an iMiracle?

At the art museum in St. Gallen: "Glitch" by Claudia Caviezel. 

The Spiritual Exercises as invented by St. Ignatius are a 30-day bootcamp-for-the-soul requiring a silent retreat under close spiritual direction. But there are more accessible formats: doing the 30 days as four one-week stints, for example, or the "spiritual exercises in daily life" where one meditates daily without a retreat, often with weekly reflections in a group. And there's the Grosse Exerzitien im Alltag, apparently invented in St. Gallen, which is not 30 days but 30 (well, 27) weeks of daily meditations, typically with monthly group reflections and meetings with a spiritual director. It's not clear to me (yet) whether or how closely this follows the Ignatian scheme, or the liturgical year, but there's a booklet with five meditations per week, and on the weekend one is expected to look back over the week's notes. And, in my case, write a blog entry. So here we are: week 1.

The theme of the exercises this year is "making a place for God" and for each week there are both Bible verses and a text from Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964), a French Catholic / social worker / mystic who lived with other women in an intentional community in the communist city of Ivry in France. She was, apparently, a free and rather uncategorizable spirit. Wikipedia says she was an author, but in fact most of her writings were intended for her friends and community and were published only after her death. She is due to be granted sainthood, but often found herself at odds with the institutional Church. She was known for her love of good wine, cigars, and dancing - and her deep faith.

Last Sunday I went to the opening event in St. Gallen and wow, hundreds of people showed up! So even though I couldn't bring myself to join a group, I don't feel like I'm doing this alone, and I started on Monday with a full battery. My goal for the week was to figure out when will I be doing these meditations. Because if I can't get into a rhythm, there's not a lot of hope for this project lasting 27 weeks, right? I've tentatively settled on: 10 am, Monday-Friday. So I decided to set an alarm on my phone. And my phone, seemingly out of nowhere*, suggested "Come, Holy Spirit, Come" by Anonymous 4. How perfect! Check out these lyrics:

Come, Holy Spirit, come,
With energy divine,
And on this poor benighted soul,
With beams of mercy shine.

It sounds like a call to prayer, for one, and benighted is such a fabulous romantic word for depression, or staring into the abyss, or whatever it is I do a lot of.

From the celestial hills,
Light, life, and joy dispense;
And may I daily, hourly feel
Thy quickening influence.

Daily, hourly...minutely? These exercises are all about seeking a spiritual life not apart from the everyday, but within it. Saint Ignatius: "seek God in all things." Delbrêl: "O God, if you are everywhere, how is it that I'm so often somewhere else?"

Melt, melt, this frozen heart;

After watching this video of Eugene Gendlin at least three times, I've bought his book and I'm using his idea of a "felt sense" in my meditations. Not trying to think, nor trying not to think, but first feeling and then letting words come to describe that feeling. Anyway I would not have said I had a "frozen heart" but in the very first meditation there it was, my heart of stone, thoroughly shielded against the pains of life but also maybe against Delbrêl's mystical sensation of being found by Love...? 

This stubborn will subdue;
Each evil passion overcome,

Do I have "evil passions"? I say no, and then go spend an hour mindlessly scrolling Facebook or buying books I can't find the time to read and decidedly not, like, spending quality time with my children or saving the planet. So. 

And form me all anew.

Gendlin: "Life is an implicit intricacy that wants to be carried forward." To live is to interact, to be in motion, to change: a constant anew-forming.

Mine will the profit be,
But thine shall be the praise;

How does praising God profit me? Y'know what, I'm going to quote myself here, because I've found myself digging up this bit of a One Spirit homework assignment over and over again: 

I suspect that surrender in Islam, grace in Christianity, and releasing attachment in Buddhism are all facets of the same existential secret to a fulfilling, joyful life – which obviously I can’t express any better than the spiritual masters, but it has to do with embracing the paradox of our individual and collective human existence as infinitesimal specs of cosmic importance (per Carl Sagan, “Humanity is a way for the universe to know itself”)…or cosmic beings of infinitesimal importance? Surrender requires an indirect object – we always surrender to something – and Islam seems to be about encountering that Being to whom surrendering results in victory and empowerment rather than defeat and abasement.

