Love as an attitude to life
Love as an attitude to life
An interview with markers Wim and Marianne Groos
Wim and Marianne Groos were markers at the Walk of Wisdom for 10 years. At the beginning of this year, they said goodbye. Time for an interview! Really a job for Damien we thought. As a former pioneer of our route, he is broederdamiaan.nl concerned with what love and wisdom are.
As I attach my bike to the fence in front of their house, the front door swings open. A radiant Marianne comes out and gives me three warm kisses. Wim is not there yet. A little later he comes in, panting: he has hurried. This morning I went for a run, this afternoon I volunteered at the Repair Café, tomorrow morning I was a cantor in the church. It is no different for Marianne. Almost 80, but still in full swing.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”, I ask Wim, who pulls his leg. He shrugs his shoulders. “Oh well, in our running club someone of 92 participates.” Proud: “It’s not about the speed. It’s about the fun, the connection, stimulating each other a bit.”
I recognize that attitude: a sense of community. Friendly. Not strict. With humor. What is your source?
They take turns speaking: raised in the same neighborhood, the same kindergarten, “we are 28 days apart:” they beamed in unison. They came together at the scouting. Marianne was Akela, supervisor of the cubs. When she heard that Wim was joining, she shouted: “If Wim Groos joins, I’m gone!” The Groos family had a reputation. “His mother was…” Marianne looks hesitantly at Wim, who eagerly joins in: “quite a lady.” Marianne: “Always at the front of the church, with such a posh hat…” Wim joined. Marianne stayed. They have been married for 56 years now.
For Wim and Marianne, the neighborhood is not just nostalgia, but a fabric of people. Next to the house where they live, Wim was born, five generations of Groos lived, they had an electronics store together for almost forty years.
Underneath their business was a cellar with a bar. At party nights, when the children were in bed, neighbors came by. Also residents from the nearby monastery. There was music, laughter and singing. Good conversations were held. “We had one rule,” says Wim. “Everything that happens in the basement stays in the basement.” He smiles. “I remember how a priest was dancing with a neighbor. Nothing crazy, shoulder to shoulder. Elsewhere that was not possible. It was possible in our basement.”
The cellar was also a breeding ground for joint actions, such as a benefit book market for an orphanage of Mother Theresa in Calcutta. A famous writer at the time – Toon Kortooms – came by in person to sign. Wim: “Doing something good together, relaxing, having fun, but also depth. That spirit of togetherness has shaped us.”
Giving without accounting
“Is faith your source?” I ask. They both shake their heads. Wim: “It’s more natural. It comes from ourselves.” Although they do find inspiration in faith that things can be friendlier in the world.
Marianne: “We got it from home. My father was a policeman. He helped in silence. For example, during the war he had to lift someone from the bed at night. The man was wrong, really wrong, but he asked my mother at home if she had a coat for him — it was cold in the cell. ‘A person remains a person,’ he thought.” Shortly after the war, the doorbell rang. On the sidewalk they found a package with a note: “thanks for the coat”. The package contained a beautiful painting. I look at it. It has been hanging in Marianne and Wim’s living room for years.
Marianne: “When fishing, my father once sat next to a man who looked sickly. The man coughed quietly.” It turned out to be a painter, who had to fish for food for his family. At home, my father said to my mother: “Come, let’s buy a few paintings. Then they have something to eat.” The paintings hang upstairs in the bedroom.
Wim starts enthusiastically about his mother’s sister: a missionary sister in Africa: “It was not about winning souls, but about helping people.” In a very conservative time, she helped young women with contraceptives. “They begged her for it, because otherwise they couldn’t feed their children.” Wim: “Back in the Netherlands, all her earthly possessions fit in one banana box. We liked that. She didn’t value luxury.”
Those examples have not been forgotten. At the birth of each of their four children, they held a ‘birth party’. They did not ask for presents, but donations for Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta. “We have also adopted children there for a long time, now we support local projects,” says Marianne. “You don’t put your own child in the trash, do you?”
Wim still drives for the Zonnebloem, does the editors of the church website. Marianne is a board member of a support fund, which distributes food packages to people in the neighborhood. Together they deliver two hundred neighborhood magazines. “It has to be done anyway,” says Wim. “We feel that responsibility.”
