Silent Night

It was the last and only cooler, wet day of a summer Austrian vacation.  I set out on the train to see where Silent Night was written on Christmas Eve 1818.  (Tonight is its 200th birthday!)

On the train to Oberndorf I mused that this really wasn’t the weather for adding meaning to an alpine Christmas carol.  Grey skies and rain did not evoke the spirit of the song which I knew had been first sung on Christmas Eve in Oberndorf church.  I tried to ignore the weather and dreamed of the mountainside setting where Max Gruber the organist wrote the tune that set the priest Joseph Mohr’s words to life and fame.

The train, disappointingly, started to leave the hills behind.  Now my imagination was having to adjust to the alpine village being, well, not very alpine.  By the time the train stopped at the first of Oberndorf’s two stations I had figured that this town was about as alpine as Dartford.

I headed for the town centre.  Peering through the drizzle I waited to cross a busy road to visit the church on the town square.  'This must be it', I thought.  Sadly the road had the silent ambiance of the rush hour in a London suburb.  The spirit of the old carol seemed further away than ever.

It was indeed further away than ever because, on finally crossing the road, the church noticeboard helpfully pointed out (in English for any misguided American or British tourist) that this church was not the one where the carol was sung.  Worse still, it informed me that the old church and village, formerly by the river, had been flooded so often that they had been demolished and rebuilt inland here.  The scrap of good news was that a memorial chapel now stood at the old site with a shop and museum.  So, my visualised alpine snow-covered mountain church having been reduced to a souvenir shop on a patch of low lying river bank, I headed that way. 

Ten damp minutes later and I was at the riverside site.  There I was able to relive a little bit of Oberndorf history - regrettably it was the wrong bit of Oberndorf history.  Two months before there had been another enormous flood.  The museum and souvenir shop had been completely inundated and were now closed.  I looked at the patch of grass and concluded that I had enjoyed Silent Night somewhat more before I visited Oberndorf than I was likely to do from now on when, every future Christmastime, it triggers memories of a long, flat walk in the rain to a grassy patch of anonymous mid-European river bank.

We always think we can add things, experiences, activities and memorabilia to improve the original Christmas, which merely had God moving through a womb to a manger as one of us. 

Merely?  With everything we add we lose a little of the wonder of the amazing grace he gave us in  the Christ-child.

World Cup Blog 31: Tunisia

Tunisia, not unexpectedly, had a quiet World Cup.  As a land, Tunisia has had a quiet few centuries relative to some neighbours.  It has figured in the many Mediterranean, European and North African changes and challenges - two recent examples were the Arab Spring and the Second World War - without being much remembered in the longer term history of either.

Tunisia takes on a different perspective when we travel further back. Before Tunisia was so called and before it was largely Arabic it was the site of Carthage.  This might seem remote from the World Cup but the Tunisian's nickname is Les Aigles de Carthage so in its way Carthage turned up at the World Cup after all.

Most famous of the sons of Carthage, which in its day dominated the Western Mediterranean, was the great general Hannibal - yes the one famed for the elephant over the Alps.

Carthage had other famous sons too, and two of them - who both were born and died in Carthage - were Tertullian and Cyprian.  By their days, 150 - 250 AD, Carthage was not as great as it had been but was still significant within the Roman Empire.  When Christianity arrived in Carthage it arrived big-time and thus their stories which overlap through the 100 years, reflect the battle between the Roman Emperors and the emerging faith.

Tertullian is remembered for his turns of phrase and his lack of moderation.  He was never canonised by the church because he was mildly heretical regarding the Trinity - but he invented the word Trinity as irony would have it. He is loved for his pithy, bold, even aggressive statements.  Cyprian was the model of moderation (and he in turn was criticised for that) but you will find churches called St Cyprian's but not St Tertullian's.

Tertullian's memorable phrases includes the oft-quoted The blood of the martyrs is the seed by which he meant the seed that grows the church.  Cyprian, for all his attempts to keep the church unified and his moderating between warring factions ended up as one such seed some years after Tertullian's natural death.  A series of plagues was blamed on Christianity and so Cyprian, then the Bishop of Carthage, was beheaded in response to local anger. He was martyred in 258 AD.

Maybe Cyprian would not have been surprised or distressed by this, however.  In a famous - though less famous than Tertullian's frequent sound-bites - quotation he had previously written:

It is a bad world, Donatus, a very bad world. But I have discovered in the midst of it a quiet and good people who have learned the great secret of life. They have found a joy and wisdom which is a thousand times better than any of the pleasures of our sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They are masters of their souls. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are Christians. . . and I am one of them.

