Friday 13 November 2020

Sursum Corda (Meditation 7)

Here is this year’s Christmas-card-cum-Jahresblatt. I had to think long and hard about it. What on earth can you do for a card at a time like this?

I remembered a postcard that HAP Grieshaber made at the end of 1947 and sent to his friends. I bid on one earlier this year, but didn’t get it. Anyway, “Sursum Corda” was the message he’d written on the reverse, “Lift up your hearts.” 

He had returned home to southern Germany after being a prisoner of war and then a forced labourer in the Belgian coal mines, just in time for the severe winter of 1946-7. It was one of those winters where huge numbers of animals died in the fields because the farmers couldn’t get to them with fodder.

“Sursum Corda” he wrote the next winter. It’s the message to send in dark times.

So here we are. A tiny light in the darkness. Lift up your hearts. There can and will be light. You just have to make it.

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