Spirit and Conscience, columns by Elaine Klaassen
Elaine started at Southside Pride in 1996 selling ads, maintaining the religion calendar and writing articles that eventually became a column called Spirit and Conscience.
Elaine Klaassen
Holiness (emerging)
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN If I were to rank different activities in the order of physical difficulty, that is, the amount of effort required, from the most difficult to the easiest, it would look like this: 1) giving birth 2) emerging from the ocean not having drowned 3) playing Chopin Etudes…
Legacy of Hope
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN I read FB posts too many times a day. I am shattered time and again by the evil afoot in our world. I despair. Then I remember my dear friend Rev. Harry Maghakian, who retired from pastoring Andrew Riverside Presbyterian Church a few years ago, and died…
Summer Song (love)
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN “I’m having an affair with a married man,” my friend Allie, who is a pillar of respectability, told me. “What???” I said. Of course I had to act surprised, but anybody who ever saw her and her husband together would NOT be surprised. Could they ever laugh…
Migration (chance)
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Where you are born is the luck of the draw. We don’t choose our birthplace. Why is THIS my home? The rippling grain, the lone tree, the curling creek beds and endless sky. The prairie is my home. Not the desert, not the mountains, not the sea,…
Vulnerable citizens, opportunity for the unscrupulous
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Everybody hopes they will never be jumped, assaulted, robbed, held up, mugged, etc., on the street. But it happens. It’s hard to imagine what gives perpetrators permission to traumatize vulnerable victims, such as the disabled, the elderly, young mothers, unarmed people. At the end of January, Mr.…
The Children (fear and hope)
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN War is waging and we picture the children, 4 years old, 8, 10, 12. It is dark, they’re hungry. Anything could happen tomorrow. There is nothing to count on. They have to believe that somewhere a great big unseen father, or mother, looks out for them. They…
Stillness (contentment)
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN In my garden grows memory, knowing and imagining. I imagine a garden. I really do. My keyboard is a protected garden, maybe an arboretum, and I imagine that my fingers are droplets of dew touching leaves, grass, branches, stones. There is no frenzy in my garden. The…
Spirit and Conscience: Work and Poverty
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN I think about my white privilege. First of all, both my maternal and paternal grandparents OWNED farms in southwestern Minnesota, that is, they were in control of land that was stolen, but if they ever had a passing thought about it, it probably went something like this:…
Healing
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Thirteen years ago, within a period of 18 months, Mary Bergerson’s losses were more than anyone could imagine. Her mom died of brain cancer, her soldier husband took his own life, her youngest brother died suddenly, her step-children were taken away because her disability eliminated her right…
Gust of Wind (mysteries)
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Many years ago a little piano student of mine wanted to play a scary Halloween song. When we couldn’t find anything he liked, I wrote him a simple piece about the howling wind, the gusting, cracking wind, a windy Halloween night, when the trees groan and rattle…
A conversation about poverty
Editor’s note: An article by Joe Selvaggio, founder of Project for Pride in Living and MicroGrants, was published in the Nov. Nokomis and Dec. Phillips/Powderhorn and Riverside editions suggesting ways to solve the problem of poverty in Minnesota. Elaine Klaassen, managing editor of Southside Pride, responded to the article in…
Healing Hub at Minnehaha Communion Lutheran Church soon open to the public
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Minnehaha Communion Lutheran Church (MCLC) has already been for years a place where non-members and strangers come to be buried and married (same-sex couples included). And for many years there have been regular AA, Al-Anon and Adoption Support groups that meet at the church. Community groups sometimes…
The Light and Heavy Chorale (earthbound)
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Dust to dust. Whatever. Life is hard. Fires, storms, early deaths, accidents, failures, let-downs, rejections, abandonments, wars. Life goes on. We make our chips and dip, fire up the pickup truck, shingle the roof and sew our wedding dresses. We still smile at the sunrise and hold hands at…
St. Helena Catholic School revitalizes music program
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN There’s a special place in heaven (or, at least in my heart) for people who make music a reality in the lives of children. Such people are found at St. Helena Catholic School, a PreK-8 in South Minneapolis. The music program at St. Helena isn’t what it…
