Mariellen Gilpin (WCTS May 2018)
Have I ever shared with you my sense that there may have been other lives for me? Both memories occurred during a family trip to Germany. I have only the sense, not a clear one at all—except that when I was with my mother and nephews driving down an autobahn in Germany on a beautiful summer day, suddenly I had a sense of great grief and suffering nearby. Then I saw the signs for Auschwitz. I don’t know if I simply picked up the sense of others’ suffering, or if I was triggered by my own memories of another life.
On another occasion, again in Germany, I was given a free hand with the map, and I navigated our little family up (down and around!) on a little mountain road to a small city called Wasserburg. As I remember, the medieval city was built on a small plot of land between two rivers. When we rounded the last turn so that we could look down into Wasserburg, I had a clear sense I’d once lived there. I knew without being told, for instance, that the crops in the fields surrounding Wasserburg were hops—nothing I was familiar with during my years growing up among corn and soybean fields in central Indiana.
Mariellen Gilpin is one of WCTS editors and a member of Urbana-Champaign IL Friends Meeting.
What Canst Thou Say? 