Episode 3.6: A Swiss saint (and human rights)

The cell and chapel of St. Nicholas of Flüe, in Flüeli-Ranft, Sachseln (Canton Obwalden), Switzerland. After 6.5 years here I still get struck by the feeling that I'm walking around in a postcard.

Pretty much anyone I’ve talked to in the last few weeks has had to endure my Bruder Klaus story, and since the overlap between “people I talk to regularly” and “people who might read this blog” is pretty substantial, this means that you, dear reader, may have already had to endure this. In which case, feel free to skip ahead.

So this year, the protestant church in Switzerland is celebrating 500 years since the Reformation; the Catholic church, in what feels like retaliation but could potentially be just a happy coincidence (?) is celebrating 600 years since the birth of St. Nicholas of Flüe, aka Bruder Klaus, the patron saint of Switzerland.

Bruder who? I was relatively clueless. But I was on duty for the preschool church service a couple of weekends ago, and I figured hey, win-win situation: I’ll do Bruder Klaus as a theme, then I’ll get to learn what the big deal is.

I made this mistake once before, when I decided to do a service on saints, and I thought we’d ask the kids “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and then talk about how saints are role models for our faith just like teachers and firemen are role models for our careers. The catch, of course, being that when I thought about models of piety for the under-6 set, I wasn’t really considering the many gruesome ways one could die for one's faith...

So I started reading about Bruder Klaus, and the story at first seemed similarly…tricky. Bruder Klaus had visions, his first when he was still in his mother’s womb. He sustained bodily injuries from fights with the devil. He survived for many years eating nothing but the Holy Eucharist. He once put out a fire with the power of prayer. He abandoned his family, though modern versions of his tale take great pains to point out that his wife was totally on board with this, making her something of a saint in her own right. I worried that I'd never be able to summarize this for the kids. But I eventually came to a version of the story I was pretty happy with – and frankly, I'm sort of proud of getting here, so here you go.

Bruder Klaus (for Preschoolers) (by Me)

Once upon a time in Switzerland, there was a family of farmers. Their last name was “von Flüe." The von Flüe family had a son, and named him Niklaus.

Hi, I'm Niklaus, and these are the verdant hills of Switzerland, where I lived 600 years ago.

Niklaus led what, for his time, was a very normal life. He grew up on his family’s farm, and as a young man he served in the army. When he returned from fighting, he married a woman named Dorothea. Together they built a new farm, and had ten children.
But Niklaus was special. Even as a child, people noticed that he had a close relationship with God. He often spent time alone, praying. And there was something else: he had visions. Visions are like dreams, but they don’t only happen at night – sometimes they appear in the middle of the day. Sometimes Niklaus saw beautiful things in his visions; sometimes they were very frightening.

A scary vision, courtesy of Christopher, who is sort of disturbingly good at drawing devils?

Niklaus knew that his visions were sent by God, and as he got older he wanted to spend more and more time alone in prayer. When he was 50 years old, he decided to leave his work and his family and dedicate his whole life to God. Dorothea understood and accepted his decision – she and the children could look after the farm.
At first, Niklaus thought he should be a pilgrim. He started walking towards Basel, but his visions told him that this wasn’t the right way to go. So a few days later, he came back towards home, and started living alone in the woods, not far from his house. His friends built him a simple hut to live in. He lived there for the rest of his life, praying and fasting.
It became known far and wide that Niklaus had a special connection to God. People started coming to the hut in the woods, asking him for advice or prayer. Poor people, sick people, rich people, even soldiers – Niklaus talked to everyone who came to him and helped them. He became known as “Bruder Klaus.” His friends built a chapel next to his hut, so that he and his visitors could pray and go to Mass. Even after Bruder Klaus died, people came to his hut and his chapel to search for comfort and healing from God.
Today, 550 years later, people still do.

The End. Do you like his ten kids? I was proud of that.

Bruder Klaus has really grown on me. I like that he lived a pretty relatable life, and that he had the courage to follow God’s call to something different when it came. (I always like stories of people who find their calling late in life, it gives me hope that I may yet find mine!) There's lots more to it, of course - the content of his visions, for one, and the historical reality of the whole thing. The weekend after the aforementioned service (lesson learned, do NOT include plastic farm animals in your puppet show if you want the kids to pay attention to anything else), I found myself with a free afternoon, and on something of a whim hopped on a train to Sachseln and followed the trail up the hill (which I could do because, Switzerland!).

Follow the yellow brick road pointy signs.

The walk was quite quiet, with beautiful views of the lake. I passed a handful of other walkers. I'm not sure what I expected to find at the top - surely a few more people, but not...crowds milling about! Tour buses! A brass band playing in an open-air church! The whole nine yards of tourist attraction, including a little gift shop that sold ice cream and water and religious articles. The farmhouses where Bruder Klaus was born and lived are right there, open to visitors. And down the hill, in the ravine where he lived, is the famous hermitage attached to a little church.

