Who's Got the Power?

Dear Friends,

Edith Velmans, a Sheffield, Massachusetts resident toward the end of her life, was a Jewish "hidden child" during the Nazi occupation of Holland in the second World War.  She died age 97 in April, and her memorial service took place this last Saturday.  Despite the crazy heat and humidity the place was packed, and the ceremony became an evocation of her spirit -- also captured pretty well in the pre-war photo (above) that became the cover image of her 1996 memoir, Edith's Story.  She was sometimes known as "the Anne Frank who survived."

Never ignoring the horrors of the war years, which included her own narrow escapes, the death of her father, the deportation and murder of her mother, grandmother, brother and many others dear to her, Edith went on to lead a highly intentional life, marked by hundreds of close friends, an unusually happy and active family, and generosity at every level. 

My mother was one of those close friends of Edith's ever since her arrival in the US in the 1940's, so Edith's family was a big part of our sense of the world.  The thing everyone instantly felt about her was her joy in living.  She did not identify with loss, still less with any victim status or traumas.  It took a lot of persuasion from others for her to gather up her diaries and letters from the war and turn them (50 years later) into a book.  Edith had trained as a psychologist; her husband Loet worked in public relations.  They were active in business, in philanthropy, in the arts, and in their many children's, grandchildren's and great-grandchildren's lives.  They were travelers, readers and eventually writers, and up for any adventure.  Instead of taking the lesson from the war that they should retreat into safety, they seemed to take the lesson that life was for involvement.  Edith was serious at times, she could be a demanding matriarch, but she was also funny, girlish, and above all positive.  She was even magically able to bestow positivity on others, as many memorial comments conveyed.

And that is the issue for us.  Can we drop the sense of this world as fundamentally difficult, ruined, and ourselves as fundamentally broken?  To put it more psychologically, can we notice that we may be adding, to life's inevitable misery, some extra dollops of self-righteous suffering?  Can we notice that our search in meditation and prayer, for instance, was only difficult as long as we believed it to be?   Or, to put it more positively: We are each given a vast potential, the vast potential, for free. 

Edith's life speaks what Glinda, the good witch, says to Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz:   "You've always had the power, my dear."

wishing you joy in all you do,

Michael