n e w c h u r c h l i f e : m ay / j u n e 2 0 1 5
Why does He want there to be a heaven? (Because God is love, and love
desires to make others happy.)
And why did He make them male and female? (For the express purpose of
marriage, because it is in marriage that people can experience heaven’s highest
love and joy, conjugial love.)
And what did He tell the first couple? (“Be fruitful and multiply.”)
Why did He tell them that? (Because marriage originates in the Divine
marriage of Love and Wisdom that makes heaven and fills it with such
happiness; and that marriage of love and wisdom seeks to bring forth the third
element of Divine life: use. The natural use, or “fruit,” of marriage in this world
is the birth of children.)
This is why marriage was ordained by God, and is holy, and why its joys
surpass all others – because its use is the highest of all uses, the propagation of
the human race, which adds to the population of heaven.
(WEO)
v as in valor
In her review of Naomi Gladish Smith’s ode to her father, V as in Victor,
(page 286), Vera Glenn says this book “will resonate with those people whose
families lived through many of the same experiences as Victor Gladish and his
family.” Well, it resonates with me.
Naomi tells the story of her father, a minister in Colchester, England, who
in 1940 is forced by the looming threat of World War II to flee to America with
his wife and five children. It is a sad story of a man unable to pursue his dream
as a New Church minister, but who emerged a “victor” anyway.
Mr. Gladish succeeded my father, the Rev. W. Cairns Henderson, who
spent one year in England after his ordination in the mid-‘30s, before he and
my mother were called to Australia.
Part of my Dad’s job in England was serving an “open road” ministry on a
motorcycle – and we siblings have always had a hard time imagining our father
on a motorcycle! How did he keep his pipe lit? Tragically, it was a bad fall from
that motorcycle that may have limited Victor’s usefulness as a pastor.
But what really resonates for me from this tale is the way Victor and his
wife persevered in the face of hardship and disappointment, without infecting
their children with bitterness, sorrow or complaint.
My parents were in Australia for 11 years and never left until the war
was over. They lived with the tension and hardship of war and rationing, on a
meager salary with few resources. They were a world away from family – my
father’s in Scotland, my mother’s in Sweden. If Dad needed to write to Bishop
de Charms in Bryn Athyn, it was six weeks before he could expect an answer.
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