Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 5
Turning Trust Inside Out
BY DOLORES LECKEY
We live in a moment of history that
abounds with stories of trust and faith. They
often surface in the accounts given by
prisoners who languished in Nazi
concentration camps, in the Russian Gulag or
in Latin American jails.
The late Eugenia Ginzburg, a political
prisoner, wrote an account of her years in
Siberian camps during the Stalinist era. It is a
moving testimony to the kind of hope and
trust that, it seems, keep people alive in the
face of hell. Her account appears in a new
book titled, “Within the Whirlwind.”
imperfect body?”
Miss Ginzburg says she had reservations
about writing her stories of the prison doctor
who would become her husband - such
personal stories. But what she tells is amazing,
concerning the circumstances - circumstances
that might have destroyed them. She even
says a year when they were in the same camp
“seemed magically happy. We were
astonishingly strong ... for we had gone
through it all together.”
Her stories, as I see them, are stories of
trust, of hope triumphing over despair; stories
of people who did not let go of a mystery that
called them to live one more day, perform one
KNOW
YOUR FAITH
(All Articles On This Page Copyrighted 1981 By N.C. News Service)
TRUST IS AN ESSENTIAL ingredient in any relationship.
Without trust marriages become battlefields, parents drive
children away, and friendships wither. To trust is to risk. The
Vazquez Troupe must trust one another each time the
spotlight falls on their Ringling Bros, circus act. (NC Photo)
Who Was The Evangelist Mark?
One day she met Anton Walter, a German
doctor imprisoned in the Siberian gold mines
-- the worst of punishments - for several years.
He is dragged from this horror to become a
camp doctor. Miss Ginzburg becomes his
nurse.
Her description of making hospital rounds
with him is one of contrasts. The interminable
squalor in the barracks that served as a
hospital contrasts again and again with the
hope the doctor gave the patients.
It was the doctor’s responsibility to
perform autopsies on the multitude of
• prisoners who died from combinations of
malnutrition, abuse and extreme cold. Miss
Ginzburg, who had been a communist, tells
how she discovered that he was a believing
Christian.
During an autopsy, she looked at the body
of a dead man and asked pensively: “And
where is the immortal soul?”
In reply, the doctor gave her “a close look.
He became unusually serious. Then he said,
‘It’s a good thing you’re asking yourself the
question. It would be a bad thing if you
imagined that the immortal soul was
necessarily located in one of the imperfect
organs of our body. ’”
Then, she relates, a colleague tapped her
and, nodding in the doctor’s direction,
explained joftly, “A Catholic, a devout
Catholic.”
After Walter died, Miss Ginzburg wrote:
“Today this unusual and brilliant world of his
and all the riches of his soul lie below a modest
mound of earth in the Kuzminskoye
Cemetery in Moscow. Or am I, perhaps,
making the very mistake against which he
sought to caution me? Am I again seeking the
immortal soul where there is only an
BY DAVID GIBSON
The man bent into the wind and snow,
walking fast along the road. Periodically he
turned around, walking backward awhile to
shelter his face from the storm.
From the other direction, a woman rushed
along on foot. The Siberian blizzard, she
thought, is different from all others. “It
conveys a feeling of man’s primeval
defenselessness: as if a whole host of demons
were on the prowl. ”
When she first saw the figure at a distance
coming toward her, it was like a mirage,
appearing, then disappearing in the thick
snow. Suddenly she knew she wasn’t alone
anymore. All sorts of worries ran through her
mind.
As the man got closer, she recognized
something familiar about his gait. It was
Anton Walter, the man because of whom she
would not spend even one more day near the
prison camp behind, despite his telephone call
warning her not to set out with the threat of a
storm.
Obviously he had known she would not
follow his advice.
She was Eugenia Ginzburg. It was 1947.
This was her first day of freedom after 10
years in Siberian prison camps.
Walter at that point had been a prisoner for
12 years. He was a German doctor who now
had considerable freedom of movement near
more kind act, share one more crust of bread.
