imagine my surprise, when I was out front taking down all of the Christmas lights this afternoon in the blowing wind and rain, upon seeing my tiny little rose bush sporting a single beautifully pink tinged bloom.
Hummm–I thought this was a white little rose bush. . .?
Is this a marvel or anomaly? Amazingly through the ups and downs of the seasons, the lack of water and proper care, the extreme heat and now the extreme cold–this little rose bush has not only survived, it appears to have actually thrived. . . as well as taking on a bit of a new color.

Could it be that maybe, just maybe, perhaps this tiny little plant is simply offering me a bit of hope for the excited anticipation of warmer and brighter days? A precursor of what will soon be?

It is on this new day to this new week of the last waning days of yet another year, that I offer to you this sweet demure rose—it is our reminder, your’s and mine, that not only is a new day and a new week dawning but there is a new year waiting for us in the wings, for better or worse, to offer us a new start, a new way, a new life, new hope, new dreams, new possibilities. Sometimes all we need is a single little flower to remind us that there is always hope for goodness and new possibilities. May you be cheered on by the sight of a single small rose—here is to a hopeful new year–for us all.

A Noble Treason

“….only religion can reawaken Europe and restore Christianity to its earthly mission as patron and founder of world peace.”
Novalis

(a white rose in the garden /Julie Cook / 2013)

Merriam Webster defines treason as:
the betrayal of a trust : treachery
the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or
the sovereign’s family.

Noble is defined as:
possessing, characterized by, or arising from
superiority of mind or character of ideals or morals.

Putting the two together produces something akin to an oxymoron.
Killing, betrayal, overthrowing, injuring all coupled with high character and
superior morals.
Certainly sounds like a conflict to me–
a clashing of two vastly different thoughts of mind and/or philosophies….
and yet, each were inextricably linked and exemplified during a terribly
grave time of madness.

Yes, I’ve posted images of white roses before,…not this particular image however.
And yes, I’ve written a specific post on the White Rose revolt and Sophie Scholl…
even briefly addressing it in an additional post…and yet, here I am again.
A flummoxing situation has arisen as I find myself in a quandary.

I just finished the book today…
A Nobel Treason–The Story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Revolt Against Hitler.

I know what you’re thinking, “Julie, how long have you been reading that book…
it’s been since May hasn’t it?”
Yes, it has been a very long read.
Not because it is a voluminous tome, not because my life is so consumed that
I can’t find the time…
simply put it has not been an easy read.
The story has been such that I have had to put the book down,
sometimes for weeks on end.

I’m not here to give a book review as that is not my purpose for this post.
My intent is, however, to continue the story of these young people,
to continue placing them, their lives,
their act of passive resistance in the forefront of our minds,
lest we forget.
Hence my quandary…
I can’t keep quiet and not share….
for the final word of the book was to “remember me”….
and remember we shall.

I know what you’re thinking, that all of this is of the past,
why do we have to revisit something so terrible?
Can’t we just let it go?
As none of us really like thinking about any of this.
A casual response might be that “I don’t know these kids, never heard of them…
who cares….?”

I have said this time and time again—
if we forget the past, if we let it go as it were,
we are bound to fall into some bad old ways.
And whereas it won’t be exactly like it was—we won’t, I don’t think,
allow for another Hitler, another Holocaust,
but there are places on this globe that may beg to differ.
There are other names for such…ethnic cleansing or genocide,
ask Bosnia-Herzegovina, ask the Kurds in Iraq,
ask the Rwandans, those in Darfour…the list goes on.

It all still continues…it’s just that it happens under different names and in
different places.
Time and distance does not make it right, does not make it go away…
But this country of mine seems more concerned and consumed with the latest Hollywood starlet’s demise, Queen O and her handbag flack in Zurich as well as
stories about some idiot politician and his bad boy behavior.
Sometimes I sadly wonder where the moral hutzpah of this nation has gone.

Sophie, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were college kids who
could no longer tolerate the cultural and dehumanizing demise of their once
culturally and academically rich historic nation.

Theirs was a literary sort of resistance as they produced leaflets for distribution denouncing The Third Reich.
No violence,
no overt opposition as they had each served their time in the Hitler Youth Program.

It was just to be the power of the written word coupled by the desire that the
World know that there were those who still remained in Germany who still
possessed a moral consciousness as well as a civility that had otherwise vanished
in the wake of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich and National Socialism.

