Marmalade and Christus Victor

What The Hiding Place had to say when my husband died

Hello everyone,

I haven’t been writing at all this month (if you got my Little Women posts, those were pre-scheduled). This is because on the first Sunday of Lent this year, my husband of 12 and a half years suddenly died of heart failure. This month has been a whirlwind of overseas family visiting, countless meals and cards and prayers delivered, and a memorial service here in South Africa. This event has completely reshaped life for me and my two (make that three, come June) kids, and I am sure it will come out in my writing as I process what this all means. I’m just not sure how/what/where I want to share about all these things publicly, but I don’t know how to write about anything else right now, because this is everything.

Instead of writing something new, I’m going to share a piece that I wrote last year and was pitching to a few publications, but didn’t get picked up. It’s about my experience of watching The Rabbit Room’s stage adaptation of Corrie Ten Boom’s Book “The Hiding Place”. It was written for a different situation. But I think what I’m finding is that if things are true, they are just as true when your 35 year old husband dies. Right? They have to be.

Another one of my favorite Corrie Ten Boom stories is the way she talked about grace to face suffering. She said her Papa told her “There is no grace for your imagination”. As someone with a wild, anxiety-prone imagination, this is important news. There is no grace for all the mental catastrophizing I have done and will certainly continue to do. But, just like Corrie’s Papa would give her a train ticket right when she needed to get on the train, when you actually need the grace, it will be there for you in your Father’s outstretched hand.

I can also say, even in these very dark days there has still been marmalade. A whisper of a feast in the presence of my enemies.

Marmalade and Christus Victor

I first encountered The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom through a children’s abridged version that my parents read out loud to us in the evenings. We watched the Billy Graham Association version of the movie a few years later with our youth group. My abiding feeling associated with this story was one of dread. These were the days of the Columbine school shooting, the Twin Towers collapsing, and although I lived as a missionary kid in South Africa, our evangelical subculture was shaped by media produced in the USA. Our Christian school library had The Book of Martyrs rebranded by D.C. Talk as The Jesus Freaks. From the news to the bookshelves, we learned that these were the true heroes, the ones who say, yes to following Christ even when faced with the barrel of a gun.

Of course, I was too young to understand the larger narratives of politics and religion shaping American culture, and the role persecution stories played in all of this. Even then, the rational part of my brain knew that Christians in South Africa (and the USA, for that matter) were in no way being persecuted like the church in other parts of the world. But when you’re in sixth grade, you don’t think about things like the evangelical voting bloc or the war on terror. Instead, you lay in bed at night and imagine you’re at school, being held at gunpoint, and have to decide if you’re ready to die for Jesus. With my eyes tightly shut, I would whisper — I don’t want to die. I want to live. Am I a bad Christian if I want to live?

Corrie Ten Boom’s story, rather than comforting me with inspiration, filled me with shame and fear. I didn’t want to think about the Holocaust. I didn’t want to think about whether I would be brave enough to hide Jewish refugees in my house. I didn’t want to think about what I would do if a Nazi was holding a gun to my head.

As a college freshman I was forced to read about the concentration camps of the Nazis again. In my English Lit 101 class, we were assigned Night, by Elie Wiesel. This time, as I read, I was not as concerned about finding myself in the story as a hero or a martyr. Fresh off the plane from South Africa, I was faced with the stark contrasts between my current life in small-town Indiana, and the challenges I left behind at home. I wasn’t looking for myself in this story; I was with Wiesel, looking at the horror of the world and asking: Where is God in all of this?

Where is God, when HIV/AIDS wipes out an entire generation of South Africans, when bulldozers are lined up to dig graves every Saturday? Where is God, when some people go to bed hungry but their wealthy neighbors have so much money they spend more on dog food each day than most people make in a month? Where is God, in all the world’s suffering? Is he a watchmaker, setting the ticking rhythm of the world, then abandoning us to suffer the consequences of our human sin and folly?

In the book, Wiesel describes a moment when the prisoners were forced to watch executions, including the death of a very young boy. In graphic detail, we watch with the narrator as the boy struggles between life and death in a most inhumane, degrading manner. As the boy’s death finally draws near, Wiesel writes,

“Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…’”

That was his answer. Where is God, in the midst of injustice, of evil, of suffering? Here. With us. Emmanuel. God is not a watchmaker who abandons his creation. He enters into it, he suffers with us. Although writing from a Jewish perspective, Wiesel’s parallels to Christ’s crucifixion is hard to miss. Where is God? Here. Christ, God in human form, struggling between life and death, hanging from a tree. Here, wailing with the mourners at a funeral. Here, with the AIDS patients who can’t get life-saving medication because of a political battle beyond their control. Here, with the orphans missing their mothers. Here, with the hungry.

