Survivor

— Midweek Meditations:
thoughts, inspiration and encouragement
from ACF community members —

My grandfather, who served on a battleship during WWI, once told me of his meeting with the only survivor from a cruiser that had been sunk during the Battle of Jutland, a stoker by the name of Hugo Zenne. I was thrilled. What was that like? What was the man like? The only survivor, I thought, must be extraordinary. No, said my grandfather. He wasn’t special in any way he could recall. In fact, he remembered the man as rather bland and a bit on the dull side. That so contradicted a gaudy pamphlet from an evangelical group I had come across a bit earlier that celebrated the lone survivor from an airplane that had crashed somewhere in South America, who claimed that they were chosen by God, who obviously had special plans with them.

Is survival a sign of  God’s special grace? Stories of survival are also usually stories of those who did not make it. Were they not worthy of God’s grace? It does not make sense. More often than not, survival has to do with quick thinking, knowing how to react, and with showing that bit of extra resilience, like in the case of Günther Haselbach who survived the sinking of the four-master Pamir in September 1957. Sometimes there is a physical advantage, like in the case of Guðlaugur Friðþórsson who survived the loss of his fishing-boat and all other crew members in March 1984 – he was found out by scientists to have a body-mass structure that was closer to that of a seal or a walrus than to other humans. And sometimes the story of survival is the story of a relentless search and rescue effort, like in the case of the girl that German, British and Israeli rescue teams dug out of the rubble in Karamanmaras, Turkey, a week after the devastating earthquake in 2022.

Surviving does something to those who survived. Obviously. It also does something to those who saved them, found them, picked them up, dug them out. And this is where, in my opinion, God’s love comes into view. Whatever the coincidence, the sheer luck, happenstance, serendipity: there is, more often than not, a moment of God’s love and courage that helps the searchers to go on, and that helps the survivor to rise beyond themselves, like Bob Cusick whose ship foundered  in a gale in February 1983, and who kept himself alive by holding on to the chorus lines of “The Mary Ellen Carter” by the late Stan Rogers:

Rise again, rise again—though your heart it be broken, and life about to end,
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,

Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

There it is.

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The ACF Midweek Meditations
are written by a diverse group of our church members with the intention to seek God’s fingerprints in our lives. They range from somber to humorous and are inspired by all facets of live and faith. Written by ordinary people from all walks of life, they reflect a wide range of Christian backgrounds and spiritualities.

Each week’s text portrays the individual viewpoint of its author. They might not always resonate with everyone, and are not meant to be understood as representing the Anglican Church Freiburg as a whole. Yet, as a church that is aiming to ‘Build a Community of Grace’ we seek to practice learning from and listening to one another.

We pray that these humble ponderings add a small spark of blessing to your week.

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