Trust is the essential ingredient in any
relationship. Without trust, marriages become
battlefields, parents drive children away,
friendships wither. Furthermore, trust
engenders hope, that virtue which is like the
spark of life.
In fact, to believe in someone is to have
faith in the reliability and integrity of that
person. It means trusting the other. Trust and
belief go hand in hand.
Jesus asked his close friends to trust him
and all that he taught them -- to trust God,
even when everything seemed to collapse.
When we encounter God or the signs of
God, we have to decide whether to trust that
experience or not. Suppose Joan of Arc had
not trusted the voices she heard, or Teresa of
Avila her visions. Suppose the apostles had
not trusted their senses when they
encountered the risen Jesus. Or suppose
Moses had not trusted enough to set off for
the Promised Land.
When life feels secure -- good job,
supportive community, excellent health,
obedient children, achievements - perhaps it’s
not so difficult to be a person of trust. But
when health fails or disaster strikes, when
someone you love dies, is it still easy?
One of the most direct and compelling
declarations of faith I ever heard came fom a
Jewish survivor of the Nazi camps. I met him
in Germany. He looked directly at me and
said:
“When people say to us, ‘Where was your
God when your children were being
murdered,’ we answer, ‘God was with us.’
Surely, you must unnderstand this. When
your Christ died, you believe God was with
him.”
his camp at Taskan. The two had been
transferred over the years from camp to camp.
As they walked side by side that day, Miss
Ginzburg suddenly “felt a sharp paroxysm of
happiness . . . Not joy, not pleasure, but
happiness. That irresistible uplift of the spirit
with which all your anxieties, fears, terrors,
even the most deeply hidden ones, fly away
and you are borne upward as if you were
holding on to the tail of the legendary
Firebird.”
The man she loved was this doctor she met
in prison when she was assigned to serve as his
nurse. He was the kind of man who once sat all
night at the bed of a sick man who was afraid
of the dark.
He joked with his half-starved prison
patients about being overweight -- and made
them laugh.
He took off his socks and handed them to a
prisoner who risked losing two toes because of
repeated frostbite.
He was the kind of man who, after the day
of a particularly gruesome event in the camp,
said to Miss Ginzburg: “It’s been a terrible
day, my dearest. But don’t despair. True, man
has a beast in him, but the beast cannot
triumph over man in the end.”
He was the man Miss Ginzburg flung hard
sayings at “to get him to prove me wrong.”
She writes:
“I hoped that a gleam of the astonishing
serenity with which every particle of his being
BY FATHER JOHN J. CASTELOT
, It would be very satisfying to know more
about the man who wrote the first Gospel
than his name: Mark. Unfortunately, after all
clues to his identity have been evaluated, that
is all we do know with any certainty.
was infused might also illumine my soul.”
He could steer conversations so there
seemed no difference between the living and
the dead. This was important to Miss
Ginzburg, for while she was imprisoned
during World War II, her son, Alyosha, died of
starvation in Leningrad. Walter gave her “the
disturbing but comforting feeling that I could
still do something for Alyosha, that I was even
duty-bound to do something for him.
Strangely, this helped to soften and reduce
the constant pain.”
Walter was Catholic; Miss Ginzburg a
former member of the Communist Party. She
recounts how each time he began surgery in
the camp, he uttered the words, “cum Deo”
(with God).
The portrait of Walter in Miss Ginzburg’s
memoirs, “Within the Whirlwind” (Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich) is the portrait of a man of
belief - one whose entire perspective on life
was visibly affected by that belief.
It is the portrait of a man who never
thought life was evil or that the human spirit
was dying out, despite the degrading prison
camp situations in which he was forced to live.
Miss Ginzburg tells why she wrote about
this courteous, gentle, strong doctor:
“The main thing is that I wanted to show
through his image that the victim of
inhumanity can remain the bearer of all that is
good, of forbearance, and of brotherly
feelings toward his fellow man.”
Until fairly recently, people took at face
value the information given by Papias, bishop
of Hierapolis, in the region known as Asia
Minor. He wrote about 120 A.D.
