The Dwelling Place of Wonder. Harry L. Serio
“California, Here I Come.” He had found his spiritual rainbow with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and sought his pot of gold on the opposite coast.
There never is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because rainbows are seen from one’s own particular perspective. You see it when you are in a mist, and should you travel to where you think the rainbow ends, you find that there is no end, just another beginning. The treasure of the rainbow is in the beauty of its vision, its hopes, its dreams. It’s good to follow one’s dreams as long as they keep receding into the future and you recognize that you are continually in a state of becoming.
Richie settled in California and worked at an assortment of odd jobs. He and his wife, Barbara, held positions as butler and housekeeper for the actor James Cagney. He thought it unusual that the Cagneys saw their children only by appointment, and only at certain times of the day. What other stories they could have told. Richie was also a horticulturist, and then he began dabbling in real estate in the Los Angeles area. Those were boom times for land development and he made a fortune. He later moved to Oregon where he also continued to sell real estate before he died of a heart attack.
Richard and Barbara Wertz crossed the country several times in the fifties, but the only stories I heard were of Jehovah’s Witness theology, of how blood transfusions, Christmas, and aluminum pots were bad for you. It didn’t bother me about the transfusions or cooking in aluminum pots, but not celebrating Christmas was an entirely different matter. I felt sorry for their kids who seemed to proliferate in biblical proportions with every trip east. Nevertheless, I delighted in sending them a religious card every Christmas.
The trips east were not so much for family reunions as they were for the Jehovah’s Witness conventions. There was a particularly big one at Yankee Stadium one year. Campgrounds were set up in New Jersey and New York where Witnesses from all over the world could pitch their tents and park their campers. In the fifties, American highways were wide open and people were on the move. I was impressed with the huge numbers of people attending the religious gathering. When you can show the world how many people you can pack into Yankee Stadium, you create the thought that if so many thousands of people believe their doctrines, there might be some truth to it. Numbers may work in politics and business, but religious truth shouldn’t be determined by how many adherents it has or how many converts it makes.
When Charles Russell founded his sect in the nineteenth century, he had the revelation that only 144,000 would make it into heaven. When his group grew to a few million worldwide, some were getting short-changed. Richie couldn’t persuade me to join a religion that had limited occupancy in the hereafter.
I was also bothered by their constant predictions of the end of the world, which they seemed to make with regularity every other decade. Originally known as the Millennial Dawnists, the group was founded with the expectation that the cosmic curtain would be drawn in 1874. And then it was 1914. And then 1918. And then 1925. I don’t know how many times since then, but Richie was now pushing for 1975. I suppose if you keep making these predictions, you will eventually get it right. But who was going to be around to say “I told you so”?
Richie sold his home in San Diego, bought another one in Tujunga, and realized the fortune that could be made in the burgeoning real estate market. Years later, he cashed in and moved to the Rogue River area of Oregon where he was not so successful. His wealth was not compatible with his religion, however, and eventually he drifted from his church, although his family continued in the faith. Richie’s faith journey has raised the question of whether a person’s life experiences determine what his spiritual expression will be, or does a person’s faith shape and mold his character and experience?
Of course it is both. That’s why it is called a “spiritual journey.” Everyone is on such a journey. We are continually in a state of becoming as faith shapes life and life speaks to faith.
I wish I had had the opportunity to discuss this with Richie, and with Lucas. I can only guess that Lucas’ spirituality was traditional and deep. I was too young to have deep philosophical and theological discussions with this simple man of simple tastes and rigid ways.
Lucas lived by the clock and by the calendar. Five days a week he worked at the weaver’s trade, coming home on schedule and demanding that his dinner be served exactly at 6:00 p.m. Soup was required at every meal, usually chicken. Dinner had to be eaten in silence—even a slurp was met with a stare.
After dinner, Lucas would go upstairs and take down a wooden cigar box in which he kept his tobacco and cigarette papers. He used a rolling machine by which he made his cigarettes in a very precise manner. After listening to the radio and his favorite programs, “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow” among them, he would retire. It was a pattern from which he seldom deviated.
Today our lives are seldom routine and are filled with overcrowded calendars and multitasking. We have lost the freedom that comes from a disciplined life that provides space for family, for simple joys and special graces, and for interior maintenance of one’s soul. It is in remembering this plain farmer from Saratov that my heart longs for his wisdom that was lost because I never recognized it as such at the time, but now that I have reached his age I have come to value.
THE MAD MONK
Natalia Grauberger stood with her monogrammed leather luggage in front of Castle Clinton at the foot of Manhattan. She had completed an arduous sea voyage that began in the Black Sea port of Sebastopol after leaving her native Czaritzyn. Across the New York Bay, many of her co-voyagers were being processed through immigration at Ellis Island, but Natalie had traveled first class, enjoyed conversation with the captain, and dined at his table. She stood alone with the bags her father had crafted for her in his leather factory, waiting to begin a new life in a new world. A proud woman, she was grateful that she did not have to undergo the often demeaning process that awaited the steerage passengers on the isle of hope and tears.
She came to America with an offer of marriage from Mr. Ellenberger, from the same Volga-German community in which she had been raised, only to learn that Mr. Ellenberger had tired of waiting and had married another. It did not take long for her to be noticed by another Volga-German, a tall, handsome farmer from Saratov who had found a new occupation as a weaver in this wonderful land of opportunity.
My grandparents, Lucas and Natalie, were descendants of industrious German farmers that Catherine the Great invited to settle in new lands that had been added to the Russian Empire. Catherine wanted to show the Russians how hard work, technological skill, and a strong sense of community could produce abundant crops in the region around the Volga River. It didn’t take much to persuade these Germans to leave their homes in Anhalt, the Palatinate, Hesse, Mannheim, and Schleswig-Holstein. In the two hundred years since the Protestant Reformation, Europe had been devastated by wars. The Seven Years War of 1756–1763 was the last straw. Louis XV had sent his troops into southwestern Germany to lay waste to the land and completely destroy the infrastructure. Poverty, enforced servitude in the military, heavy taxation, and religious persecution made living conditions intolerable. While many of these Palatine Germans found their way to America and joined existing communities, most notably the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” some thirty thousand accepted the Empress’ invitation to move eastward. The carrot at the end of the stick came in the form of large tracts of land available for purchase, freedom from taxation and military conscription, religious freedom and a measure of self-determination, and financial assistance in establishing their communities.
For more than a century these Volga-Germans endured hardships, Cossack raids, burning and pillaging, but they continued to prevail and even to flourish. By the latter part of the nineteenth century their numbers exceeded 1.7 million. Some, like Natalie’s parents, actually managed to rise in the ranks of the upper middle class so that their children could receive a good education and enjoy the fruits of their labors.
However, a “Russification” process had begun under Czar Alexander in 1874, and the emigration of Volga-Germans to the American frontier had begun. The first decade of the twentieth century brought many changes. The dark clouds of unrest began to gather and the four horsemen of the apocalypse were saddling their steeds, ready to bring war, famine, pestilence, and death to Mother Russia and to the rest of Europe. Those