Before it was all over, 6 of their group, all of them young college kids plus a noted professor, would be lead to a guillotine—
14 others sent to various prisons and concentration camps.
The spinoff branches, which had taken hold throughout Germany,
were also then rounded up and either executed or imprisoned.
The Gestapo was working over time to silence a mere handful of dissident youth.
Why and how could a group of young people living in the small town of Ulm cause
such alarm and fear within the upper ranks of the Gestapo and Nazi Party by their
quiet distribution of mere pamphlets…
such that the dreaded and powerful Heinrich Himmler himself took personal
command of the situation and of the ultimate sentencing.

When arrested they all took full responsibility for their actions never
capitulating never recanting.
There was a calmness in the face of certain death.

A single word comes to mind….
Brave.

Could I walk calmly to have my head chopped off?
Could I bear all responsibility, trying to deflect potential harm from my
friends and family?
Could I remain brave or would I be of the status quo afraid of the reprisals?
Could I still hold to my convictions while facing the possibility of
tortures, when those I trusted turned on me, pretended not to know me?
Could I remain brave seeing the tears and sorrow in the face of my parents
as they said good-bye one final time……

I have never been able to wrap my brain around Hitler, the Nazis,
or of the German people who fell under the spell…
how could a once proud country of northern Europeans,
whose nation, though its millennium of rich history,
which had given so much to the world in the way of literature, art and music,
be capable or such barbarism?
How could they have allowed it to grow into such a monstrous level of hate and death
while doing little or nothing to stop it….
going as far as even agreeing with it?

I find it nearly impossible understanding the unthinkable death camps and of
the horrific things a few humans would inflict on other humans,
using those deemed “less than” as lab rats for all sort of heinous acts…
As there were the ovens and the chambers…

But of course that was then and this is now….
why do I torture my mind by pondering such…

Because none of those 6 million plus individuals died in vain,
And just because it is a staggering number that is so overwhelming…
almost impossible to comprehend,
Nor should we forget the millions left dead on the various battlefields
before the war was all said and done.

We remember the women paraded to the “showers” who were stripped naked while
walking past sneering and heckling guards…

These were wives, mothers, sister, daughters….

There were the children torn from the arms of parents.

How do we now comprehend humans being so unfeeling and disconnected
from other humans?

And yet, it continues today…simply in a different guise and in different
part of the world.

But the question should be asked, are there groups of young dissidents
today such as Sophie, Hans and Christoph and if so, where then?
I don’t know.

At first these were Germans against Germans.
It seemingly starts insidiously then grows to an almost triumphant crescendo,
when the world first takes notice, with Kristallnacht,
the night of the shattering glass.
Germans killing fellow Germans because of their religion…
destroying lives, businesses, and unbeknownst, destroying themselves.

I thankfully will never know what it was like to live in a Germany destroyed by
a previous world war.
I have not lived through a great depression nor of a war fought on my own soil.
I do not personally know what those sorts of things do to people.

One of the most poignant parts of the book retells the story of the hurried up
monkey trial for Sophie, Hans and Christoph–
from the time of their arrest to the trial and of the ultimate beheading,
it was less than a week—
unheard of today as these sorts of things could take months to sort out.

Their parents had learned on a friday of their children’s arrest.
On Monday they took the train to Munich thinking they would be there for the trial.
But the trial was already in progress by the time the parents arrived.
The Scholl’s pushed their way through the crowded courtroom to where their children were sitting before the most notorious judge of the Third Reich,
Roland Freisler.
Freisler had been immediatley dispatched from Berlin to pass sentence on three of Germany’s brightest youth.

When Mrs. Scholl first sees her children in a defendant’s box and hears their words,
it is all she can bear.
She faints and is taken from the courtroom.
She attempts to re-enter,
explaining to the guard that she is the mother of the defendants—
the response from the guard was cold, not one of empathy…
“You should have done a better job raising them”—

Aggghhhh the irony!!!

The fact here is that she had done a marvelous job raising her children as she and her husband instilled in their children the deepest sense of responsibility and moral conviction that would transcend time …

No, I don’t think I will ever understand this particular time of our human history. Countless historians, military experts, philosophers, analysts, etc…
greater minds than my own,
have written about, researched and written some more regarding the how and
why of it all—-yet still leaving the world no less wiser.
Was it the perfect storm of events which created such a black and horrendous
scar on our existence?

The White Rose organization wanted the World to know that there were still
decent people remaining in Germany,
defiant and not willing to bend to the will of a madman.
The young Anne Frank, hiding hundreds of miles away in Amsterdam
remarked that she still believed that people were still inherently good.
The christian Corrie ten Boom worked along side her father to aid countless
Jews trying to escape the death grip of the Nazis only to face prison herself.
Father Hugh O’Flaherty worked tirelessly in Rome, within the Vatican
and under the vise of Nazi occupation and Mussolini’s fascist regime,
working tirelessly to smuggle thousands of men, woman and children out of the
county.

