Elaine Klaassen

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.


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,…

Continue reading

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.…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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:…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

How do you earn your way out of poverty?

It’s good to open a discussion on poverty. I appreciate Joe Selvaggio’s article in that regard. However, his tone makes one think that he lives miles and miles from the people who find themselves, for many, many different reasons, without the means to survive. His deprecating tone is disturbing. And…

Continue reading

SPIRIT AND CONSCIENCE: The Church’s ongoing reformation

The mural on Trinity’s building at 20th and Riverside Is filled with biblical figures. The artist, Larry Rostad, wrote: “We have represented the extended family of faith with paint, in mural form …. Our hope is that Trinity’s mural will contribute to our neighborhood; may visible hand-painted images help reveal the INVISIBLE things of the Spirit.”

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Cultural Uniqueness of Trinity Lutheran Congregation When I talked with Jane Buckley-Farlee, co-pastor of Trinity Lutheran Congregation, we discovered she had been at that church as long as I’ve been at Southside Pride—21 years. I’ve been reporting on religious groups, mostly churches, during all this time; overall,…

Continue reading