Something like that.

And unto thee I will devote
The remnant of my days.

I'm well into the second half of my life (even if I do live to a ripe old age) and when I think about this it terrifies me. Have I done anything useful? Will I?

And will all this meditating (assuming I manage it) help me figure anything out? Early signs are...decent. Stay tuned to this channel. Or check back in with me at Pentecost.

* This truly baffled me. Did my phone in some creepy way know what I was looking for? Have other people used this song as an alarm sound?? The boring answer is that the tune, Abbeville, makes this alphabetically the first song in my phone's music library. 

aaaaand...

meanwhile, in Zurich...

All right, I'm all caught up on trips. And while I've been out galavanting (or writing about it), Stuff Has Happened. 

• Caroline started university, studying math. Living at home - no "going off to college" for this Swiss girl. I know very little about how it's going, except that she fusses about her weekly programming assignments. Maybe I'll find out more after her first set of semester exams in January? Or maybe not. 
• We signed Chris's apprenticeship contract: for three years starting August 3, 2026, he will be working as a butcher at Metzgerei Ziegler. He can't wait. Butcher! Who would have guessed? Not me. 
• I got my last TBI paper back. Grade: C+/B-. Pooh. See very much: this. But all I needed was a passing grade, so success! 

The next step in the Great Swiss Theology Adventure is to get a psychological assessment that will determine my suitability to work in the Catholic Church. If I pass, I'll be able to apply for a 3-year program consisting of more theology classes and practical training, followed by a year of apprenticeship, after which I could work as a pastoral assistant. But that's getting waaaay ahead of myself. My assessment is scheduled for Feburary 5.

When we were in Milan, Lisa looked up my horoscope...

So. The stars say that I need to get my head out of the clouds and put my feet on the ground. An ecumenical round of the "Spiritual Exercises in Daily Life" starts tomorrow and runs through Pentecost, and I'm hoping that taking part will help me get into a daily reflection and journaling routine - and if all goes well also a weekly writing practice. Daily cleaning, cooking, and exercise routines wouldn't hurt either. So please, send your most domestic vibes my way. 

Milan

Milan! My last adventure in an adventure-rich six months. My East Coast friend Lisa was leaving from there on a 10-day tour of Italy and since she'd be "in my area," we decided to meet before her tour started. The point of this trip was less to go sightseeing than to see each other live and in person, and our hanging-out was really much better than our wandering-about, given the icky weather and the tourist hoards. But we did our bit!

Which was, mostly, to marvel at the cathedral. Here are four things I learned:

(1) On the trip down, I had an hour to wander around Lugano, and I wondered at this decoration on the ceiling of the cathedral there. Turns out: the radiant sun of justice is a symbol of the Visconti dynasty, and is also featured in the central stained-glass window of the Milan cathedral (aside: what's with this cool website?).

foreshadowing

(2) The Madonnina - so called not because she's small, but because the church is dedicated to the birth of the Virgin Mary - sits atop the tallest spire of the cathedral in Milan, and...well Wikipedia just says this so well:

By tradition, no building in Milan is higher than the Madonnina. When Gio Ponti's Pirelli Building was being built in the late 1950s, at a height of 127.1 m (417 ft), a smaller replica of the Madonnina was placed atop the Pirelli building, so the new Madonnina remains the tallest point in Milan. In 2010 another replica was placed as well on the top of the Palazzo Lombardia, at a height of 161 m (528 ft), being then the tallest building in the city. In 2015 still another replica was placed atop the Allianz Tower so that the Madonnina still occupies the highest roof in the city, now at 209 m (686 ft).

Pragmatic solutions ftw. Tee hee.