According to Papias, Mark was not a
disciple of Jesus, but served with Peter and
wrote down carefully - though not in order -
Peter’s remembrances of what the Lord said
and did.
Scholars inferred from this that the Gospel
of Mark was a sort of transcript of Peter’s
memoirs.
However, this isolated scrap of
information is no longer taken seriously by
most scholars. To begin with, we do not even
have the writings of Papias. Only fragments
have been preserved, and this particular
fragment is quoted by the fourth century
historian, Eusebius, who doesn’t seem to have
considered Papias very reliable.
This means the customary view of Mark’s
identity rested on an isolated statement of
questionable worth. Furthermore, Mark’s
Gospel is not a simple “transcript” of
anything. It is a complex reworking of
traditional material about Jesus.
On several occasions, the New Testament
mentions a man named Mark.
- In Acts we meet a John Mark, the son of a
woman named Mary, whose house in
Jerusalem was a meeting place for the first
Christians. His cousin Barnabas was a good
friend of St. Paul’s, and the three set out on
the first missionary journey.
Mark left the group rather abruptly, much
to Paul’s annoyance, and when Barnabas
suggested taking him along on the second
journey, Paul wouldn’t hear of it.
- In the letter to Philemon, Paul lists a
certain Mark among his co-workers and then
in Colossians recommends Mark to the
community there.
- In the second letter to Timothy, Paul
asks Timothy to bring Mark with him to
Rome.
- Finally, the author of the first letter of
Peter writes, “The church that is in
Babylon . . . sends you greetings, as does
Mark, my son.”
Even presuming these references are to the
same Mark, they give not the slightest hint
that he was the author of the Gospel.
Furthermore, Mark was the most common
name in the Roman Empire, and there must
have been dozens of Marks in the early
church.
One of those Marks wrote a Gospel for a
predominantly, if not exclusively, gentile
Christian community.
There is no way to be sure just where that
community was located. Common view had
Mark writing at Rome, but the evidence for
this is quite inconclusive.
It is more likely that he wrote fora gentile
community somewhere in the East, like
Antioch in Syria, the seat of the Roman
government and a very Roman city.
What makes Antioch a strong probability is
the fact that both Matthew and Luke knew
about the Gospel of Mark. Matthew almost
certainly wrote his Gospel in the Antioch
area.
Mark’s Gospel was written almost 40 years
after the resurrection, most likely around 70
A.D. or a few years earlier.
Other questions, however, are more
important than who Mark was or where he did
his writing. For instance:
Why did Mark write a Gospel? What
situation in his community prompted him to
write as he did?
The answers to such questions furnish a
key to understanding his message, a message
of lasting value.
Discussion
Points And Questions
1. Spend a few minutes thinking about a person you trust. Why do you
trust this person? What is the relationship between you? Do you think this
person trusts you? Do you think there is a relationship between the
meaning of the word “trust” and the word “faith?”
2. Why does Dolores Leckey say so emphatically that trust is
important in all kinds of relationships? Does your experience lead you to
agree with her?
3. From the portraits provided by David Gibson and Mrs. Leckey,
describe what kind of person Dr. Anton Walter was.
4. Why do you think Eugenia Ginzburg was so fascinated by the faith
of the compassionate doctor in her life?
5. Choose a statement by Eugenia Ginzburg or Dr. Anton Walter in
Gibson’s article and discuss why this one especially interests you.
6. Why does Father John Castelot say we really do not know much
about Mark, the author of the first Gospel?
7. In Father Castelot’s view, how important is it that we can identify
Mark exactly?
THOUGH IMPRISONED behind the walls and wire of a
Siberian labor camp, Eugenia Ginzburg saw, through shared
suffering, a strong Christian faith in Dr. Anton Walter. She
realized that “the victim of inhumanity can remain the bearer
of all that is good, of forbearance, and of brotherly feelings
toward his fellow man.” (NC Photo by Paul Tucker)
A Believer Behind Barbed Wire