As an international couple our life is a constant “rapproachement”.
When Josef was asked to address the topic of “Marriage as a Vehicle of Cultural Rapproachement Between East and West” I immediately sensed that this was meant to address the issue of our international marriage and its motto of “World Peace Through Ideal Families”. The conference was about Europe and Eurasia and when I researched the definition of Eurasia it included all of Europe, so I was a little baffled by the request to address rapproachement between Europe and Eurasia. However in the spirit of the event, sponsored by UPF, we went ahead and he prepared a presentation. I write about this elsewhere.
Actually we are talking about rapproachement which is defined as an agreement reached between opposing groups or people in the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, but actually we mean all sorts of things.
I’m thinking of the arrangement between men and women when they decide to form a family. Of course that was also indirectly the topic. The topic was defined once as East and West and once as Europe and Eurasia.
I see the whole issue as two individuals representing two cultures, no matter where they originate. In our case it would be rather north and south as well as Europe and Australia.
We were introduced by the moderator as being the ones who create rapproachement between Mozart and the kangaroos. I would still need to think a lot more about that one. He was referring to our five sons who had all joined the Vienna Boys Choir. Well, I have certainly raised them bilingually, speaking only English at home – this of course meaning Australian English. Â The conference organizer mentioned that he had never met an Austrian-Australian couple before. I told him there were many in Vienna, however we were the first in our spiritual community. We took our “mission” seriously, to be ambassadors for peace and a bridge between Austria and Australia.