[a replica of] the Madonnina

and her original iron frame

(3) The cathedral boasts a nail from Jesus's cross, personally found by my patron saint Helena, which is kept in a tabernacle 45 m above altar. Each year on September 14, the bishop performs the Rite of the Nivola, in which he is hoisted up to the tabernacle in a cloud-shaped contraption rumored to have been designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself! You cannot make this stuff up. Watch a video here.

See that tiny red light waaaaay up in the dome over the altar? I wouldn't have either, if Lisa hadn't booked us a cathedral tour.

(4) Angels have specific numbers of wings. (Should I have known this? I did not. Now I do.)

“Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” (Isaiah 6:2, King James Version)

Borkum

Researching this trip north, I spent a lot of time wondering what else we should visit. More Netherlands - Rotterdam or Amsterdam maybe? Or the TGV back to Brussels or Paris? The bus back to...somewhere in Germany? But my Navy-brat constitution suffers from the lack of ocean exposure in Switzerland, and in the end I couldn't resist the call to go further north and see the coast. 

So we took the train from Groningen to Eemshaven, which felt like the edge of the world: wind turbines, data centers, a shipping port, the shallow expanse of the Wadden Sea... 

...and artistically-placed sheep.

From Eemshaven we took the ferry to Borkum, the westernmost of Germany's East Frisian Islands. The ferry ticket includes a ride on the charming train that runs the 7 km from the harbor to the town center. 

chugging along

Borkum is everything you could want from a somewhat dilapidated seaside resort. Slash rehab clinic(s) location. Book your seaside cure today! We left our bags at the hotel, walked towards the beach, and ran straight into the music pavilion. Live band Tuesday - Sunday, 11 - 12:30 and 4:30 - 6, rain or shine. The band leader said they were giving their 1,172nd concert, and an enthusiastic couple waltzed along the boardwalk. 

The music pavilon on the boardwalk at Borkum. October 10, 5:41 pm. Chris could not understand why I was so obsessed by this but...what century are we in again? 

We got lucky with the fall weather: grey, but not too cold and mostly not rainy. We walked a lot, ate some delicious meals, visited the aquarium and the "northwesternmost point in Germany," and saw a shepherding demonstration - and when Chris got tired of me he visited the Watertoorn and I went for a walk on a dike.

There's a lot of this.

And this.

I was sure this was an abandoned Star Wars set, but it is a container for a water sports club's equipment.

All that beachcombing makes one hungry.

In its pre-sanatorium days Borkum was, to quote Wikipedia, a "centre for piracy and whaling." The Catholic church in Borkum is named for Mary, Star of the Sea, and the Reformed church (seen here) has a distinctly nautical theme, with a model ship at the front and ship's-wheel chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

The Borkum coat of arms bears the motto "mediis tranquillus in undis" - "calm in the midst of the waters." I might adopt that.

Borkum is insta-ready. Its visitor population, at least when we were there, is...probably not. 

Two days later we took the ferry back to the mainland, this time to Emden, where we caught a train back to Bremen.

There was a cat robot waiter on the ferry!

Ferry tip 1: going towards the mainland, the time on your ferry ticket is not the time the *boat* leaves the dock but rather the time the *train* departs from the town center - and this is not at all clear on the ticket, though signs to this effect are plastered all over the train station. I got the impression that the long-suffering souls in the tourist information kiosk spend the vast majority of their working hours clarifying this arrangement for confused tourists. Including me.

Ferry tip 2: On the Borkum-Emden ferry, which takes one hour longer than the Borkum-Eemshaven ferry, you have the option to order food along with your ticket.  I wasn't sure what that meant, but decided to try it. What it meant is that we had a reserved spot in the ship's cafe, but since there were only two of us, our theoretically-reserved booth was invaded by pushy German retirees - they wanted to sit at a table too and we didn't really need all that space for ourselves, did we? Also - and I say this as someone normally willing to eat at all hours - we truly wanted neither Currywurst nor Apfelkuchen at 10:30 am. On the other hand, we did get a nice window seat for the first hour of the ferry ride, and when we finally gave in and left the booth to the retirees, we found that their pushiness was somewhat understandable: the remaining free seats were up on the top deck, where it was decidedly chilly and wet.

