The first half of my sabbatical has been marked by lots of changes to the original plan. This was caused by a lot of cancellations due to sickness: One of the professors at university was sick for a while (see later entry to the blog). Furthermore, my course at the seminar on “Christology in the Gospel according to Matthew” at the Lutheran Seminary in Ratzeburg was also cancelled.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do understand people getting sick – and nobody should be forced to work during an illness. Period.

However, what irked me was how the administration dealt with the circumstances. Five days before the seminar we were told that it looks like we are without instructor. Furthermore, would we be interested in facilitating the seminar ourselves?

You need to understan, none of the participants is a first-year seminarian. All of us are clergy with considerable experience and knowledge. After all, German pastors usually spend an average of five to six years at university reading theology, and nothing but theology. In addition, the seminary’s own facilitator (not the academic expert who had taken ill), herself a well-trained theologian and pastor had offered to provide material which we would have been able to work through ourselves. It would have been an interesting learning experience – and a wonderful way to learn from each other. As I said before, we are not novices with no theological education. But the administration also included a cop-out, basically suggesting that the better option was to cancel the seminar all together. Alas, most of my colleagues decided to bail. Chicken! Immature chicken indeed! That’s all I have to say. No Ratzeburg for me this year. Pitty.

However, I still decided to take the train North for a few days, visiting my great-aunt and a colleague.

My great-aunt Miko is the middle of three sisters (my late grandmother being the oldest). My great-aunt doesn’t have children of her own and she has always been very close to her sisters’ families. Later in life she and her husband took in my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather who lived with them till they died. My mother has many fond memories of staying with her aunt, my great-aunt, and her grandparents, my great-grandparents. I suspect my grandmother was more than relieved to send her children away for a few days or weeks during the bitter WWII and post-war years…

Great-aunt Miko turned 90 this January and it was a wonderful celebration. She still lives by herself and takes care of herself, with great help from her neighbour and my mom, my dad, and other members of the extended family. Even though my parents live quite a distance (some 650km) they have done a lot to make my great-aunt’s life easier. Still, age is catching up. Yet, nobody is complaining. After all, she is no spring-chicken anymore. But she has noticeably shrunk, has become more fragile, and (what is really hard) she has become a bit forgetful. Still, she is happy to live her life and I am happy to visit and spend a few days with her in her little house, which friends of mine coined the “hobbit house” because it is nestled into a slight slope at the edge of a forest.

Whenever I stay at my great-aunt I get to sleep in my great-grandparents’ bed. My niece and nephew have slept in the very bed, too, thus, it has provided rest for five generations! And there are always new things to discover in hideaways in the house. Just last year I found some postcards sent by my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother during WWI (yes, WW ONE!). I was particularly thrilled and touched by the loving tone of the card (at the time the card was sent they were only dating.) My great-grandfather obviously was very much in love with my great-grandmother. The tender content of the postcard warmed my heart, even though it took time to decipher: It was written in old-German handwriting, which is quite distinct from modern-day handwriting.

From a simple historical perspective it was a fascinating postcard, too. As I said it was during WWI and my great-grandfather was a sailor in the German Imperial Navy. However, the postcard was postmarked in Connecticut, before the U.S. had entered the war. Fascinating! I wonder about the story behind the postcard…

Speaking of stories, of course I hear a lot of family-lore when staying with my great-aunt, which I thoroughly enjoy. Families are always complex and colourful, particularly one’s own!

The “hobbit house” is situated in a town called Stade, about an hour down the Elbe River from Hamburg in the State of Lower Saxony. Both my grand-mother and my grand-father were born in the rural area surrounding Stade. They come from poor rural folk, nothing exciting. Even though I grew up in Franconia, the North is still an important part of who I am. It is a bit home for me and the soil is thick and rich and has seen many a people crossing through: Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Swedes, Hanseatic powers, Hanoverians, Prussians, and Germans. I have always been drawn to the North and find a deep of sense of belonging there – even though I never lived there (and probably never will.) Having said this, I do want to connect to my father’s side of the family (i.e. the Bavarian part of me) much more intentionally this time round. My mom and dad and I have already planned a trip South to an area on the Danube just outside the city of Regensburg, where some of my ancestors are buried. And maybe there is even time to explore my Swiss side too… We shall see. I might even end up buying a pair of Lederhosen…

My great-aunt and I also attended church one Sunday in one of the medival city-churches of Stade: St. Cosmae. It is a typical North-German Gothic structure, built from brig. Inside it is whitewashed and the vocal point is a Baroque altarpiece depicting the Last Supper, the Cruxifiction, and a statue of the risen Christ. Since this is a Lutheran parish church (as most areas in the North are Lutehran strongholds) the cruxifiction of course is much more prominent than the other tow parts of the altarpiece.

