Growing up in North Saskatchewan as a child in the late ’40s and early ’50s, my thoughts return to our evening prayer which is similar to the “Office of the Church” prayer.
Mom and Dad usually gathered the twelve of us children around the kitchen table for this prayer to say the Rosary.
Most of the prayers were said in German and Russian, so my mumbling was, “Stodda…stodda…stodda....Amen.”
English was okay for me, but I could not speak nor understand the prayers in German and Russian, except that I knew we were praying.
At the end of the Rosary, Dad would unfailingly say, “Now we will say an Our Father and Hail Mary in English, for the conversion of my homeland—Crimea, Russia.”
Forward many years later. I was visiting home after the Christmas services on the reserves and we were all watching the news on TV. It was about Russian leader MikhailGorbachev’s announcement on the restoration of freedom of religion in Russia. Tears silently flowed from my Dad’s eyes as we watched.
Several years later, I asked my Dad about those tears. Quietly, he said, “I left my homeland for freedom, and never did return, and for over 80 years we’ve prayed for freedom in my homeland.”
Dad was 80 years old at the time, and the year he was citing was a year when I was not yet even born. All of our families’ life courses are undefined, to be sure, yet my Dad, with his deep faith and insight, managed to include the prayers of his parents, my grandparents, and all of us twelve kids, when he said, “We have prayed for this.” For me it was a lifetime lesson in faith. Dad died at age 88 years in 1998.
Sister Bernadette Feist, O.S.U., coordinates the Valley Native Ministry in Lebret, Saskatchewan, in the Archdiocese of Regina.