Groningen

Groningen is a college town in the northern part of the Netherlands. Why was it our fall break destination? Because my amazing friends Charlotte and Hal - Hal was my analytical chemistry professor in college, and Charlotte was my adventure partner when they lived for a year in Zurich - are spending a 3-month mini-sabbatical there. I was excited to see them. 

We took the FlixBus from Bremen. I paid a bit extra for the very front seats on the bus so we'd have a good view on the drive, but I wouldn't do that again - there was very little to see and mostly we felt like we were eavesdropping on the conversation of the two bus drivers up front. 

News flash: it's flat in these parts. We did see lots of windmills.

This is how amazing Charlotte and Hal are: they met us personally at the bus stop and took us straight to a pastry shop. 

Cake!

And for a walk around Groningen, and to our hotel, and then they hosted us at their place for a very delicious takeaway-Indonesian dinner. No good deed goes unpunished, and all this hospitality was cause for discontent among the teenager in the group (cue grumpy voice: "If we're just going to hang out with *your* friends why did *I* have to come?"). Luckily it turned out that both Groningen and later Borkum were great places to send said teenager off to explore on his own when he was feeling age-appropriately frustrated about being "forced" to hang out with old people. Also, I should have taught my children social skills.

In any case, Groningen. So young, so hip, so Dutch. So many things to like. The Forum - 6 floors of indoor public space! Snack food vending machines with hot food, including Groningen's signature dish, the aaierbal (a boiled egg fried in curry-flavored batter - delicious and substantial)! Coffee shops open past 5 pm!! And of course charming buildings and canals, and lots of public art, and a rather stunning train station.

Some random cool details:

We spent a good long time contemplating this sun dial, which would tell you all sorts of things, if only there were any sun.

A real estate agency for ships! Check out Fikkers.nl!

Hot chocolate at breakfast. Forget those silly packs of powder, this is how it should be done.

Cool tiles.

When you visit Groningen, you do take the non-negligible risk being of run over by an errant cyclist. But we survived unscathed.

Charlotte writes two blogs, Claremontography and Glamping in Switzerland. Which is to say I'm going to defer to her pictures of Franeker and Leeuwarden, where we ventured on the train after we'd explored [at least the center of] Groningen.

This amazing sandwich at Barrevoets in Leeuwarden (blue cheese, grapes, smoked almonds, fig and date vinegar, and lamb's lettuce) made my year, food-wise. Dutch bread is so good!

And as for how things came out on the travel-during-puberty front, let's just compare and contrast these two pictures:

Charlotte and Hal [insert all the heart emojis here]

Chris with the hat he got in Hannover on the way home [ditto]

Maybe old people are cool *sometimes*...

Bremen

Bremen! Does not deserve a post. Which is to say, I'm sure it does deserve a post, but this one will not do it justice: for Christopher and I, Bremen was less a destination than the place we stayed overnight on our way to and from locations farther north.

Four thumbs up for the Ibis Budget Bremen City Center, which - for less than half the price of the other hotels we stayed in on this fall break trip - delivered everything we could want: a good location, clean rooms, and breakfast with a top-floor view over the city. And only here could we pull the double bed apart to make two singles: at one-week-short-of-15 Chris was quite understandably not all that crazy about having to share a bed with mom. 

In both directions we arrived too late and left too early to see the inside of anything, but we did get a taste of the city and I hope we'll be back to visit properly someday.

The famous musicians, after dark

Guilds of today in the Schnoorviertel

A stained glass window after my own heart. And now I know that Kaffee HAG (the world's first decaffeinated coffee manufacturer!) came from Bremen.

A selfie with what the internet says is Stephan Balkenhol's "Mann mit Vogel". I felt so...maritime. 

And of course not to be missed: the [door to the] Christophorus-Saal of the Liebfrauenkirche. What does it look like inside? Maybe next time we'll find out!

Munich

The second trip I took with my mom was with Chrisopher to Munich, which is a straight 3.5-hour train trip away from here and yet we never visit. 

