Rosebud founder shares year-end message

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

For LaVerne Erickson, founder of Rosebud School of the Arts and Rosebud Theatre, it was a busy, yet fulfilling year.
After spending months of 2014 recovering from back surgery, Erickson started a new project this fall: teaching a course on rural community-based tourism at Hope College in Drumheller.
The course has no Canadian textbook available, but with his experience – including founding Rosebud School and Theatre, Canadian Badlands Passion Play, and Chemainus Theatre: and serving as Alberta Travel Ambassador, Erickson acknowledges, “I’m like a living textbook of what is to be done.”
He hopes the course will result in a new crop of rural tourism enterprises in Alberta.
Erickson emphasizes his concern for rural Albertan life.
“An ongoing challenge (I see) is the decline of rural population, and the effect that it has on our sense of community and wellbeing as a country,” he says. “The young people that grow up in Rosebud … either they have to be entrepreneurs and figure out something they can do here, or else they go to the city. We spend our families’ energy raising bright young people and then we lose them to the city.”
Besides the economic impact, “I think there are a lot of moral implications,” he says, “because of the values that we have (in rural areas) that come from us being Christ-like to one another.”
When he talks about being Christ-like, he says people often protest, ‘you’re trying to push Christianity.’
But his point is simply that we’d all do better if we lived the way Jesus did.
“That’s who we want to be like,” he says, “because if we’re not like that, our society’s going to fall apart. … if we’re not truthful and honest and caring.
“If my focus is on myself and my wealth, and my little circle of friends, it becomes self-defeating. On the other hand, if we invest ourselves in others, we forget about ourselves and we’re building something that’s going to be handed down.
“Everybody who comes (to Rosebud), we want them to have some sense of belonging. So many people don’t feel like they belong anywhere.”
So in 2015, “we’re going to have some work-bees here,” he said. “So they’re maybe going to come and plant trees and build a gazebo.”
They’re also exploring the feasibility of a community garden.
“Jesus drew a circle of love so big it took in the whole world,” he says. “Communities are big circles of love. So that’s my year-end message. The older I get, the more important that is.”
Erickson mentioned friends, neighbors, even former students, who passed away or received serious diagnoses in 2014.
That – and turning 71 himself – also shapes his perspective on the year ahead.
“If we’re getting to the end of (life), we have to express our appreciation for one another,” he says. “If there’s something that needs to be resolved in our relationship, let’s be truthful and honest and pursue that and make sure this all comes to the kind of conclusion that it should.”