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Friesen-Braun Trials (Fangs of Bolshevism) Unto the Third and Fourth Generation
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© J. Glenn Friesen 2003-2011
The Stages of Life
This is the only picture that I remember from the home of my paternal grandparents, John C. and Tina Friesen. It is not great art. The picture is not even an original, but I used to marvel at it as a child. It shows the stages of life, from birth to death, 0 to 100. It shows the changes from spring blossoms and sunrise to sunset and to dead leaves in the fall. Family members come and go. Having reached the top of the stairs, the man looks successful, but this soon fades, too. His clothes look Russian. Perhaps the picture did come from Russia, along with my Mennonite great-grandparents in 1876.
My grandfather John C. [the C. stood for his mother's name, Cornelia] lived until 99, so he didn't quite fulfill the promise implied by the picture. If he had, he would have received personal congratulations from the Queen.
As I write this, I am now 54. I am past the peak, and I have started down the steps. There is both good and bad in this second half of life. I look back on leaving my practice as a litigation lawyer, on the breakdown of two marriages, at dreams that remain unfulfilled. And yet the second half of life is also a time of hope, a time when our past begins to bear fruit, a time when we can begin to develop those sides of our personality that we earlier sacrificed in order to form our ego (an ego that was so necessary to establish that personal sense of identity that we used to fight our way through the world). But we find that we need to re-invent who we are, and to ask again the big questions of how we relate to our true self, to the cosmos, to others and to God. And so I have returned to the consolations of philosophy. I completed a doctorate in religious studies, and I have taught a few university classes in comparative Eastern Religions, the Nature of Religious Experience, and Comparative Mysticism.
I continue to try to make sense of who I am and what it all means. We live between memory and hope, retrocipation and anticipation. The already but not yet. And if the alchemists are right, as we align ourselves with our true Origin, there is also a rejuvenation of our spirit, a becoming younger that is not reflected in the picture of the Stages of Life.
Life as a Search is a tragic-comical philosophical account of my life.
Friesen-Braun Trials (Fangs of Bolshevism) is an account of how a great-uncle of mine was defrauded in the 1920's, and the divisions that this caused in the Mennonite church.
The Friesens Abroad is a memoir of a crazy family trip through Europe in 1969.
I have also put my family tree online, tracing the Friesen family back to about 1730.
Unto the Third and Fourth Generation: The Long Shadow of my grandfather I.P. Friesen is a story of the religious conflicts experienced by my grandfather, and the effect that this has had on his descendants.
Revised Jun24/11