Aberfan

Yesterday I spoke at a Primary School Harvest Assembly.  One of the songs that was sung - by Year 3  (7/8 year olds) - was All things bright and beautiful.  Perhaps nobody else in the 400 plus people in the room realised the poignancy of singing that hymn this week.

On the morning of October 21, 1966 the primary school children sang it in assembly at the primary school in Aberfan, South Wales.  The assembly lasted from 9:00am to 9:15am.  I was many miles away in eastern England, though would have been an 8 year old in that assembly had Aberfan been my home.

Which is why I've thought about it a lot this week.  For 88 children just like me died at 9:15am straight after that assembly when the National Coal Board's reckless mountain of slag swept down the hillside and buried the school, sending into eternity a generation of my contemporaries, aged 7-9 and 28 adults.

There are many sad ironies about that particular hymn being sung which both at the time and on reflection have occurred to many observers.  Although we often blame Nature (and by extension its Creator who also makes the bright and the beautiful) for disasters, the Aberfan disaster lay squarely on the shoulders of man.  In South Wales at the time all that was dark and ugly in the landscape was man-made and all that was bright and beautiful was created by God.  But the hymn still feels wrong somehow,

Yet maybe today as the old school site has a peaceful memorial garden it is more helpful to think of the bright and beautiful as the long-term and the dark disasters as short term.  Of course they do not seem very short term to a village that lost a generation.  Yet worldwide from Cambodia to Congo to Hiroshima to St Petersburg there are places haunted by ancient awfulness which have returned to a brightness and beauty in their time.

I thought of that a couple of years ago when visiting the mountain retreat of the Third Reich in the Alps.  Beauty outlasts the Beast.  In the end nobody in heaven sings songs of mourning - not even the martyrs.

Eisriesenwelt (Ice Caves)

On any vacation there are things you are never likely to forget.  When you pay out the money you anticipate (perhaps over optimistically) that the thing(s) you will never forget will be good.  The reality of vacations: long distance travel, unfamiliar food, different climates, different insect life etc. suggest that this optimism needs qualifying.

 

One thing I will never forget from this vacation was an announcement.

 

It is probably true that there have been several Church Services in which an announcement has stolen the show, notwithstanding the preparatory efforts of the musicians, the preacher and other participants.  That day the announcement somewhat stole the show.  The Eisreisenwelt are lauded as one of Austria's most spectacular places.  That is quite something in an alpine nation that is filled with amazing landscapes and an enormous historical significance over many centuries of culture, politics and the arts.

 

Certainly these ice caves are amazing - though possibly less so than the hype and world recognition suggest.  A cave is, after all, a cave.  And every cave I have ever visited has shapes and clever lighting shows them up.  Whatever.

 

The announcement that my daughter and I will not forget was memorable for its context as well as its content.

The caves are high, high up the mountain.  There was a bus to start with which (together with its amazingly grumpy driver - isn't it strange how you can tell that someone is grumpy and swearing at every passing car even when you can't speak his language?) took us to the car park.  The car park is itself a steep slope, then a facility building, and another uphill walk of some minutes to the cable car.

 

I mentally associate cable cars with going up mountains from bottom to top but this one turned out to go up from about 6/10ths of the way up to 7/10ths.  It left us with a further climb, the following photo being taken about a third of the way up that last climb.  You can see the entrance to the cave in the middle.

 



 

Even at the cave entrance the temperature, on the day we climbed, was in the mid 20s.  The English language has several words available for how we felt on getting to the entrance (how everyone arriving at the entrance seemed to feel).  I'll choose this one: knackered.

 

That was the context of the announcement. 

 

The content of the announcement?  At the entrance tired climbers were offered a Deutsch or Englisch queue each with fit-looking young guides in very warm-looking coats.  And ours, in decent English, made this announcement;

 

"I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that there are 700 steps up and 700 steps down.  The good news is that although it is freezing you will not feel cold with all those steps to climb!"  On the cheerful delivery of which he led us to light our lamps and on into the caves.

 

My inadequacy of language means I cannot accurately convey the experience of arriving with exhausted relief at a destination to find that the destination is a 1400 step climb.  The best I can do is that it felt like my body remained at several thousand feet up but my heart sank back to the shuttle bus stop at the valley bottom.

 

I wonder how many people climb their way through life without realising what they are climbing towards.  I wonder whether they would so climb if they knew.  I wonder if there is a whole different Way that ends with rest?