Church chat
While I have not graced the inside of a church in quite some time – well, OK, I did attend mass on Christmas Eve to appease my mother – I found myself inside two different churches just this past week.
The first occasion was on Tuesday, inside a well-endowed Episcopalian church that is run by obviously well-endowed people. My presence there was in no way religious, however. This church happened to be my designated polling place, and I was merely casting my votes for the mid-term elections.
The second occasion was on Friday. I was attending a memorial mass on the campus of the Catholic university where I work; a co-worker had recently lost her nephew, and I wanted to show my support. I had never been inside this chapel before, and my unease at entering was tremendous. It had nothing to do with the chapel per se. It had more to do with the Catholic Church in general. A Church which has pretty much excommunicated me and said loud and clear: “We don’t want you.”
I was nervous, ill at ease. I actually whispered to a few colleagues that if the church were to suddenly explode, it would be my fault. I was kidding, yes, but my feelings were genuine.
I feel incredibly unwelcome in Christian churches these days. It has nothing to do with God or my belief in God. In fact, God and I communicate and interact on a rather daily basis. Which is not to say that I hear a deep, booming male voice with a Brooklyn accent inside my head. I am speaking… metaphorically.
What I felt most inside that beautiful little Catholic chapel was a sense of loss. Of emptiness. I MISS being an integral part of a church community. I MISS ritual and song and communion and community. I MISS tradition.
I miss songs and prayers and even rote responses. Just tonight, as I was parking my car for the evening and walking into the house, I could hear one of the village churches’ bells chiming. It was impossible for me not to sing along silently in my head: “Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
The small University chapel where the memorial mass was held was aesthetically beautiful, with ornate stained glass windows, paintings, and religious sculptures. Jesus, even though he was hanging on the cross, did not look at all displeased or angry with me. I think he may even have winked at me. But probably not.
The chapel reminded me of all the churches I had been inside in Germany. We lived in Germany for four years and traveled extensively. It is impossible to escape churches in Germany; they are everywhere. And most of the ones that were bombed into smithereens during World War II have been rebuilt. The huge churches of Nürnberg (Nuremberg) are a prime example; photos of the flattened churches are posted within the carefully recreated and restored churches and sold as black and white postcards to tourists from the countries that bombed them. Bamberg, although not really all that far away from Nürnberg, was a rare city pretty much unscathed by the bombings; its old-style architecture, 11th century cathedral, and two episcopal palaces are arrayed along the Regnitz River in a rare pocket of Bavaria left unharmed by the ravages of the Second World War.
München (Munich), my favorite German city – partly because it mixes old and new so well and is located in the true heart of Bavaria and partly because I spent five weeks there as an exchange student in high school – is filled with famous churches of its own, the Gothic dual-towered Frauenkirche probably the most famous of all.
It is not just large cities, though, which sport incredibly massive and ornate churches and cathedrals. Many smaller towns, which at one time were market hubs or centers of the Holy Roman Empire, sport amazing cathedrals. Speyer is a prime example with its four-towered Romanesque basilica, originally built in the early 11th century and then destroyed and rebuilt several times over. It takes your breath away to see such amazing feats of art and architecture in such small, out of the way places.
The churches in tiny villages, like Heilsbronn between Ansbach and Nürnberg, where we lived for two years, had an amazing Lutheran church. My younger son had the privilege of going to a Lutheran Kindergarten in Heilsbronn, and periodically they had ceremonies and special church services in the local Lutheran church. Originally a Catholic church and part of a famous monastery, the church is another Romanesque basilica and purportedly houses paintings by Albrecht Dürer, a native of nearby Nürnberg. To have such amazing architecture and art and history and tradition in your small, provincial village – and to have it still in active use as a place of worship! -- leaves me stunned.
The city that stands out the most in my mind as a crossroad of places of worship is the town of Worms. While visiting Worms for a day, we were able to see its magnificent Cathedral; the site of the Diet of Worms where the famous Edict of Worms declared Martin Luther, subsequent hero of the Protestant Reformation, an “outlaw”; and the oldest Jewish cemetery in Germany.
The Romanesque Worms Cathedral is one of the Kaiserdome, like in Speyer, a relic of the Holy Roman Empire. Some bits of it date from the 10th century, while most of it was built during the 11th and 12th centuries.
Aside from its Catholic background, Worms is also a landmark of Protestant history. This was the place where in 1521 Martin Luther was branded a heretic, an “outlaw,” worthy of arrest because he refused to recant his religious beliefs, some of which had been nailed to a church door in Wittenberg the year before.
