It must have been ten years ago when we first met. You had travelled from your native Germany to visit friends in Australia and had dropped in to see me at Flinders University on the recommendation of a mutual friend, a university chaplain in Munich.

We sat down and chatted in the newly opened ‘Oasis’ –  a unique centre for students and staff, imaginatively constructed to reflect the hospitality principles of the Dutch pastoral theologian Henri Nouwen. I sensed you were on a search.

Then I heard that soon after you returned home, you were down with many others at the Munich train station to welcome refugees. Angela Merkel had just announced that Germany would open their borders to them. 

And they flooded in.

A year or two later I was visiting a friend and chaplaincy colleague who had been the Catholic chaplain at Cologne University and was now a pastor in Bonn. His parish had recently accepted responsibility for a thousand refugees! I had the privilege of meeting the team of 14 volunteers who spearheaded their endeavour, headed by a psychiatrist and including lawyers, social workers, teachers and others drawn from his parish. Two years later, it was 3,000!

Verena, I don’t know the extent to which your visit to Oasis may have fuelled your instinct for hospitality. Hearing how you were welcoming refugees, I was full of admiration. As theologian Miroslav Volf has said, there is no greater injunction in the Bible than that of welcoming the stranger. But, at a distance, I had no idea of the extent of the radical shifts you were undertaking in your life and depth of your struggle.

When I heard about, what I imagined to be, episodes of depression, hints of living on the poverty line as a volunteer and desperate for spiritual support, I began to ‘hold you in my heart’ – which is how I understand ‘prayer’ these days.

In the prime of your life, you soon took yourself off to Greece in admiration for their lifestyle and to join with others trying to help the wave upon wave of asylum seekers risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean in flimsy boats. Greece, of all places, with such political and economic chaos! Itself, under threat! How could anyone cope?

But what I was seeing in your Facebook posts all this time, apart from your courageous struggle, was the artist. Beauty, creativity and depth – in imagery and reflective writing.

So now then… 

COVID has stopped you in its tracks and you are facing the challenges that were always there, but perhaps overshadowed by youthful energy and healthy optimism. Who is going to step up and fill in for you now? What’s going to happen to all those people if you are not there to help? 

I remember how I felt at the beginning of my university chaplaincy. The institution had no place for religion in its day-to-day life. The majority of academics had long thrown ‘God’ out the window. (Not that I necessarily believed in the kind of ‘god’ they had rejected!). I spent a lot of time meditating on what it must have been like to be one of the women at the foot of the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. Powerless. Seemingly irrelevant. Confused. Feeling helpless.

Today your task may well be to explore a new kind of wisdom to fuel your spirit for this stage of your life. Maybe asking questions that may have no easy or definitive answer, such as: How does guilt work in my life? For good and bad. What do I do about the anger I feel from the injustices I see? Can one live with paradox – ‘both/and’ at the same time? And what is ‘relevance’ when one draws faith, hope and love from the well of God’s unconditional love for oneself?

And perhaps, as a life principle, ‘what is life-giving?’

This is where the artist lives.