Easter is a different Easter this year than usual; precarious, needy, smaller. There is not that much of a resurrection. Easter 2020 is therefore also an invitation to imagine the encounter with God in a completely different way, namely: “I want to comfort you as your mother consoles you.”
This sentence about God comes from the prophet Isaiah. He does not present God to us as a king, not as a father, not as a shepherd, not as the commander of a group of angels; but as a woman, as a mother – as a mother who consoles. It is a fascinating idea: the mother gave birth to us, she brought us up, she accompanied us, she let us go and come back. Not everyone had a comforting mother. My mother was such a comforting woman. Anyone who has or had such a mother knows what a wonderful idea it is to imagine God as it exists, so that one can believe in it, as a comforting mother.
A deity who queries Latin vocabulary
The mother taught me the multiplication table, she checked the English and Latin vocabulary, she prayed with me and my siblings, she scolded; she sat on the bed when we were sick, she wiped away the tears. And she was there for us again when we got older and she was already old; it is and was there in the crises of our life.
A nice idea: a god, a deity, who queries Latin vocabulary, who hugs us, wipes the tears, which presses us to her heart, who gives advice and comfort. A nice idea: a god, a deity who will endure it later if you find it a bit annoying because you went out into the world and life, but the mother reminded you of an old life and its rules and therefore asks questions that just don’t suit you.
Slowly, I want to live longer
In her last years of life, I often went for a walk with my old mother through the Bavarian Oberland on Sunday – and when I drove too fast for her, she said: “Slowly, I want to live longer.” But then, after her ninetieth birthday, she was said to be getting fewer and fewer. It was like the farewell symphony. You are familiar with this symphony by Joseph Haydn, in which the musicians close their notes one after the other and switch off the light and say goodbye to the stage. It was the same with my mother’s spirits. She was demented.
For us as for God, getting older means facing death. That is what is special about the Christian religion; that made her foolish for the Hellenistic-Roman world in her early days: the divine goes into the community of suffering with people. A mother God has seen an infinite number of people come into life, be children, grow old, go out and die. She takes our face in her hands and says: Don’t be afraid. “I want to comfort you like your mother consoles you.”
If you don’t become like children
Sometimes it is said that old people, especially dementia, would become like children again. I would like to tell you a second very personal story. It was at a time when the dentists were still called dentists and not every German could afford their third teeth: when my many aunts presented their newborn grandchildren to grandmother (she had fifteen children!), The old woman then thought about it an anthropobiological question: how did it come about, she mused that the small children without teeth are generally considered cute, but the toothless old people are considered ugly?
She accepted the toothlessness of the elderly as an eschatological necessity concerning the Bible word “If you do not become like children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven”. And so, theologically the most questionable, but very satisfying for my grandmother, the physical deterioration was explained and embedded in popular piety.
At the threshold of life
Dealing with dementia: Even a demented mother can comfort; it can be comforting to just see her, to hear her voice, to get a hearty kiss from her, to be hit by her disarming emotionality, to feel her joy that you are there. All of this can be comforting – despite and sometimes even because of dementia.
The trick is not to treat demented people who are comparable to infants in their need, like toddlers, but to take them seriously as adults. This will not only benefit the elderly, but also the children. It will change children’s childhood when they grow up in such a society. A “motherly” Easter can develop a different picture of being human.
Easter nests are set up. A nest not only needs a young life, but a nest also needs old life. Easter not only changes the image of God, but it also changes the image of man. Human beings, I mean with this different picture of human beings and human beings, are no longer measured against the ruler of economy and performance. Need for help is then not a disorder that needs to be remedied, but is part of being human. Such a way of dealing with times at the thresholds of life would be a turning point.
“Children are our future” – you hear that every day in politics. But that is only half the truth. Part of the whole truth: The old are also “our future” because our future is old. The old are our future; the children are our future.
The Basic Law as a home for children
That’s why I’m still talking about Hanschen. It is a story that I like very much, which I also told you about years ago. Hanschen shouted: “You have forgotten that the people do not only consist of adults, but also children.” Hanschen is not just any Hanschen, it is “Konig Hanschen the first”. So he says to his ministers: “There should be two parliaments, one for adults, one for children.”
These are plans that would only make a short smile in politics before turning back to the consequences of the shutdown. The story of King Hanschen comes from Janusz Korczak, the great Polish educator, and writer. In it, he tells how children learn to fight disputes and find alternatives to the usual order. The book is old, it was published in 1928 in Polish and German in 1988. But it is incredibly modern: it teaches “pedagogy of respect”. Not only in his children’s books but also in his orphanages, Korczak developed a system of self-government for children, he built democratic structures there.
Can’t you say? It went. Why and how? That already follows from the title of his main educational work, it says: “How to love a child”. German politics could also consider this. German politicians have to be asked: Why is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child so little anchored in this country? Why is the Child Rights Convention so little present in law? Why doesn’t every new law need to be questioned about how it affects children?
The answer could be: Because there are no children in the Basic Law, at least not as rights holders. The Basic Law knows no children until today. It is a pity, it is unfortunate, it is strange. The Basic Law now expressly protects animals and the environment, including Easter bunnies, but not children. That needs to change. The Basic Law must become a home for children. The draft submitted by the Federal Ministry of Justice for this purpose is insufficient.
Getting crazy
Janusz Korczak, the wise man in the orphanage, accompanied his children to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942, around two hundred of them. He died with the children, murdered by the Nazis. Korczak didn’t want to let the kids down. Let’s not let them down today. The great pedagogues would also come with the children’s right, Janus Korczak, Maria Montessori, and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi would come into the Basic Law.
Janusz Korczak has taught us respect for the children. Respect for children and respect for the elderly belong together; it is the bond that spans life. It is part of this respect that old people can be moved in peace. There is a lot to be straightened out in this society. To be aware of this – this is Easter.
