Prelude and Postlude to Herman de Jong’s story
“A Good Friday” (link below)

Herman de Jong’s prose story of “A Good Friday” has been with me for as long as he’s been gone — twenty-one years now. I wish I had known it before then, just as I wish I could have talked to him about it. That deep regret, that I did not ‘know’ my own father as well as he deserved, will stay with me until it gets passed on to my children. To Calvin’s saying “true sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves,” I would add in the knowledge of those we love, and of the many whose stories of discovery have been passed down to us.

Stories are the wellspring of wisdom. This one, about a Good Friday and Easter Sunday seventy five years ago, was told by my father some forty years later, during his reflective phase. And now, after another thirty-five years, I present the story again, enlarged and enriched by the comings and goings of Herman’s family and church in a rapidly changing, volatile world.

The story centers on Easter weekend, 1950 in the Vennekerk in Winschoten where Herman did public profession of faith, as was the custom. What goes unsaid is the length and breadth of the shared experience that radiates out from a moment like this. Those young catechumens could not imagine the lives that they would live, or even fully understand what had been given them already.

At the age of eighteen, on that Sunday morning, my dad gave attention only to his parents, likely unaware of a certain fifteen year old girl sitting elsewhere with her family — that romance was still three years out. But, from my perspective, seventy-five years later, that awareness hits me hard.

There aren’t many moments like this to be had in our distant past, before Super 8s. and iPhones. In that still standing sanctuary, within familiar worship service and among all the grandparents, aunts and uncles I would later come to know and love (they were all there), I can feel the faithfulness as tangibly as a gentle breeze under summer sun.

Three years after that, most of these family members took this faithfulness with them to reconstruct in Canada. By 1955 the hesitant young man and lovely girl were married and a year later I was born. In the years to come, their professions of faith would be challenged by change and rising responsibilities, sometimes subject to doubt, but always carried in communion.

The once eighteen year old, by now confident enough to be a teacher, choir director and church organist, took his ecumenical faith into various mainline churches as director of music, serving these gracefully for most of his years. Only after his final stints promoting the ministries of Shalem and then Friendship Groups did he give up his first love, leading worship from behind the organ.

In 2023, seventy years after emigration, a grandson of Herman and Stiny de Jong sat down at the new organ in Winschoten’s Vennekerk to accompany a Sunday morning worship service for just the van der Laan clan. Some hundred odd members of Stiny’s extended family had gathered nearby for their week-long reunion, and had rented this old church for themselves. Herman and Stiny were not there.

Yet, family and faith had endured remarkably well. The newer organ and its playing would have pleased my father. The pews had not shifted, and the stained glass windows were still at play. A granddaughter preached and a daughter-in-law led worship, while others formed a music team. The Invocation and the Benediction echoed in from long ago, bouncing off of 1950, 1550 and many points between.

If Herman de Jong could have glimpsed all this on that Sunday so long ago, I imagine his Yes would have been as bold as the trumpet fanfares he was fond of playing later.

(Pease continue with the prose story below)