Episode 2.5: church and home

The topic of class last week was “models of church.” We did an interesting exercise in which the instructor laid out 40 or so photos and asked us each to choose one that represented “what church should be” and one that represented “what church should not be.” Of course, there wasn’t a single answer: church should be community, collective effort, a way to pass on wisdom, an oasis… Then we read ten different bible passages offering images of church (as light of the world, salt of the earth, chosen people, and so on). The message of the class was clear: “church” isn’t a single thing, or a collection of facts, or the hierarchy from the Pope down to the people—it’s a collective idea that we form in the context of our society and history.

I’ve been thinking about church as “home.” The priest asked my new colleague and me to write a few sentences introducing ourselves, to be published in the church bulletin. This seemed incredibly daunting at first…hi, I’m Susannah, I have a PhD in medical physics...no wait who cares…um… I ultimately talked about the fact that the playgroup that I’m now running was an important source of social contact for me when we first moved to Switzerland, and how the church in general has been a constant in my rather nomadic life. The priest said he liked what I had written, and that this was something he’d thought about in the context of the Albanian mission, which also has services in our church – for the people who come, church isn’t just about worshipping God, it’s about meeting other people who literally speak the same language, an oasis of familiarity in a foreign land. I think this sense of "church" has particular meaning to many expats, immigrants, and refugees around the world (and not just Christian ones).

The Swiss have this concept of a Heimatort – “hometown,” except that sounds folksy and personal and Heimatort is far more weighty. In Switzerland you aren’t first and foremost a citizen of the country, you’re a citizen of a town – for most Swiss, the town their great-grandparents came from. This of course made far more sense before modern mobility made it easy (and necessary) for people to move to other towns and cantons and countries, but the concept remains and is part of your identity here: <Name>, born on <date>, from <place>. It’s important for immigrants, too: when someone applies for citizenship, they apply for citizenship of a specific town, and the general rules say that you must live for 10 years in that same place before you can even apply.

Like most military brats, I have trouble with the question, “where are you from?” These days I just say “Seattle” because that’s an answer people are satisfied with, and most people here haven’t been to Seattle so I don’t get too many follow-up questions. But the truth is more complicated. Seattle is the home of my grandparents, of evergreens and blackberries and grey days and white mountains, a place where my soul resonates with the climate. But Zurich is as much my home as Seattle these days, a city I love to wander around, the place where all my books are, where my children are growing up. There are other bits of my heart scattered all over – in Monterey, home of teenage angst and first loves and waves; Newport, home of childhood escapades; Claremont, where everybody knows your name… As a birthday present this past weekend I took a trip sans-kids to London, ever the lover with whom I’ve never had the burden of a real relationship – tantalizing, passionate, and exhausting.

For me church is a common thread through all those places, sometimes a big part of my life, sometimes not, always a point of connection. Coincidentally my hotel in London was right next door to the German mission, so I went to mass there on Sunday. Strange, to be escaping to London only to find comfort in going to Mass in German.

St. Boniface's German Church, London

The preferred model of church in current Swiss theology is “der Volk Gottes unterwegs,” which conjures for me the image from that video we saw a few week ago: a long line of people shuffling, single file, through the desert…not super appealing. But the idea is that we are the children of God walking together in continuous pursuit of God’s will for ourselves as individuals and for the church collectively. I think it’s supposed to communicate in particular that change is not a thing to be feared, but an integral part of the fact that we are on a journey together – something that the generally-conservative Swiss perhaps need to be reassured about. 

On Saturday, I went with a friend to see an exhibit by Wolfgang Tillmans at the Tate Modern. One of the exhibit rooms has, in addition to his photographs and art, clipping of journal and news articles about public opinion and cognitive bias. The booklet from the exhibition says “[Tillmans] began his wryly-named truth study center project in 2005. Photographs, clipping from newspapers and magazines, objects, drawings, and copies of his own images are laid out in deliberate – and often provocative – juxtapositions. … In 2017, the subject of truth and fake news is at the heart of political discourse across the world. This iteration of the project focuses in particular on how constructions of the truth work on a psychological and physiological level.” There were a couple of disturbing studies about how people confronted with facts that contradicted an established bias failed to question their bias, and instead doubled-down on it. I don’t think this is big horrifying news in quite the way it’s presented sometimes: salespeople have known all along that facts aren’t the way to convince people...but it's definitely the question of the year: if we can't agree on the facts, how do we move forward together?

In tonight’s class (yep, a little late posting this, my plan was to get lots of writing done in London but I just couldn’t bear to stay in the hotel room that much, the city was calling!) we’re going back to talking about church history. We got a little booklet with four parallel timelines going from the birth of Jesus to the election of Bill Clinton: church history, papal history, theological history, and political history. Our homework is to look through the booklet and mark “all the things we’ve heard of.” I’m afraid this is going to be a somewhat embarrassing exercise because I have a hole in my education roughly the size and shape of all of European history. But history is another thing I've been wanting to write about. So with luck, more soon.

"No minute gone ever comes back again, take heed and see ye nothing do in vain"