But rather than comforting me, the idea repelled me. I did not want a God who just endures suffering and evil alongside me. I did not want a God who dies. I wanted a God who makes things right.

I don’t want to die. I want to live.

It was with the sort of internal angst one feels when going to the dentist that I volunteered to host a screening of The Rabbit Room’s production of The Hiding Place. I knew it would probably be good for me, in that inspiring, martyr-y kind of way, but I couldn’t shake my sixth-grade feelings of dread at the thought of subjecting myself to over two hours of a play about the Holocaust.

It was a few weeks after South Africa’s most recent election, and everyone was on tenterhooks about the outcome: would political parties make a compromise? Would our democracy survive another round? Would there be looting and violence, like that kind that broke out a few years ago? It was a moment in history swirling with uncertainty. What should Christians do at times like this? Somehow watching Christians survive the Holocaust seemed appropriate — sort of a reverse of Godwin’s law. If they could get through those fraught times, with answers to the problem of suffering, the sovereignty of God, and how to live in fraught political times, we could surely survive our own, arguably less intense historical moment.

Betsy, from The Rabbit Room Production of The Hiding Place

So, with coffee and brownies, a collection of us gathered to experience this theatrical adaptation. From the very first lines, the play invited us to watch. To witness. To see the movement of God in this grand moment of history, and in the intimate details of one small family of watchmakers. The set glowed with warm greens and golds in the cozy home of the Ten Boom family. There was laughter, joy, and flowers. The Ten Boom’s father prays before a simple family feast, complete with a dish of marmalade from their aunt, the jam glowing sweet and golden, acknowledging God’s hand in their joy by saying, “Lord you know what makes the planets spin. You know what makes my watches hum. You set the atoms dancing. And in your grace you bless our feast with marmalade. So tune our hearts to hear the tick and the tock of the vast engine of your mercy. Amen.”

A God who runs the universe, and who pays enough attention to bless a breakfast with marmalade. That was the God of the Ten Booms, in the comfort of their family home. There was still the question, though. Where was this God when they entered the concentration camp of Ravensbruck?

Betsy in Ravensbruk (more info on how to stream the play is here)

As the characters entered the camp, the entire set changed, so washed in pale blue light it was as though we were watching a black and white film. All of the warmth and laughter of the Ten Boom’s family home drained away. At first, it seemed that Betsy and Corrie Ten Boom’s answer would be the same as Elie Weisel’s. In fact, in a mirror of the moment in Wisel’s book, we watch as a dissenting prisoner is strapped to a post and dies a slow, torturous death. At the other end of the stage, Betsy hands out smuggled communion crackers, reminding the huddled prisoners that Christ suffered and died for them, and in a way, with them.

And yet, the Ten Booms’ ultimate answer is not the same as Wiesel’s. For one thing, there is marmalade. The package of smuggled communion crackers also contained a jar of marmalade, glowing golden in the midst of the grey and white set. For another, communion is not just a reminder of Christ’s suffering. As Betsy hands out the crackers, she starts with Christ’s death. “This is his body, broken for us. Even now he is here. He suffers in each of us. He bleeds, as we bleed. He dies, as we die.” But Betsy is not finished with this familiar declaration of incarnate suffering. She continues the story of the gospel, clutching hands and speaking over the moans of the dying prisoner. “And yet, he is neither spent nor consumed.

Do not be afraid sisters, there is no edge in all of Creation over which he does not cry mine. And that which he claims he will not fail to make new.

Great good is coming, and we shall all be witness to the thunder of its arrival.

Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. Amen.”

Christ’s death was not empty suffering at the hands of injustice. It is the way in which all creation is being gathered up into something new. All the orphans will one day be given a home. All the wars and calamities, all this maneuvering of political leaders while their people suffer, will one day come to an end. Because of Christ, we are not alone in the pain of this moment. God is not a watchmaker abandoning his creation; He is with us. And because of Christ, we can see this pain is not the end. Christ is risen, he will gather up the broken bits of his creation and make it new.

The play ended, and all of us who were gathered there sat for a moment in silence, letting the tears which had been running down all of our faces get wiped under the cover of the darkened room.

I had survived yet another Holocaust story, but this time, I left feeling lighter. I was no longer replaying Corrie’s story as a test simulation for my own willingness to die for what I believed. What Corrie’s story was telling me, was that I needed to live. The God of the galaxies cares about my little life. In his scandalous mercy, I have Christ, and I have marmalade. I do not have to ignore the darkness and injustice, to pretend everything is alright when it clearly is not. And yet, perhaps the goal of the Christian life is to live in such a way that we can glimpse with Corrie what lies beyond the edge of darkness:

“Him.

The prince of clerical errors.

The Master of Marmalade.

The Father of Fleas.

The Man of All Sorrows.

Who sets watches and galaxies spinning. He was there, too. In every one of us.

Christus Victor.

And he is here, still”.