under control

It is still hot and I am still talking about the church field trip. And I said most of what follows in a much more compact way in a comment on Facebook so if you're caught up there, you can maybe skip this one 😉

In introducing the Kollegikirche (Kollegi = Kollegium = college, because the school next door used to be a boarding school run by the Benedictines), our guide noted that the time just before Vatican II, the pressure for modernization in the Catholic Church in Switzerland was immense. Parishes were experimenting with liturgy reform - in one town one way, in the next town another way, and it was all "kind of chaotic." Luckily the reforms implemented by the council laid down some guidelines that were subsequently interpreted by the Bishops' Conferences - for example, the idea of "concelebration" was introduced, so multiple priests could celebrate Mass at the same time, instead of each priest having to say one privately every day. 

His point was that this particular church was designed and built in the in-between years, which is why it retains anachronistic features like the side altars. But the subtext I got (and it should be said again, sometimes I'm way off about what people are trying to say in German, so this could be my imagination) was "whew, glad we got that little fire under control!" 

We learn over and over in my theology classes that Vatican II was a breakthrough in the Church, a flood of reforms of an institution that had been stuck in the Middle Ages, with heels firmly dug in in reaction to the Enlightenment and the Reformation. But I feel like the least enlightened thing about the Church, the hierarchy itself, survived pretty much intact. The changes were well-intentioned, but they were imposed from the top down in a way that in the end satisfied neither those who felt strongly connected to the old traditions nor those who wanted more autonomy. At least, that's how I understand things - as a post-Vatican II child I feel like I have very little hope of ever understanding what living through this was like. But in any case there's a phrase in German, "Der Geist weht, wo er will" (the Spirit blows wherever it wants to) which I assume comes from John 3:8:

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

"The Spirit blows wherever it wants to, but within the Church it too has to follow canon law and the guidelines of the relevant Bishops' Conference!" just...doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Here are some more photos of the church, which definitely made me think about the Spirit, and how "getting things under control" rarely helps as much as we imagine it will, and how our beautiful parts and our questionable parts go hand in hand.

The side altars, with their sparse decoration and light from above, were striking and peaceful and  moving.

Something went very wrong with this picture but this was on another one of the side altars and I love it. Crucifix or chalice or both?

I don't even know the liturgical term for this but it's so clearly a throne...the furniture is beautiful but...how exactly are we following Jesus here?

The tabernacle. Again, beautiful craftwork and there's undoubtedly some symbolism that I'm completely missing. But honestly...you may have slipped the bonds of death, Jesus, but you're not getting out of this one!

arty

I've got big complicated thoughts tonight but not enough time to thread them all together...here's an attempt at one part of a larger picture, I hope it makes a little sense:

Another place we visited on the church field trip on Thursday was the chapel in Kantonsspital Obwalden - which, as its name implies, is the cantonal hospital for Obwalden. Obwalden is the canton smack in the center of Switzerland, and it boasts a population of around 37,000 people and postcard-worthy views in all directions. It's Catholic to the point that the church chapel isn't a multi-faith prayer room or anything like that, but a "proper" chapel complete with sacristy and tabernacle. At the same time, it's very...conceptual. The altar is a giant wooden slab that extends from one end of the room to the other - it's even supposed to go "through" the wall and out into the hallway, though they haven't installed that part of it. And behind the altar is a painting of four squares - red and blue on one diagonal, white on the other. Here's a photo:

The chapel in Kantonsspital Obwalden, with its stretch-limo altar. The thick post you can see near the wall is the tabernacle (in case there are any non-Catholics here, that's the holy place where the bread-that-is-now-Jesus's-body is stored). 