I suppose the small ray of hope is that there are men and woman who remain the
still small voices in the desert of the madness of humanity..
their voices continuing to fight and cry out when all else seems lost.

There always will remain a moral compass to guide others.
There will always be risk as there are those who will work equally as hard to
silence the voice of justice and righteousness.

I can hope that when I am faced with the choice of action, of speaking out
verses remaining silent…
I will chose to act and to speak–
to speak loudly with brave conviction–
may it be so that we all choose the courageous path of the often lonely and
dangerous road of justice and moral obligation.

Going no further than the door

“Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door.”
Meister Eckhart

(Photograph: Burges, Belgium/ Julie Cook/ 2011)

I suddenly stop walking, being pulled back by something that I’m not sure of. Was it something I saw? Maybe it was something out of the corner of my eye…. Was it the lone bicycle propped against the wall? The red door? What about the red door? Where does it lead? Was it the emptiness of the small courtyard, the solitude beckoning me to enter through the arched wall, brushing past the cascading vines…?

The ancient cobblestones..is that what stopped me? What stories do they tell? Who walked here before me? Not today, not yesterday, but 500 years ago… who was here? Will I hear the voices of those who were here? Flemish, Dutch, French, German…how many languages? Who was it that lived here? Who is here now? Something asks, beckons, urges me to pass through the arched wall. Is it mere curiosity? I think it’s more than that. But what exactly? Why stop, why now……..

That same feeling, that same urging is how I often feel deep in my soul. Life is going along as it usually does when suddenly there is a feeling, an urging, a longing. What is it? Why am I feeling like this? I feel suddenly empty and yet I know there is more, so much more…but what exactly, what is it that I long for, yearn for?

I’ve been reading the book A Noble Treason, the story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Revolt. I’ve written about Sophie Scholl before…the young German girl who, along with her brother Hans and a close friend, worked to form an underground youth movement in order to fight against, in a most passive way, the Nazi regime. Eventually being caught, tried in a monkey court and being quickly executed by guillotine. Did the Nazis think that cutting the heads off of 3 young people would silence them better than, say, some other form of execution?

The book takes the reader into the development of Sophie and her brother….into the things that helped form them into “dissidents and enemies of the State”…I was struck by one section that reflected on Hans and his studying the works of the French mathematician, writer, physicist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal. Pascal had waged a theory about the existence of God “Let us weigh the gain and loss in choosing ‘heads’ that God is. Let us weigh the two cases: If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then unhesitatingly that He is.”

I found that thought most profound.

I wagered a long time ago that He truly is. Now, JEHOVAH – JIREH, JEHOVAH – RAPHA, JEHOVAH €“NISSI speaks deeply to my soul beckoning, yearning for me to come, to enter, to go further. My soul yearns to be satiated….He has beckoned and I must go.

Are you willing to go further than the just the door…..

The White Rose

Who would have thought it possible that a tiny little flower could preoccupy a person so completely

that there simply wasn’t room for any other thought.
—SOPHIE SCHOLL

Thanks to my sweet and wonderful future daughter-n-law and son, I received this beautiful tiny white rose bush for Mother’s day. My husband gave me a nice new camera as well, which is a nice step up from my little pocket digital Sony. I thought I’d try out the new camera by snapping a few shots of the rose bush.

The tiny white rose blossoms appear demure and almost shy– so unlike their larger showy cousins. I wanted to find the perfect quote or saying to accompany the photographs. I actually found this wonderful quote by Sophie Scholl, when suddenly I remembered the book I had sitting in my stack of books to read—A Noble Treason –The story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Revolt Against Hitler.

Sophie Scholl and her brother were founding members of the White Rose Society—a group of college students who worked to undermine the Nazi regime with the use of passive resistance. It was their hope and vision that, by joining together, the youth of Germany could topple Hitler and his regime.

They helped to publish and distribute leaflets condemning National Socialism. They also painted denunciations of Hitler and the Nazis on the walls of buildings and houses. When seen tossing a stack of leaflets from a college window, the Gestapo arrested Sophie, her brother and another young man. The trio was quickly tried in a farce of a court hearing, sentenced to death for sedition against the state, and were beheaded within hours of the sentencing.

Does it make me sad that upon seeing such a beautifully small white rose I am suddenly reminded of the sad true story of a brave young German girl? Not in the least–I find it a comforting reminder that there have been brave people who stood up to tremendous evil–all at such an overwhelming cost. I enjoy my freedom today because of the brave men and woman of a previous generation. Will a future generation feel the same towards our generation—that I cannot answer.