NEWS FEATURE: Despite Struggles, Modern-day Pilgrims Find Reasons to be Thankful

c. 2004 Religion News Service CLEVELAND _ Consider the plight of the original Pilgrims: They came to a new land for religious freedom, and in the first winter alone nearly half of the 102 colonists died from disease and inadequate diets. And still they gave thanks after the first harvest that “by the goodneses of […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ Consider the plight of the original Pilgrims: They came to a new land for religious freedom, and in the first winter alone nearly half of the 102 colonists died from disease and inadequate diets.

And still they gave thanks after the first harvest that “by the goodneses of God, we are so farre from want.”


The fears of scurvy and consumption no longer occupy the lives of people here, but the suffering that is part of the human condition challenges many this Thanksgiving Day in Cleveland, recently rated the nation’s poorest city.

These are the stories of some modern-day spiritual pilgrims _ a dying man, two blind women, a recovering addict, a poor mother, a person deaf since birth _ who come to the Thanksgiving table with their own struggles and still find much to be thankful about.

They are not representative of all people in their situations, but they share an indomitable human spirit stretching over centuries that refuses to give up in the face of loss.

Seventy-one-year-old Mary Lewis comes slowly into the simply furnished living room with the aid of a walker, settling down across from her daughter in a plain wooden chair and smiling. She is suffering from diabetes, Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure and an enlarged heart, but her daughter Vanessa has not abandoned her.

This Thanksgiving, Lewis will give thanks for her daughter, who she said is a gift from God.

Vanessa Lewis-Knox, 39, also will give thanks. She is a statistic of the toll that poverty takes on women and children, but she said she can also see the love of God all around her.

“He gives me breath to breathe. My kids are healthy. … There are so many things to be thankful for,” she said. “Even though I don’t know how my lights or gas or telephone bills are going to get paid, he’s still making a way for me. I don’t know how not to pray, how not to thank him.”


Not that life is easy for a woman with a stronger work ethic than a resume, who is trying to be a primary caregiver for her mother and her children and at the same time find work.

Still, she is thankful for making it to this point in her life. There is suffering ahead, but she can appreciate the love that is in her life today.

Like the friends who invited her family to Thanksgiving dinner. “Just two months ago,” she said, her 15- and 12-year-old sons reassured her, “We’ll just be broke together. No matter what, we’ll be together.”

They are “the little things that you can’t put a price tag on,” but together they make a life worth being thankful for.

Three years ago, Gerald Elbe was spending Thanksgiving at the St. Augustine Hunger Center, looking around at all the lonely people and saying to himself, “That’s you.”

His days had become a nightmare of barely living off the street, sleeping at night in a Salvation Army shelter where he would have to leave each morning. He worked at temporary jobs in junkyards or as a restaurant dishwasher only long enough to get money for cocaine.


This year, he will be the family patriarch at Thanksgiving dinner, saying grace surrounded by his wife, children, sons-in-law and seven grandchildren. Last year, Elbe entered a residential recovery program at the City Mission, and he has not looked back.

“I’m just thankful that Jesus saved my life,” says Elbe. “I lost everything I had, but he restored everything I had, plus.”

There are more than a few regrets. He could be living comfortably today on pensions from his job as a bus driver and his service in the Army Reserve if drug abuse had not caused him to lose both positions many years ago.

As he rebuilds his life at age 59, he is beginning with just a part-time job at the City Mission. But he said he found what was important. He is back with his wife of 40 years, his childhood sweetheart. He is resuming his role as a father and grandfather.

“I cry now, but they are tears of joy,” Elbe said. “I have the love of God that I can show people and give to people.”

Bonnie Robertson and Grace Bertolino stuff envelopes, visit the sick and distribute Communion as Eucharistic ministers at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Cleveland.


So what if both women are blind.

When they gather for Thanksgiving dinner _ Bertolino at her sister’s house in Solon and Robertson with her family at St. Augustine _ the two say they will be thanking God for bringing them to the point where their blindness has become a witness to others rather than a source of pity.

It was not always this way.

As a child, Bertolino said she was angry that she could not play the games all the other children were playing. What changed her life, she said, was a conversation with a priest she had when she was 7. The priest told her that God chose her to be the way she was to be a witness to other people.

“From that day on,” she said, “I was able to move forward and become the person I am now.”

That person continues to defy expectations by serving at Mass as a lector reading Scripture in Braille and distributing Communion. “I am spreading God’s love to his people,” said the 51-year-old woman. “I am his servant. I am his witness.”

Robertson said she grew up being told, “I can’t do this. I can’t do that.” Before the 63-year-old woman found St. Augustine in the early 1990s, she spent her days at home in a rocking chair, listening to the radio.

Now she and Bertolino travel throughout the area visiting the sick, bringing particular inspiration to the blind in hospitals or in their homes.


On this Thanksgiving, she said, “I feel a peace about me, a calmness and a peace that you’re doing the right thing and doing God’s work.”

Mary Ellen Czelusniak says it can be hard for a deaf person to communicate with a hearing person. Often, during lunch at a senior center, she will express herself with a hug and a smile.

“Love is a communication,” she says.

This Thanksgiving, before she goes to a daughter’s home for dinner, she will take two friends with nowhere else to go out for an early dinner at a restaurant. The grace she will say will include the words, “Thank God for being alive, for … friends, for having food, for having a place to go to.”

Czelusniak said she also will thank God for one other thing: her deafness.

She sees other people in her life drift away from their faith, or take their faith for granted. But she said those lacking the gift of hearing understand in a special way their dependence on God.

She passes the gift on by teaching religious education to young deaf people at St. Augustine. When she was in the hospital recently for surgery, her visitors included Bertolino and Robertson, the two blind women from the church.

“I thank God for the gift of deafness, the gift of love, the gift of St. Augustine,” she said.


You are 88 years old. You can still see the dead bodies floating in the water _ Americans and Japanese _ from 23 battles in the South Pacific during World War II. You saw the devastation firsthand as one of the first American soldiers in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped. Your wife _ someone you describe as “your life” and a person you would give everything you own to have back _ died four years ago.

And you have been diagnosed with a form of colon cancer, given a life expectancy that is measured in months.

What do you do?

If you are John Shvorob of Richmond Heights, you still go to work every morning as a heating and air conditioning contractor. Some of your customers have been with you more than 50 years, and when you know they are struggling on a fixed income, you don’t accept any money.

For lunch, you go to a senior citizen center where you take flowers from your garden and put one at each place. And you tell a few jokes to lighten the mood. “You get ’em laughin’, that’s the idea,” the easygoing Shvorob says as he leans back on a couch at the Hospice of the Western Reserve.

He will spend this Thanksgiving at his oldest son’s house, where they will give thanks and say grace together, knowing it may well be the last time he will share the holiday with his family.

But that is not what he will dwell on.

“I’m here, so what is there to complain about?” Shvorob says.

As a Russian Orthodox Christian, he holds the hope of being reunited with his loved ones in the next life. He will end this Thanksgiving Day, as he does every day, by praying first for forgiveness and then for acceptance.


“I tell God every night, whenever you’re ready, my number’s ready. St. Peter, open the gates.”

KRE/PH END RNS

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