I sigh out loud: “You are retired! Aren’t you getting tired of all that toil for others?!”
Wim, firmly: “And then? Breakfast, reading the newspaper. A walk. Lunch. Take a nap?” Marianne: “Life without volunteering would be empty for us.”
I ask why. Wim: “It gives you a good feeling. But that is not an end in itself.” Marianne: “Of course I get happy when we distribute the neighborhood newspaper and someone picks up a newspaper: how nice of you to do this! But that’s not what we do it for.” Wim: “The good feeling confirms that it is good. It’s a confirmation that you’re on the right track.”
Doing good without accounting. Regardless of the result. With sincere intention as a basis, as something natural. Without expecting anything in return. Marianne: “Otherwise it’s not love.”
“But what is love then?” I ask Marianne. Helder: “Love is doing something for each other, even if you don’t like doing it yourself. Wim likes pumpkin soup before going to bed. That’s quite a lot of work. I prefer to cook simply. But Wim likes it, that’s why I do it anyway. I see him enjoying it. That’s nice, isn’t it?”
Wim: “I will never forget how I helped a grandmother in the Repair café with her first Sony, a small, portable cassette recorder. The woman wanted so badly to let her grandchild hear it. But I just couldn’t get it repaired. I took it home and after hours of fiddling it worked. When the woman picked it up, she put a tape in it. You’ll never guess what was going on then….:” He looks at me with sparkling eyes: “THANK YOU-SIN-TER-KLÁÁÁSJE.”
A route as a community
At the Walk of Wisdom, their task was to mark a piece of pilgrimage route right behind their house. Wim was also a ‘route doctor’ — a word he coined himself. With auger and pole, he cycled out to screw in missing signs or put a new marking in the ground. Together they thought about the starter pack for the pilgrims. A few months before the official opening, they ran the route for a trial, with photocopies of the concept guide in hand. “All the test runners came together afterwards to eat soup,” Marianne recalls: “Very cozy.”
Now, almost eighty, they have handed over their part of the route. To people from the neighborhood – how could it be otherwise – their neighbors across the street. Marianne, decides: “I don’t want Wim to go out with such a heavy pole on the bike anymore.” They don’t let go completely. While walking they come to the route, speak to pilgrims. “They invariably tell us: what a nice trip it is.”
They recognized in the Walk of Wisdom something of the spirit that guides their lives. A route on which people get moving and can express themselves to strangers along the way. Informal, connecting, without hierarchy.
Actually, I wanted to develop a route around the world, I say. To propagate the connection between people. But the desire turned out to be too great and there is only a round around Nijmegen. Wim smiles: “Try to cherish the small circle around Nijmegen. From there you can make the circle bigger.” Marianne: “Every rain shower starts with a drop.”
“Do you still believe in that global connection?”, I ask more sombrely than I want. Wim: “In the week before Easter, I sang the ‘dark matins’ in a small group with the community of the monastery. In one of the psalms, we recited “how the women of Lebanon are raped.” Little has changed in 2,500 years,” he says matter-of-factly. But it doesn’t make him gloomy. “Maybe my little prayer can help.”
Wisdom is knowing where your wealth lies
“All that life experience and also 10 years on a pilgrimage route around “Wisdom”. What is that for you: wisdom?”
Marianne tells about a sister with whom she had a difficult relationship. “She had almost no one and we always picked her up for the hospital. Prepared food for her. But every time I was with her, I heard a little voice inside me: ‘what a nasty person you are’. I didn’t listen to it and tried to be there for her anyway. ‘Oh Maai, I would say to myself, just swallow it.’
When she died, it turned out that she had disinherited us on purpose. Of course, that’s not what we did it for. But what stuck was: why? Why so?!” For a while, Marianne was very sick of it. Until she saw all her children and grandchildren come in on her birthday. “Look, what wealth,” she thought. “My sister had no children. She was poor.”
Marianne: “Wisdom is realizing where your wealth lies. That you know what makes you happy.” Wim nods in agreement.
Not far from their home, outside, in the Heumensoord is part of the Walk of Wisdom. Part of their neighborhood. Grown out of love. Partly thanks to Marianne and Wim.
