Brot und Rosen

Oh, let all who thirst

Let them come to the water.

And let all who have nothing

Let them come to the Lord.

Without money, without price; 

Why should you spend your life

Except for the Lord?”

Isaiah 55, paraphrased in John Foley’s song, Come to the Water

Describing Brot und Rosen is hard, and I am not sure that I quite understand everything that is going on here.  And that is OK!

 When I first got here I was asked my expectations.   I said, truthfully, that I didn’t have many expectations.   I had been looking for a service components for my sabbatical, I had asked my friend Cornelia from the Westphalian church, and she had immediately suggested this.    I like Cornelia and trust both her and God working in her, so I wrote to them and applied. 

I knew they provided housing to refugees, and I knew I they were related to Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, but my concern was giving back during part of my sabbatical. 

But this is much more, and much different from a typical service opportunity.  This is a community that differs from the community in the world as we know it.   It is a community like we find in Acts 3; “ The whole congregation of believers was united as one—one heart, one mind! They didn’t even claim ownership of their own possessions. No one said, “That’s mine; you can’t have it.” They shared everything.”(The Message)

Four people who live here all the time: Birke, Birgit, Sarah, and Dietrich (I think:   I am really struggling to connect names here) some of whom work elsewhere, most part time, put all of their salaries into the common purse.  Each person, including the ones who live here for a season or for a time, takes what they need: food, clothing when it is available, some pocket money, etc.   Each person contributes to the running of the house.  Because many of the people here are unemployed and in transition, they are the recipients of a certain amount of charity; food pantries, groceries with dated goods, etc. and the community strives to use these things as well as they  can.   For example a food truck came Monday with a whole load of red bell peppers in excellent condition, and last night we had delicious roasted red pepper soup!

So part of the work is helping to keep up the house, cooking, etc.  yesterday one of the permanent residents came in with a bag of plums and suggested I make a plum cake.   With the help of others (finding ingredients, prepping the plums) I did, and it was pronounced “lecker” (delicious).   Monday I made coleslaw for the barbecue and went to buy the charcoal.  Every day I have done some dishes and Friday I will fashion a meal for everyone out of what we have.   I am considering veggie chili if there are enough tomatoes.

It is less work and more community here, and while simple, this community seems to be on a solid footing.   I have much to learn from them.

One note: one thing I don’t have is readily available internet: I am heavily using my cellular internet, which is limited.   So I may not blog as often these three weeks.

Germany and uncertainty

So finally I am in Germany, winging my way on a super fast ICE train to Hamburg.   I’ll spend a long weekend hanging with my brother, then three weeks as a volunteer with Brot und Rosen, a church based philanthropic organization that works with refugees.   With all the talk of Afghan refugees, this is something that I think will be as valuable to me as to them.   Maybe more so.   Then . . . . 

The truth is, I don’t know. 

Israel was set to start accepting tourists in early August, but they have not started it yet, and I don’t know if it will even be possible to travel there as an individual traveler.    If it is, it is not possible to come from Greece, which is on Israel’s list of no-no departure points. 

Currently, my itinerary has me traveling to  Thessaloniki on September 29, and traveling Athens to Tel Aviv on October 7.  One of those places is not going to happen, and I don’t know which.  I keep putting it off, but I do know that 7 days out, September 22, I will need to do SOMETHING to plan my way forward.

Israel is my priority, but if it is not possible, there is little I can do about it. 

If you are a praying person, keep me in your prayers. 

Ulrich Zwingli’s Zurich, and more boat rides.

There are three steeples here in this photo looking from the Zurich See (Lake) toward the river running into it.  On the left the Grossmuenster, and on the right the Frauenkirche and St. Peter’s Kirche.  These are the primary Reformed churches of Zurich, with two other churches of renown worth looking at. 

To be fair, the Frauenkirche has less to do with the Reformation than the stunningly beautiful set of 5 windows by Marc Chagall.    

The churches really don’t have much to say about the Reformation - to me, Calvin’s story is more interesting than Zwingli’s, but there is more about it in the  Landesmuseum, which I spent three hours contemplating Swiss history and the place of the reformation in it.   Some interesting facts. 

Zwingli beat Luther to translating the Bible into German.  At least according to the Landesmuseum Zurich.  

It was a really difficult and violent time, marked by profound intolerance of anyone who believed differently than you.  Hence clear annoyance between Zwingli and Luther, with the Scottish reformers complaining that Luther wasn’t answering their letters, and Luther, of course, exhibiting a bit of passive resistance. It really sounds like they didn’t like each other. 

And the profound fact that there is today in Switzerland, a great deal of tolerance for other people’s ways of worshipping.   Churches where protestant and Catholic congregations sometimes meet, tolerance for other non-Christian religion

Intolerance as caused so much pain.  Why can’t we get past it? 

And, Zurich also has water busses.  For an extra CHF 4.40 and a daily transit pass, you can take a 1.5 hour cruise around this side of the lake.    So I did it after I’d seen all the sights.  

John Calvin’s Geneva, and boat rides.

When I got to the top of the hill that houses Saint Pierre cathedral in Geneva, and discovered that the museum of the Reformation is closed for “transformation” and that Calvin’s auditorium was also closed, I was thinking , well this will be a short pilgrimage in Geneva!  Not so fast!