At one point Worms was also a center of Judaism in Europe, its first synagogue built in the early 11th century. The Jewish Cemetery, which also dates from the 11th century, is one of the oldest – if not the oldest -- Jewish cemeteries left in Europe. Called the “Holy Sands,” this well-preserved sanctuary of sandstone tombstones is an eerie reminder of a time when Christians and Jews co-existed in peace in Germany. The fact that the cemetery survived the Nazis at all is amazing. While most of the Jewish Quarter of Worms was destroyed during Kristallnacht, the cemetery itself was left intact. Legend has it that the town archivist convinced the Nazis to leave the cemetery alone because of its historical importance. There is not a Jewish community in Worms today.
It is impossible for me to convey the impact of seeing all of these historically, religiously, and aesthetically significant places and structures in a mere blog posting.
I have been inside a lot of churches, some of them almost a thousand years old, some of them utterly destroyed and painstakingly rebuilt. The history of the Catholic Church and the Protestant church and empires and governments and wars and disagreements over faith are represented by these structures. The structures alone, however, cannot convey the history. That is left to the modern caretakers, and who knows how good of a job they do conveying the past to today’s now ME computer and technology generations. Whether people today care or are even interested is another matter.
One of my colleagues teased me on Friday that my presence in the University chapel almost made him choke on his communion wafer. He said that I sat there, arms crossed, with this look on my face that said: “My God! How can these people believe all of this crap?”
I hope that was NOT the impression I conveyed. It was most certainly NOT the thought that was going through my head. I sat there as an outsider in a place where I had once been an insider, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the chapel and by memories of all of the amazing churches and cathedrals and buildings I had seen while living in Germany. I thought of all of the years and toil that had gone into creating all of those churches and their artwork and their beauty. I thought of all of the war and strife that had criss-crossed Europe and destroyed and burned and pillaged many of those places. I thought of the evil of the Nazis that tried to wipe out an entire religion and the Allied bombs that destroyed historical places of worship in a matter of hours, if not minutes. True, many of these structures have been rebuilt, and many are still used as places of worship today.
The tiny chapel where I sat on Friday is considered “old;” it might be a hundred years old -- and renovated several times over. There is a sense of history and tradition there, as far as the University goes, but there is very little in the New World that can ever truly be considered “old.” I was not sitting where people had sat since the 10th or 11th or 12 century to worship a God that I, in my woefully human, human existence, try to understand and embrace today.
Yet, that did not keep me from trying to understand or embrace the Divine. And, in the end, four walls and an altar and some stained glass are not really necessary for me to continue that painful and lonely search.
The first occasion was on Tuesday, inside a well-endowed Episcopalian church that is run by obviously well-endowed people. My presence there was in no way religious, however. This church happened to be my designated polling place, and I was merely casting my votes for the mid-term elections.
The second occasion was on Friday. I was attending a memorial mass on the campus of the Catholic university where I work; a co-worker had recently lost her nephew, and I wanted to show my support. I had never been inside this chapel before, and my unease at entering was tremendous. It had nothing to do with the chapel per se. It had more to do with the Catholic Church in general. A Church which has pretty much excommunicated me and said loud and clear: “We don’t want you.”
I was nervous, ill at ease. I actually whispered to a few colleagues that if the church were to suddenly explode, it would be my fault. I was kidding, yes, but my feelings were genuine.
I feel incredibly unwelcome in Christian churches these days. It has nothing to do with God or my belief in God. In fact, God and I communicate and interact on a rather daily basis. Which is not to say that I hear a deep, booming male voice with a Brooklyn accent inside my head. I am speaking… metaphorically.
What I felt most inside that beautiful little Catholic chapel was a sense of loss. Of emptiness. I MISS being an integral part of a church community. I MISS ritual and song and communion and community. I MISS tradition.
I miss songs and prayers and even rote responses. Just tonight, as I was parking my car for the evening and walking into the house, I could hear one of the village churches’ bells chiming. It was impossible for me not to sing along silently in my head: “Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
The small University chapel where the memorial mass was held was aesthetically beautiful, with ornate stained glass windows, paintings, and religious sculptures. Jesus, even though he was hanging on the cross, did not look at all displeased or angry with me. I think he may even have winked at me. But probably not.
The chapel reminded me of all the churches I had been inside in Germany. We lived in Germany for four years and traveled extensively. It is impossible to escape churches in Germany; they are everywhere. And most of the ones that were bombed into smithereens during World War II have been rebuilt. The huge churches of Nürnberg (Nuremberg) are a prime example; photos of the flattened churches are posted within the carefully recreated and restored churches and sold as black and white postcards to tourists from the countries that bombed them. Bamberg, although not really all that far away from Nürnberg, was a rare city pretty much unscathed by the bombings; its old-style architecture, 11th century cathedral, and two episcopal palaces are arrayed along the Regnitz River in a rare pocket of Bavaria left unharmed by the ravages of the Second World War.
