Thy Kingdom Come by Friedrich Schorlemmer
http://www.oocities.org/marc_batko/thykingdom.html
Friedrich Schorlemmer was born in 1944 in Wittenburg. Since the beginning of the seventies, he was engaged in the peace- and environmental movements of the DDR (east Germany). From 1970 to 1978, Schorlemmer was a university chaplain in Merseburg. From 1978, he has been a preacher at the castle church in Wittenburg where he joined ina grassroots group. In 1988 with his group, Schorlemmer presented the “20 Wittenburg theses” critical of the regime at the Evangelical church day in Halle. Today he is an academic director at the Evangelical Ac ademy of Saxony and since May 1990 SPD chairperson in the Wittenburg city parliament.
Schorlemmer was a co-founder of the citizen movement “Democratic Awakening” (Demokratischer Aufbruch). In 1989, he was honored with the Carl-von-Ossietzsky-medallion of the International League for Human Rights. He is a member of the west German PEN and belongs to the German UNESCO commission. In 1993, he received the peace prize of the German book industry.
This sincere and courageous man who sought to forge swords into plowshares strengthens through his example fellow human beings in the hope that “gentle water can break the stone”.
A man of integrity, Friedrich Schorlemmer lived in the DDR and struggles today for the removal of new inner walls with a language borne by a readiness for reconciliation and understood by people in the East and West. With the whole strength of his personality marked by truthfulness and pensiveness, he admonishes the restoration of inner unity as a condition for successful outer unity. He contributes to overcoming the problems that Germans have in dealing with one another in the process of reunification and at the same time contributes to the preservation of inner and outer peace in Germany and the world.
Thy Kingdom Come
Happy is the one who can pray: “Thy kingdom come”. Because he has not given up all hope, he prays. Because he can pray, he has not abandoned all hope. His eyes are not sealed up. He sees what is and what oppresses. While reading the low and high tide reports and the “prosperity of desert growth”, he also sees what can develop and grow.
What we hope and desire appears in and throught he little things of life.