I'm not good with Photoshop, but maybe you can use your imagination to temporarily erase the crucifix, the icon sitting on the altar, the tablecloth, and maybe also the flowers. Because in the artist's conception of the room, the painting is supposed to be the crucifix. And the altar is supposed to be that whole long table, with enough space for everyone. Our group's conversation about all this was funny. The historian who was our guide for the day said that the axes between the squares on the painting clearly implied the cross, with its vertical connection between heaven and earth and its horizontal connection to all of humanity, and that the red and blue were meant to represent the elements water and fire. But somebody said well, this is a hospital, could that also be arterial blood and venous blood? And someone else said, that looks like the coat of arms of Ticino! And the altar looks like it could be a slaughterhouse table...or a drawer in the morgue? Oooh, we've cracked the code! Abstract art invites its viewers to come to their own conclusions! But religion...that's different, right? In church, theologians much smarter than ourselves have worked out the answers for us and we just have to take them on faith, or (if we're the thinking-for-ourselves types) struggle our way towards them. Right? Or is there another way, one in which we honor our traditions but allow people to have their own journeys? Can we hold space for people to interpret things differently? To ask with honest curiosity, "what do you see here?" and listen to their answers? Where? How? 

multitudes, or lack thereof

Here is a poem that has been occupying me lately.

Walt Whitman: Song of Myself, Section 51
The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) 

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) 

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab. 

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me? 

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Do I contain multitudes? I like to think so sometimes; and then other times I find myself staring into the abyss and there doesn't seem to be much point to me. There has, in fact, been so much abyss-staring in the last few weeks that I went to the doctor and got my iron checked. It was ok. So what's this all about? Am I having an existential crisis? Or is the abyss a metaphor for the upcoming summer break? The latter is not unlikely. School will be out in two weeks and Dan's mom arrives in just over a week. Eeek! And to be clear, the eeek! is not for Monika - who is a lovely person and way up there in the rankings of low-maintenance mothers-in-law - but for the amount of cleaning I need to get done before she arrives, and for the complicated logistics that it seems this whole summer break will involve. Stop thinking, Susannah, and get to work...

hot

Where were you in the summer of 2002? I had just finished my PhD and we moved in early June from London to Davis (where I'd found a postdoc with the incredible Kathy Ferarra) with nothing but our suitcases. We'd found a place to rent in the fall but as an interim housing solution we moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in downtown Davis with furniture borrowed from Dan's parents and no air conditioning. It was...so hot. And the song of the summer was "Hot in Herre" and we would sing it every night while stripping down to our underwear and trying to figure out how to get a cross-breeze in an apartment with windows on only one side.

This is all to say, it it hot here. 36 C / 97 F today. The Swiss believe that air conditioning in buildings is for wimps and/or environmentally unfriendly, and they're right but...our apartment is in the attic under a bunch of ceramic roof tiles. I'm gonna take my clooooooothes offff. 😓(Aside: I learned yesterday that the schools here used to have "heat days" which is like snow days except that school closes so everyone can go jump in the lake, which sounds like an excellent plan.)

BUT it was also church field trip day! I know, another one? Yes! There are three every year! And I go on all of them! Today was a particularly good day because (1) we had an air conditioned bus, and (2) the churches, perhaps by virtue of being empty, were nice and cool.

I don't have the energy for a full trip report (coming soon I hope) but here are my two favorite pictures of the day:

This is the Kollegikirche St. Martin in Sarnen. The church itself is beautiful and fascinating - it was built just before Vatican II, so it's very modern but still has 14(!) side chapels for the Benedictine monks to say their daily masses - but also I like this photo because the people in motion both compliment the sweeping curves of the architecture and, like, challenge the static idea of church? That little person is Christopher, who took a day off school to come along, and did a fabulous job of staying engaged, though he was deeply disappointed that in the many chapels and churches we visited we only found one depiction of St. Christopher.  The residents of Canton Obwalden really need to get their saint priorities in order. 

The St. Nicholas chapel in Kerns contains murals from around 1350 which were painted over around 1700 and then rediscovered and restored in the 1990s. The pictures are scenes from the life of Jesus and the life of St. Nicholas. This one is the visitation of Mary and Elizabeth. Very sweet.

tidbits

My new rule that I made up today (we'll see how long it lasts) is that I have to do my reading before I can write anything. Tonight I did manage to get to page 50 in one book, which is something. If I can get on top of this, I think my week of classes this summer will be super fun and interesting - they're "Old Testament 1" and "New Testament 1." The Bible is something I could stand to get to know a lot better, and both instructors seem intelligent and nice, or in any case way more manageable than the last guy.

This will probably mean snapshots instead of well-considered blog posts but you probably didn't come here for well-considered blog posts anyway...