München (Munich), my favorite German city – partly because it mixes old and new so well and is located in the true heart of Bavaria and partly because I spent five weeks there as an exchange student in high school – is filled with famous churches of its own, the Gothic dual-towered Frauenkirche probably the most famous of all.
It is not just large cities, though, which sport incredibly massive and ornate churches and cathedrals. Many smaller towns, which at one time were market hubs or centers of the Holy Roman Empire, sport amazing cathedrals. Speyer is a prime example with its four-towered Romanesque basilica, originally built in the early 11th century and then destroyed and rebuilt several times over. It takes your breath away to see such amazing feats of art and architecture in such small, out of the way places.
The churches in tiny villages, like Heilsbronn between Ansbach and Nürnberg, where we lived for two years, had an amazing Lutheran church. My younger son had the privilege of going to a Lutheran Kindergarten in Heilsbronn, and periodically they had ceremonies and special church services in the local Lutheran church. Originally a Catholic church and part of a famous monastery, the church is another Romanesque basilica and purportedly houses paintings by Albrecht Dürer, a native of nearby Nürnberg. To have such amazing architecture and art and history and tradition in your small, provincial village – and to have it still in active use as a place of worship! -- leaves me stunned.
The city that stands out the most in my mind as a crossroad of places of worship is the town of Worms. While visiting Worms for a day, we were able to see its magnificent Cathedral; the site of the Diet of Worms where the famous Edict of Worms declared Martin Luther, subsequent hero of the Protestant Reformation, an “outlaw”; and the oldest Jewish cemetery in Germany.
The Romanesque Worms Cathedral is one of the Kaiserdome, like in Speyer, a relic of the Holy Roman Empire. Some bits of it date from the 10th century, while most of it was built during the 11th and 12th centuries.
Aside from its Catholic background, Worms is also a landmark of Protestant history. This was the place where in 1521 Martin Luther was branded a heretic, an “outlaw,” worthy of arrest because he refused to recant his religious beliefs, some of which had been nailed to a church door in Wittenberg the year before.
At one point Worms was also a center of Judaism in Europe, its first synagogue built in the early 11th century. The Jewish Cemetery, which also dates from the 11th century, is one of the oldest – if not the oldest -- Jewish cemeteries left in Europe. Called the “Holy Sands,” this well-preserved sanctuary of sandstone tombstones is an eerie reminder of a time when Christians and Jews co-existed in peace in Germany. The fact that the cemetery survived the Nazis at all is amazing. While most of the Jewish Quarter of Worms was destroyed during Kristallnacht, the cemetery itself was left intact. Legend has it that the town archivist convinced the Nazis to leave the cemetery alone because of its historical importance. There is not a Jewish community in Worms today.
It is impossible for me to convey the impact of seeing all of these historically, religiously, and aesthetically significant places and structures in a mere blog posting.
I have been inside a lot of churches, some of them almost a thousand years old, some of them utterly destroyed and painstakingly rebuilt. The history of the Catholic Church and the Protestant church and empires and governments and wars and disagreements over faith are represented by these structures. The structures alone, however, cannot convey the history. That is left to the modern caretakers, and who knows how good of a job they do conveying the past to today’s now ME computer and technology generations. Whether people today care or are even interested is another matter.
One of my colleagues teased me on Friday that my presence in the University chapel almost made him choke on his communion wafer. He said that I sat there, arms crossed, with this look on my face that said: “My God! How can these people believe all of this crap?”
I hope that was NOT the impression I conveyed. It was most certainly NOT the thought that was going through my head. I sat there as an outsider in a place where I had once been an insider, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the chapel and by memories of all of the amazing churches and cathedrals and buildings I had seen while living in Germany. I thought of all of the years and toil that had gone into creating all of those churches and their artwork and their beauty. I thought of all of the war and strife that had criss-crossed Europe and destroyed and burned and pillaged many of those places. I thought of the evil of the Nazis that tried to wipe out an entire religion and the Allied bombs that destroyed historical places of worship in a matter of hours, if not minutes. True, many of these structures have been rebuilt, and many are still used as places of worship today.
The tiny chapel where I sat on Friday is considered “old;” it might be a hundred years old -- and renovated several times over. There is a sense of history and tradition there, as far as the University goes, but there is very little in the New World that can ever truly be considered “old.” I was not sitting where people had sat since the 10th or 11th or 12 century to worship a God that I, in my woefully human, human existence, try to understand and embrace today.
Yet, that did not keep me from trying to understand or embrace the Divine. And, in the end, four walls and an altar and some stained glass are not really necessary for me to continue that painful and lonely search.
posted by delta at 10:50 AM
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