Feast of the Holy Innocents - Sunday, December 28

RICHLAND HLLS — When Marie Talbott of Bedford visited New York City not long after 9-11, she was touched by memorials for victims, especially thousands of origami cranes
suspended from the ceilings of churches.

In Japan, the origami crane is a symbol of peace, and legend says that folding 1,000 paper cranes will make the folder’s desire come true.

When Talbott returned to her house of worship , Calvary Lutheran Church in Richland Hills, the Bedford woman had an inspiration for her congregation.

"After the war [in Iraq] began, I thought we should have 1,000 cranes for the soldiers, for their safety and the end of the war," she said.

The project also became a way to mark the "Slaughter of the Innocents," an event related in the Gospel of Matthew. The biblical account tells of an angry King Herod who, fearing the predicted birth of the "King of the Jews" as a potential rival, commanded the killing of boys 2 years old and younger in Bethlehem and surrounding areas.

On Dec. 28 each year, many churches remember the baby boys during the Feast of the Holy Innocents. They are honored as martyrs. Church members often display charity
by encouraging adoption, fighting child abuse and promoting education.

In 2003 — the last time Dec. 28 fell on a Sunday — worshippers at Calvary hung hundreds of cranes of many colors, many of them created by children in Sunday school. Talbott supplied paper and instructions to the youngsters. "Some were really industrious," she said. "I have a book on origami, and the crane is one of the easier ones. It doesn’t take long. Anytime I was sitting down, I was folding."

This year, with Dec. 28 again falling on a Sunday, congregants so far have made nearly 900 cranes of varying colors for the Feast of the Holy Innocents service, said Viktor Andersson, Calvary’s director of worship and music. The plan is to stretch seven fishing lines horizontally across the church’s ceiling, each with hundreds of cranes attached to strings dangling vertically from the lines.

For church member Leslie Herd of Richland Hills, a retired chemical dependency counselor, making cranes this year has a special personal significance. Her husband, Harry Herd, was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer in 2004. Despite doctors’ prediction that he would only live six months, "we’re blessed because he’s still here," Leslie Herd said. But in mid-November of this year, Harry Herd suffered a liver abscess. Leslie Herd spent an anxious 12 days with him in a Dallas hospital before he was released.

A church member brought her a huge stack of paper to create origami. "I was sleep-deprived and couldn’t read and concentrate, and at one point, I was just disoriented," she said. "The blessing of the cranes was that it was just a mechanical thing for me to fold and fold. "During those 12 days, it made me feel productive," said Herd, who made about 250 cranes. "Normally, I wouldn’t be a person to do a lot of precision folding, but it worked for me."

Symbol of peace According to Japanese legend, anyone who folds 1,000 paper cranes will have a wish come true. The crane became a symbol of peace because of this legend and a Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki, who as a baby was exposed to radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She died at age 12 of leukemia.

Before her death, she folded cranes in hopes that she would live. When she realized she would not and saw other children in her ward dying, she wished instead for peace and an end to suffering. She folded more than 600 cranes before she died, and her classmates continued making cranes in her honor. A statue of Sadako, standing with her hands outstretched and a crane flying from her fingers, stands in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. Her story has been told in several books and has become an inspiration for schoolchildren to create cranes in a wish for peace.

www.cranesforpeace.org

TERRY LEE GOODRICH, 817-685-3812

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