The service was enjoyable, particularly because I got to attend with my great-aunt. The minister even wore a white alb-like liturgical garment and stole (usually Protestant ministers in Germany were a black preaching robe with preaching tabs for any kind of service)! And there was Holy Communion. What more to ask for. (Though I will say a few words about our Protestant sisters and brothers here in Germany in one of the later blogs I hope…!)

After a short lunch, it was time to say good-bye for now and move on. Which was not that far, because I only had to go to Leezen, a small town outside Hamburg, in the State of Schleswig-Holstein, about two hours from great-aunt. Distances are so different in Europe!!!!

I had never been to Leezen and Leezen is not a town mentioned in many (if any) ravel guide. It is a tiny little town, forlmerly a farming community, but now a lot of communters live here too.

Why Leezen?

Well, last year, as I attended one of the two seminars in Ratzeburg, I really connected with one of my Lutheran colleagues, and she lives and ministers in Leezen.

Anett has been the pastor there for quite a while and you can feel and experience that she not only has become part of the local community, but she has left her definite mark. And she has become an institution! And no wonder! Because of the rather prolonged university training, Lutheran pastors in Germany can sometimes be rather intellectual, rather cerebral and, hence, distant from the people (yes, that’s where I get it from…). Furthermore, their spirituality can often be an academic construct. Gut and heart are often excluded. In fact, those aspects of the human identity are often considered less important, even suspect. Now, our training for ordained ministry has is own faults and I wish would have much more of an academic grounding, if only to avoid some of the heresies that are unfortunately oh-so-present in some parts of the North American church. But, this is not a blog about this. Right now, it is about my colleague Anett, who embodies the best of both worlds. She is soundly grounded in academic theology, but she also celebrates humanity’s (an her own) profound and deep identity, i.e. she lives by heart, gut, and mind. Furthermore, while Anett takes our faith and the church seriously, she can laugh about the silliness of the institution. And Anett can laugh about herself. Plus, she is just a great person. And, last year in Ratzeburg, we fast becaome friends (lucky me!!!) And maybe one day I will write about the importance of friendship in my life, which not just since St. Aelred, is a also a deeply theological topic.

So, of course I wanted to see her during my sabbatical. And it was just a wonderful time spent connecting, chatting till the wee hours of the day, laughing about “Gott und die Welt” (God and the world, i.e. everything), exchanging deep theological thoughts, and listening to each other’s story. And time just flew by.

One of the interesting experiences while I was in Leezen was seeing the movie “Das weisse Band” (The White Ribbon) – a historical drama set on the eve of World War I in Northern Germany. The whole movie was filmed in black and white and the character studies were stunning, yet also frightening! The pressure of living in a small village at the time: the written and unwritten rules, the ways by which everybody controlled everybody else, the hierarchy of village, and, especially interesting (and frustrating for me) the way the local pastor dealt with issues of morality and power… It was a not-so-subtle reminder that the good ole’ days very often were not so good indeed.

This would not be my only time in Leezen. A few weeks later, I returned to this picturesque village during a family vacation to preach at a Sunday service. It was Trinity Sunday to more precise – a feast that celebrates a central feature of God’s self-revelation, but that also keeps people shaking their heads. It ain’t easy to understand all this…. But Trinitarian theology neither is an abstract thought invented in some academic mind or in intellectual circles. It is who God is, and this has profound implications on how we relate to one another. In fact, without Trinitarian theology and spirituality we size to be the church and our mission is in vain. But this is no sermon and I will leave the discussion of this to more appropriate times and places.