The Column with Canon Rev Dr Rod Garner We must tear down walls to build new friendships
I’M WRITING this column on an early Saturday morning. Some restful music playing in the background to help my concentration and an Advent candle still smouldering behind me that burns each day leading up to Christmas.
It’s a beautiful candle: deep red with numbers down the side and purchased this year in Berlin on a brief visit to a sick friend.
Rolf Eckstein and I go back a very long way, 50 years in fact.
As teenagers quite unknown to each other we shared a 1960s passion for the Beatles and the Stones. I had a letter published in
a music magazine. Amazingly, a copy of the magazine came into Rolf ’s hands in what was then East Berlin under Communist rule.
Western material was censored or destroyed by the authorities but somehow Rolf got to read the letter.
We exchanged postcards and agreed to write to each other.
We got to know each other better and the letters, gifts and cards continued.
We grew up, found partners, had children and now have grandchildren.
In 1983 I visited him for the first time. Not an easy endeavour.
I was detained at Checkpoint Charlie and monitored by secret police during the stay.
Rolf was jailed for several days after I left.
Before releasing him, the prison officers held him at the top of a flight of stairs and told him how strange it was that so many prisoners seemed to fall down these stairs. Sometimes with fatal outcomes.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down.
Somewhere I have a tape of Rolf’s ’phone call to me on that momentous evening telling me that he is “a free man at last and he has tears in his eye”.’
Terribly moving and a great relief to me.
I had always thought he might be shot dead trying to escape over the Wall. It had happened to friends he once knew.
He is in poor health now after a stroke and a serious fall but music still moves him and he is very slowly managing to walk a few steps.
He plays piano and adores his new grandson.
Over 50 years we’ve survived, seen political parties and politicians come and go.
We have sung and prayed for peace to be given a chance and witnessed the wars and global atrocities that have scarred our world and made peace seem impossible.
Now his daughter tells me that as a young woman she is fearful about her future in Germany with political extremism making its presence felt.
I tell her how sad and perplexed I am by the state of British politics and the unknowable outcomes of Brexit for the UK and Europe.
I’m hopeful that Rolf might be able to visit my family next time, meet our sons and grandsons, enjoy a beer, listen to some old tunes and give thanks for an enduring friendship that has enriched our lives.
The candle from Berlin will lighten these dark December days. The season of Advent forbids despair about the state of our nation or its future. It is instead a time of waiting and hoping, of praying and still believing that nations can live together in peace and resist the powers of darkness and fear.
In a small but significant way my friendship with Germany keeps me hopeful: the lesson of 50 years tells me that divisions can be overcome and walls of our own making can be pulled down.
And in a way that only the deepest and truest meaning of Christmas can convey, I will continue to work and pray for peace and goodwill.
Not just because we are poorer in every way without such possibilities.
But also to honour the birth of Jesus and to keep faith with his promise of a future kingdom. His message of peace and love endures.
It is the most precious gift in anxious and uncertain times.