After I went to church at the Cathedral, toured the archeological excavations under it, which show the development of at least six different churches on the top of this hill between the first century and today, toured the cathedral and walked down to the Reformation Wall, it was only about two o clock in the afternoon, and I’d done everything on my list. 

Now before I go on, let me talk about Reformer’s Wall.  It is a huge memorial dedicate to the Reformers (primarily the reformed ones) starting with Calvin, Knox and a couple of their cronies.  But there are also options of it reflecting some of the more implicated history.  Jan Hus is mentioned, Luther and Zwingli have their own memorials right next to the walls.   Important events from the Reformed saga of the Reformation, including our Pilgrims are included.   

But it is big an a little bit cold, kid of like the memorials in socialist countries, like the ones in Havana and Berlin. Even though it is not propaganda, it has a little bit of the feel of that  kind of thing.  It also lines a park, and I saw it on a Sunday afternoon while children plate in the playground, the outdoor restaurant served brunch, people rented lawn chairs to sit in the sun, and both young and old people played chess with the huge lawn size chess pieces.     In this context the wall certainly loses some of it’s institutional quality.  And it is mighty impressive.   I went back Monday. 

So I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening in the Park by the lake, taking pictures, writing in my journal, talking with a guy from Côte d’Ivoire who happened by, to the extent we could as we kept our distance and contended with not having a common language.

I ate a salad in the park - big, meal type salads are rare in Italy, at least without having some kind of meat on them, so the salads I had Sunday night (with cheese and falafel on it and Monday afternoon wtih olives, artichoke hearts and sun dried tomatoes) were a real treat.   I took the ferry boats all over this end of the lake, as they are included in the travel pass that the hostel gave me.   At the end of the day I played pinochle online with my sibs, four of us in three countries.   

After pinochle I researched walking tours in Geneva.   I knew there was a Reformation walking tour, but my notes said to get the brochure from the Reformation museum, and it was closed. Online I found a walking tour of seven historic churches in Geneva, and I used that to find out a little more about the development of church, and especially of freedom of religion, in Geneva.   

And I scored the Reformation walk brochure from the main TI in the English Garden, near the floral clock, although in German.  That works, I could read it (looking up a good Number of words) and followed it to a number of other sites including the local Lutheran Church and the site of the original Reformation School - because of course teaching children to read is essential if they are going to read the Bible. 

By the time i was finished, it was after 4, and I still had laundry and packing to do for tomorrow.   Off to Zurich and the story of Zwingli!

A day off

This morning I visited Santa Maria della Angelo, above, which is where Francis lived for a good part of his life.   Then I came back to Assisi, ate a piece of pizza and drank a lemon soda, came back to the Convent, took a shower.

And now I am cross stitching.

Even when you are taking a sabbath, you need times of rest.

Someone down the hill is playing a harp down the hill and I am listening in a sitting room while I stitch.

This afternoon later I’ll head down the hill for evening prayer at San Francesco and dinner (likely in the opposite order.)

A whirlwind visit to Milan’s Duomo

My travel plans did not end up as smooth as I like today.   There were no trains between Milan and Geneva, more specifically, no seats on trains on this Friday.  So I ended up taking a bus, and the early bus I wanted was also full. 

This meant I had to take the late bus, that leaves at 17:00 (it was a half hour late in addition.).  And since the train from Florence was on time at just ahea of 1 PM, I had four hours.  

So I went online and booked tickets to the Duomo, or Cathedral.   I booked the full package, the church, archeological site underneath, and the roof.   Pics above. 

There are a couple important church history things here.   It’s a connection with St. Augustine.  Augustine was baptized in this. Cathedral, in fact the archeological site above IS of the baptistery in which both St Ambrose (the bishop who baptized Augustine) and Augustine were baptized.   Yes. That is a picture of it right there.   

Milan’s Christian community is quite ok.  A list of bishops of this Cathedral in the church lists bishops all the way back to AD 51.  Yes, that is before Peter and Paul were martyred, before any church in Rome, indeed while Paul was beginning to write letters to people like the Thessalonians and Galatians, and some were still dealing with the loss of Jesus. 

Construction on this church started in 1386 and finished in 1965. Almost 6 full centuries.   An think about its start!  1386 was 21 years before the monk Luther would nail his 95 theses to the famous door in Wittenberg, and start the Protestant reformation.  As this church grew, so did the conversation about how to be church, in the contentious and sometimes bloody transformation of the Christian Church into something other than it was (and the reformation and the responding counter-reformation changed both the Potestand and Catholic Church.). 

It was very cool to be where Augustine was baptized.   It was also cool to see this church again and do the walk on the roof again. 

Tomorrow:  Reformed Church of John Calvin in Geneva. 

Staying Active

So, the rules of self- isolating in Scotland mean that I need to stay at the residence where I am for the self-isolation period.   The only exception seems to be to post my Covid tests on day 2 and 10.staying active is a challenge.  

Which is why I walk around the garden, over and over and over again.   Hence my GPS map above (it’s also a real illustration of the limits of GPS: this was 40 laps of the same track).

On the positive side, I booked a night in Fort William to replace my first night in Oban, which was canceled.   Hope to do some hiking in Glencoe that morning.