BUILDING COMMUNITY
A faith unfaltered by time Maria Loewen's faith is unshaken through 100-years of heartache and upheaval
When Maria Loewen is asked how she managed to live to the age of 100, she has a one-word answer: “Gebet”—prayer. Along with prayer, Loewen, who celebrated her centennial birthday on February 1, reads the Bible every day; she’s read through it several times. “The disciplines of prayer and reading the Bible are very important to my mother,” says her daughter, Marianne Dulder. This has been an example to her children and grandchildren, she adds, noting how she exemplified her Christian walk by “praying, studying God’s word, and attending church.” At the same time, Maria—a member of North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church—“never pushed her faith on us or her grandchildren with lectures or condemnation, but lived a balanced life worth emulating,” she said. Instead, she spoke about “a caring heavenly father” who was the “basis of how she perceived and lived her life.”
the couple and an infant daughter moved to Germany a year later where they lived for 18 years before immigrating to Canada with their four daughters. Despite many hardships, heartaches and upheavals in her life, Maria never complained, Dulder said. “Her way of dealing with all of that was not an entitled response of ‘Why me?’ but one of acceptance and even greater trust in God who she was certain cared for her and would take her safely into the future,” she said.
Early-life marked by trials
Born in 1921 in Russia to Johann and Katharina (Janzen) Sudermann, over her now 100 years of life Maria experienced many trying experiences—poverty, persecution, famine, war, refugee flight and other setbacks. She experienced hunger in the 1920s during famine in Ukraine, and later saw her first husband of only one month taken away by the Soviets in 1941—never to be seen again. She was also caught up in the fighting between the German and Soviet armies during the war before fleeing to safety in the west with the retreating German army—a terrible and terrifying trip—before being helped by Mennonite Central Committee to go to Paraguay when the war was over. After remarrying Heinrich Loewen there in 1953,
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APRIL 2021
M B H E R A L D.C O M
Maria Loewen celebrated her centennial birthday on February 1, 2021