I did not do a particularly great job of planning this trip but I figured we'd manage, and we did, though there was probably more random-walking and puzzling-over-what-to-do-next than necessary. The 25 Hours Hotel was hip and comfortable and ideally located next to the train station, a good base and a convenient retreat when we needed a break. We checked off some tourist boxes: the glockenspiel at Marienplatz, a meal at the Rathaus, the Viktualienmarkt. Shamelessly partook in that kind of consumer capitalism that just doesn't exist in Switzerland. And visited two solidly B-list tourist attractions appropriate to the interests of my son: the eclectic and rather run-down Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum, which if nothing else saved us from getting soaked in a downpour (and Chris did love it), and the Museum Minerologia, which turns out to be the displays around the geology department at the university (there's a woman sitting in an office in the corner who will gladly take your entrance fee [cash only please] but it was unclear to me whether anyone cared if you paid). 

The surprise theme of the trip was...drum roll please...DIORAMAS. Not making this up.

In each of the hotel elevators there was one of these dioramas by artist Sandra Havemeister. Tiny people doing normal and improbable things! You'll have to click through to get an idea of the detail involved - in this one, for example, there's a devil chasing the ice skaters in the cave on the bottom left. 

The hunting and fishing museum is located in the former Augustinerkirche and has all sorts of accessibility issues. Among other things, the bathrooms are up three steep flights of marble stairs. But on your way up you can enjoy depictions of hunting through the ages, including this gripping diorama of a wild boar hunt at the Schleissheim Palace.

...and my very favorite, in the entrance alcove of the Theatinerkirche. "Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, 'Lord do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.' The Lord said to her in reply, 'Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.'" (Luke 10: 40-42). It is not recorded whether Jesus followed this statement with a hearty “Prost!” but you can draw your own conclusions.

Also, less surprisingly: dachshunds (ooh that plural sounds so wrong to my German-addled brain: Dachshunde!) - the spirit animal and Olympic mascot of Bavaria and also my mom has a soft spot in her heart for them because she grew up with one. Named Gretchen, I think? Which it only occurs to me right now is such a perfect name.

Saint-Ursanne

I'm skipping Biel, where I spent three days doing a circle training with the Swiss Restorative Justice Forum, because I have neither interesting pictures of it nor anything particularly deep to say about it at this time. For now it's just a planted seed. 

So: on to *my* mother's visit. She also came for two weeks, and we took two trips together, the first one with Caroline to Saint-Ursanne. On my trip to this fairytale town three years ago I spotted, through a low window in the closter, this charming weaving studio. And my mom owns a loom, inherited from her aunt, who in turn got it from her uncle, who manufactured looms in the basement of my great-grandparents' house in Seattle (truly a thing - here's someone's random blog post about them!). So my plan was: use the fairytale town as a base to visit other locations in the fairytale Swiss Jura region and treat my loom-owning mother and my crafty daughter to a weaving class. This plan was half successful. It turns out that Saint-Ursanne is...maybe not experiencing its best years. In particular it lacks regular bus service back up the hill to the train station, so once we got down there we were kind of stuck, with precious little to do except take long walks, which my mom's hip was not up for. But the bits of the town that were open were still charming, and the weaving class was awesome. Friendly, accessible, beautiful materials, therapeutic activity...of course Caroline took to it the fastest but even my mom and I got some lovely tea towels out of it. Five stars.

On the way there my mom and I made a pilgrimage to the Camille Bloch (no relation, unfortunately) Discovery World in Courtelary. Chocolate tasting, always good! 

Saint-Ursanne, not as public-transit-friendly as it could be but still very much a fairytale village.

We stayed at the rather-strangely-medieval-themed Peanut Lodge, which featured things like motion-activated jungle sounds in the hallway and peanut-shaped butter balls at breakfast. Why they didn't keep the name "Hôtel du Boeuf" is beyond me, who wouldn't want to stay there?

Caroline, rocking the loom.

Supplies, and tea time.

The fruits of our labors.