It was less a religious experience than an exercise in feeling...bewildered? We just don’t have this kind of religious tourism in the U.S. (for starters, only Native Americans could possibly even have 600-year-old religious sites). Mystical visionaries and holy hermits aren't part of my daily life. What were all these people here to see? For that matter, what I was I here to see?

A mural from one of several churches near the hermitage of Bruder Klaus. The cliffs in the middle of the picture represent Switzerland, protected by angels and Bruder Klaus himself (middle right) from the destruction of World War I (horrific piles of skulls, right and left). Around the edge reads: “In 1914, as the world war brought death and destruction, we asked God for your intercession. Praise and thanks to you Holy Bruder Klaus. Our precious fatherland was miraculously spared and protected.” 

Coming out of the lower church, I ran into a woman from my choir (because, again, Switzerland). She's like 80 years old and sings in two choirs and plays the violin and travels all over and walked back up the hill faster than I did, without breaking a sweat. I ended up riding the train back to Zurich with her and her similarly astounding friend; they pointed out places they'd lived and visited and I was struck not for the first time by the Swiss sense of connection to "home" as a fixed place, another thing I have a very different experience of. They're both protestant and were curious whether I, as a Catholic, really believed that thing about how Bruder Klaus survived on the Holy Eucharist alone. I sort of shrugged, my German level still being nowhere near what would be required to spontaneously discuss what I really think about the matter, which is...well, it can't be physically true in my reality, but maybe physical truth isn't what it was about? And maybe there are other valid realities out there?

After enduring the long version of this story, Dan sent me this article in the Atlantic, which considers the question: why don’t people see visions and hear God’s voice any more? James Kugel says that in biblical times people's concept of "self" was actually different than ours; they didn't think of their own minds as self-contained units. This left space in their self-conception for "God" to enter. What he says at the end of the interview is fascinating:

I think I have an idea of what ancient Israelites might say about us, once the shock wore off. Quite apart from our living in a world in which God plays no obvious part, they would be astounded at encountering a sense of self that is just huge, virtually filling the heavens. Each of us would seem to them so important, so big! Their sense of self was far more collective than ours; their own existence was tightly connected to that of siblings and cousins and clan-mates far and wide, and who they were was very much defined by who they came from as well as by their inherited social roles. All this, quite apart from semipermeability, simply made them much smaller than we are today. In fact, from this perspective the semipermeable mind was just another aspect of human smallness. I think the challenge facing religions in the West nowadays is to try to help people shrink down to a more realistic size, and then to let the divine take over where the human leaves off. 

That is the challenge facing more than just religion, I think. But with that, back to theology class. We spent one whole evening on the UN Declaration of Human Rights, including, as a fun exercise, actually reading the whole thing out loud in class. This made me sad, in a formerly-ignorant-and-faced-with-reality sort of way. The question on the theology class table was, are human rights the new Ten Commandments? And pretty clearly, no? I see the connection - here are some basic rules that we all agree to. But the Declaration is so…long. And uninspiring. And impractical. And clearly the product of precisely the sort of paternalistic euro-centrism that we need to be working ourselves away from, not deeper into. And of course the Church is only sorta on board with the whole thing…those pesky problems with the whole women-are-equal thing. But what made me saddest is the whole thing is terribly dependent on the concept of the independent nation-state: if everyone would just take care of their own, it seems to say, all our problems would go away. Glaringly absent from the list of human rights is the right to free movement between countries. Unless you have money, naturally. I am painfully aware of my privilege here. We moved here because of a good job opportunity, because it would be a good experience for our children – but we were hardly suffering at home. People seeking the most basic chance to provide for their families and raise their children in safety are called invaders and turned away at the border.

I understand why immigration scares people, particularly here in Switzerland. Just look at a map - how can a nation of 8 million people with five national borders and four official languages (!) maintain a national identity in the face of wave after wave of foreigners with even more different languages, traditions, and values? What does “Swiss” even mean if a Swiss person doesn’t have to speak a regional dialect, or have roots in the country, or go on a hike every Sunday, or identify with hundreds of years of religion and history? If we have to share our privileges with everyone who crosses our border, won’t there be less to go around?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. But I know that jealously hoarding our wealth and privilege, turning away economic migrants (particularly when we have jobs available, but we're worried about the bad influence their foreignness is going to have on our precious culture) is unjust and corrosive. Could we ever shrink our enormous national egos down to a realistic size, to the point where we as nations could do what is right and trust the divine to sort out the rest?

September 25 was actually the feast day of Nicholas of Flüe, so it seems reasonable to finish with his most famous prayer:

Mein Herr und mein Gott, nimm alles von mir, was mich hindert zu dir.

My Lord and my God, take everything from me that keeps me from you.

Mein Herr und mein Gott, gib alles mir, was mich führet zu dir.

My Lord and my God, give everything to me that leads me to you.

Mein Herr und mein Gott, nimm mich mir, und gib mich ganz zu eigen dir.

My Lord and my God, take me from myself, and give me completely to you.