DEVOTED TO THE WORD
Lutheran pastor loved to write
Sharing personal stories in a daily newspaper column seems out of character. Having to preach every Sunday to hundreds of people seems an odd career choice for a private man.
Harold Gniewotta was a quiet leader, gentle and caring by all accounts, but easily described as introverted. A Lutheran pastor and a chaplain during his ministry, he turned to writing in retirement. His work appeared in eight different publications, including the Edmonton Journal, where 35 of his submissions ran in the weekly guest writer column, Offerings, between 2001 and 2013. A book of his Christmas meditations and stories was published in 2005.
Pastor Harold, as he was known, died Sept. 6 at age 87, just six weeks after a cancer diagnosis. In five pages of instructions for his funeral at Ascension Lutheran Church, he asked that the service not focus on him, but on the Lord. He also stipulated time limits on the eulogy (seven minutes) and service (no more than an hour). Having presided over hundreds of funerals in 50 years of ministry, Gniewotta knew what he wanted.
“We found out more about him in the last months than we had ever known,” says his stepdaughter Colleen Swenson, touched by comments from people who befriended him or read his Journal columns over the years.
Gniewotta’s travels in retirement following the death of his wife Elsie in 2006 worried Swenson and her brother, Richard Swenson. The Journal published a Gniewotta column (June 29, 2013) sharing a story of how he was helped by a Good Samaritan after he became lost in Nanaimo, B.C., driving his rental car to the airport.
“We didn’t even know about that till we read it in the Journal. Perhaps he didn’t want to share with us signs of his declining memory,” she recalls. “We told him, ‘Dad, if you don’t want us to know, don’t write about it in the Journal!’”
Typically, Gniewotta didn’t talk about his feelings or even ask his children about theirs as they were growing up, Swenson says. Away from the pulpit and his computer, he was a man of few words.
But technology seems to have opened a door for him and he shared his reflections, gleaned from a long ministry in Western Canada and as a chaplain for 11 years at the Dr. Gerald Zetter Care Centre.
Determined to learn how to use a computer, navigate the Internet and send emails, Gniewotta took courses in the late ’90s. Retirement allowed other hobbies, such as painting, photography and woodworking, but the words began to flow and make their way into pub- lication. He joined InScribe Christian Writers’ Fellowship.
Mourners at Gniewotta’s funeral learned even the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, Rev. Dr. Larry Kochendorfer, looked forward to Saturday’s Journal, hoping to see another column by the retired pastor.
Writing about the accomplishments of seniors in many walks of life, Gniewotta wrote: “As a retired pastor my future is in God’s hands, but I pray that the Lord will have meaningful work for me to do as long as life continues.”
Swenson says her step-dad halted his writing two years ago when passwords and email became too much for him.
Gniewotta, born in 1927, used the Internet to research his family’s immigration history. As a fouryear-old, he crossed the ocean from Germany with his mother to join his father, who was already farming in Saskatchewan. They arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax, a place Gniewotta revisited with Swenson in 2009.
In an Offerings column in 2010, Gniewotta wrote: “As I stood in the main doorway of Pier 21, I thought of my mother and sister Irene, who had walked through there with me 79 years before. I can imagine how Mother, nervously clutching her children, her hand luggage and her documents, stepped out toward a great adventure in a new land. She really did not know where she was going or how things would turn out, but she went on courageously.”
Harold and Elsie married in 1963 when he was an intern pastor in Shellbrook, Sask.; she a widow with three young children. Difficult years followed the wedding, with the death of Elsie’s daughter Esther, and the pastor having to move every five or six years to a new post. In 1965, the couple’s son, Keith, was born.
Gniewotta became a chaplain for the Good Samaritan Society in the early ’80s, after serving churches in Rolly View, Wetaskiwin, Ellerslie and Edmonton. He said being a chaplain to seniors in continuing care was the best job.
Befriending lonely seniors gave meaning to his own final decade, when he faced life without Elsie in an assisted-living residence. He wrote (Offerings, Nov. 3, 2007) about his dinner table of regulars who shared their Christian faith with each other.
“Our table is truly ecumenical. We have concluded there will be no denominational divisions in heaven … Since all of us are approaching the end of our lives, we also look forward to continuing our fellowship someday around the throne of God.”