Just to start somewhere - last week was the church employee field trip. The idea is that each year, a different employee shows us around their home town, which means I'm basically off the hook (aside from a lot of jokes to the effect of hey Susannah, when are we flying to Seattle? ha ha), but my job-sharing partner had her turn this year. We visited the area where she grew up around Canton Zug. She did a fabulous job of putting some variety into the trip, and we visited (1) a prison, (2) a restaurant with a view [definitely a thing here], (3) a church [gotta have that in there somewhere], and (4) a bakery.

Things I learned:

• 32% of the 100 or so prisoners in Strafanstalt Bostadel - by far the largest group, by religion - are Catholic. It was not at all clear to me that this could be explained simply by demographics. 
• I had one of those slump-down-in-my-chair moments when the prison director showed a slide of this map. The incarceration rate in Switzerland is 81 per 100,000 people. In the US it is 665 per 100,000; among Blacks in the US it is 2,306 per 100,000. USA! USA! Also - what the f*ck am I doing about this??? Visiting bakeries in Zug?! Moving swiftly on...
• A Zuger Kirschtorte is not, as I once thought, a cherry cake, but rather a cake featuring a decidedly non-negligible amount of alcohol - specifically, it's a sponge cake soaked overnight in a thickened mixture of kirsch, sugar, and water, covered on top and bottom with a meringue layer and then frosted and decorated with nuts and powdered sugar. The name "Zuger Kirschtorte" is officially controlled and denotes cakes which are made in Zug with locally-distilled kirsch.

Here's our tour guide demonstrating the use of the machine that precisely douses each cake with kirsch. Engineering is cool.

And here is my cake, half eaten. If you look carefully you can see the alcohol 😀

Church interiors of the 18th century. Lots going on. Hard to love.

Scrabble

No, seriously. Check out this set of histograms of word lengths in various languages. The average word length in German is 11.66 characters, in English 8.23. Words eight letters or under make 43.2% of the English dictionary but only 8% of the German one. The struggle is real. Here's a game in which Caroline sped to an early lead with "RACHEN" (throat or mouth, as in Rachenmandel = throat + almond = adenoid) but we've been scraping the bottom of the two-letter-word barrel for a bunch of turns now. I need vowels!

Our current Wordfeud game. Help?

And now a moment of catching up. I passed my latest theology exam on Saturday. Which would normally be yay! but...have I told you about this class? Let's just say that the instructor and I have some relatively fundamental differences of opinion. Or at least, differences of perspective. The exam and his evaluation of my performance were frustrating - after mulling it over a bit I've realized that this has a lot to do with an old insecurity / trigger I have around what my undergraduate advisor called my "flippant" delivery. I'm just crappy at sounding precise and erudite, which leads academically-inclined people to think that I'm dumb and/or disrespectful. But I'm not dumb, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, I just...think things are more interesting my way? I should stick to writing, I guess. Anyway, it's over and I passed. Now I have to get caught up on the reading for the two classes I'm taking over the summer. I calculated today that I need to read 25 pages (this doesn't sound like much I know, but it's slow going for me in German, so that's a solid hour) and 7 chapters of the Bible every day until my classes start. Total today: zero. Hmm...could it be that less Scrabble is in order?

catching up

This week I'll catch up, I promise. In the meantime, a public service announcement: German is not a language that lends itself to good Scrabble games. Eight letters just aren't enough to spell anything 😂

Pentecost

Come Holy Spirit 

unknown author

arranged by Peter Hallock

sung by the St. Mark’s Compline Choir featuring My Most Favored Brother this morning…well, last night their time

Come Holy Spirit and wound us and make us whole.

Come Holy Spirit and smite us and give us peace.

In the cup of whose hands an ark sailed rudderless and without mast.

In your hands we rest,

And own a providence as large as sea and sky that could make of the aimless wandering of the ark a new beginning for the world.

In your hands we rest,

Ready and content this night.

To see thee is the end and the beginning.

Thou carriest me and thou goest before.

