out with a light

I've been meaning to write about the church service I went to on New Year's Eve. Fun fact about Silvesterclausen in Urnäsch: it starts at 5 am, and everyone is so tired by the end of the day that there are hardly any fireworks at midnight, only church bells. But well before midnight arrived, I decided to ditch the rest of the family and take one of those cute red trains towards St. Gallen, where there was a "meditative service of thanksgiving" for the end of the year.

I'm not a huge fan of the St. Gallen Cathedral. It's sort of...gaudy. But it turns out that at night, when the lights are dimmed, it's gorgeous and serene. It occurred to me for the first time that maybe all that crazy baroqueness was less overstimulating before electric lighting was invented?

The main part of the service went as follows: Bible reading. A prompt about the reading with a question or topic to ponder. A couple of minutes of silence. Song. Repeat. It felt like there were a lot of readings, but in a good way! And things were moving along at such a refreshingly non-boring pace that I lost count. Maybe in the end there were only four: Klage und Lob, Bitte und Dank, which is...um...lamentation, praise, petition, thanksgiving? The prompts were blessedly short and straightforward and had just the right amount of gentle humor. One that stuck with me was for praise: the reading was Luke 2, about angels coming to the shepherds in the field. Shepherds, the pastor said, are a weather-hardy, stoic lot, certainly not given to saying much, and yet this experience left them "glorifying and praising God"? What amazing things did you witness this past year that broke through the fog of everyday life? And so on. After the last reading-prompt-silence-song cycle, everyone was invited to light a votive candle and place it in front of the altar, so there was a pool of light right there in front for the rest of the service, which continued with the Eucharistic Prayer and communion - which felt extra communal, somehow, maybe because there were all our hopes and dreams and successes and failures right up front with the priest.

It was...I don't know, maybe my expectations were low. Maybe a service in a cathedral is always a cut above the rest. But it felt special. And I think it was because instead of a sermon, there were those strategic minutes of silence. We were allowed - trusted - to have our own thoughts about our own lives over the past year. Seems straightforward enough. And yet...when do we otherwise do this at (Catholic) church? I've been paying more attention lately: it hasn't happened since.

The cathedral and its Christmas tree, after dark but well before the fireworks started. A nice calm end to the year.

Bonus picture, taken out the train window on my way in. Because stunning-landscape-shots is how we roll here in Switzerland.