Thou art the journey and the journey’s end.

https://complinepodcast.org/?p=1700 (start at 25:50)

https://play.google.com/music/listen#/album/Bjr4b3wa35kr5sdqhvk55vsklvy/The+Compline+Choir/Of+the+Lord's+Mercies

"Rudderless and without mast" is kinda how I'm feeling right now, and I hate not being able to write, but my to-do list is so long and I am so very behind. It's a holiday here - I'm choosing to believe that we're resting with the apostles because they the day after they burst out of the locked room speaking in tongues and stuff, they must have had a mean vulnerability hangover? - and Daniel has the kids and I am going to MAKE SOME PROGRESS. ... any minute now .... now, maybe ....

the future

Something that I found inspiring this week...from Adrienne Maree Brown, https://sublevelmag.com/issues/the-speculative/report-recommendations-for-us-right-now-from-a-future

Need: Separation weakens. It is the main way we are kept (and keep each other) in conditions of oppression.
Truth: Belonging doesn’t begin with other people accepting us. It begins with our acceptance of ourselves. Of the particular life and skin each of us was born into, and the work that that particular birth entails.
Mantra: Where we are born into privilege, we are charged with dismantling any myth of supremacy. Where we are born into struggle, we are charged with claiming our dignity, joy and liberation.
Possibility: From that deep place of belonging to ourselves, we can understand that we are inherently worthy of each other. Even when we make mistakes, harm each other, lose our way, we are worthy.
Practice: Learn to apologize. A proper apology is rooted in this worthiness – “I was at my worst. Even at my worst, I am worthy, so I will grow.”
Practice: Move towards spaces that value us, let ourselves belong to those communities that know they want us, know they need us, know we have worth, know we deserve more than transactional care.

This is, like, all the things at once. I love the wording "where we are born..." because of course we are born into both privilege and struggle. And this invites us to think about which is which, and from there, where our work lies. What is one thing I can do to take a step in the right direction?

be a man

I'm behind on blog posting, and I don't know if or when I'll catch up. For today, here's an excerpt from the On Being podcast with Elizabeth Gilbert that struck a chord with me (my transcription, edited for clarity):

I spent my twenties writing about men for men. And it was very much a reflection of where I was in my life at that time. I was very interested in masculinity, I think because I wanted to be a guy. And the reason I wanted to be a guy (and I don't mean literally, like when somebody's born in a women's body and wants to be a man, that's not what I'm talking about) is that I wanted to live the way men live. And the reason for that was because it was better, you know? I grew up watching what many of us grew up watching, which was men who had a great deal of freedom and women who followed them around and took care of their every need. And when I looked at those two models, one of them seemed very clearly better than the other one. So I just threw myself into men's worlds. I worked in bars, I worked on a ranch in Wyoming, I became a writer for GQ and Esquire and Spin - very much men's worlds. I threw myself into men's worlds where they were studying masculinity too. I was just as interested in that as they were. And I felt comfortable in those worlds. I even did a story for GQ where I dressed up as a man for a week and lived as a man in New York, and felt what that felt like - which, interestingly, I didn't enjoy, because I felt very constrained in that gender, once I was in it. I much preferred being a woman among men than being a sort of fake-man among men. But what happened with Eat Pray Love was, it was a time in my life when I sort of came out of the closet as a woman. And I needed to do this because the questions that I was grappling with were very much women's questions, and...there were certainly universal spiritual questions that I was grappling with, but the main one that I was grappling with, and that ended my marriage, was the question of whether or not to become a mother. And certainly that is the ultimate women's question: what is my biological destiny? Am I meant to be part of the story of motherhood and nourishing and nurturing or am I not meant to? and what I am I supposed to do with society's expectations around that, what am I supposed to do with the biological expectations around that? What does it mean if I don't have children? What does it mean if I take a different path? Am I still a woman? 

I've thought a lot about how I ended up frittering away so many years of my life in science. Was it purely the intellectual stimulation? The challenge of doing something just because it was there? Was I trying to embody some societal ideal of success? Was I just trying to please my parents? Or maybe...I, too, grew up watching men who had a great deal of freedom and women who [literally] followed them around [the world] and picked up after them. And one of these options did - still does - indeed seem a lot better than the other. But eventually I, too, was forced out of the closet. I became a mother and stopped working in predominantly-male worlds at just about the same time. Coincidence? Probably not.