World Cup Churches 21. Belgium

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

When I first visited Bruges (Brugge) I was, like many visitors, attracted to its canals, wonderful atmosphere and architecture.

I was not attracted by the church tower in this photo, made entirely of bricks and soaring far into the sky.  Yet as you see, I photographed it. I did so because it is such a monumental thing - far higher, for example, than Big Ben/the Elizabeth Tower of the British Houses of Parliament and far higher than any other building in Bruges.

'Being monumental' is not a great Christian virtue, and this tower is a monument to the enormous commercial wealth of Bruges mid-millennium.

Like any Catholic Church of size it is also relatively full of monuments (or in Protestant parlance perhaps idols) inside.  Yet this is where this church has a feature that says something significant about the confusion that is Belgium.

Belgium is about a third of the age of this church and is arguably at least two countries still, the Dutch and the French, plus a small German section.  When this Church was built it was part of the County of Flanders belonging to the House of Burgundy. Later it was under the Spanish, later the Austrians . . . you get the idea.

The feature in question, however, is Italian.

Michelangelo's Madonna and Child was the first of his sculptures to leave Italy and the reason it left Italy was the same reason the ludicrous brick tower was built - money.  No Italian patron could match the offer from Bruges and so this amazing statue has stood . . . no, wait a minute, it has NOT stood for 500 years here.

Three hundred years later the French Revolutionaries were in town and it was shipped off to Paris.  There is stayed until Waterloo, when Napoleon's defeat and demise enabled its return.  It lasted a hundred years or so until the Second World War.  

Peculiarly it became a 'victim' of D Day as retreating German forces retreated with the statue in tow.  Where had it gone?  A year or so later it was found in a salt mine in Austria.

Perhaps the lesson in all this is that although this is a monumental statue in a monumental church (The Church or Our Lady [Eng]) there can be relatively few churches or statues that have changed hands or countries as often as these!  Human things are never changeless things.

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.

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?

 



Mozart

Salzburg is very proud of Mozart.  I had no wish to avoid him, but even if I had so wished I could not have done.  As the story unfolded I started to find this quite amusing.

 

Poor Wolfgang Amadeus himself did not like Salzburg anything like as much as Salzburg has come to like him.  As far as the story can be understood, he spent a great deal of energy trying to extricate himself from the mediocre Salzburg Court to become more widely rich and famous in Vienna or Munich or the like.

 

It is nearly as ironic that to do almost anything truly Mozartian in Salzburg will cost a small fortune.  Some people somewhere are making a lot of money when an opera ticket costs over £300.00.  Mozart himself made a decent amount of money but spent an indecent amount leaving him indecently in debt: a few forward royalties might have helped as I imagine his link to the city adds up to 20% to the cost.

 

One might imagine that no-one is more empowered to control their legacy than a genius composer or artist.  Hundreds of years on their work is still being enjoyed, their locations remembered.  Yet human beings are not like that.  They take up legacies and shape them in the way that suits them.

 

The only way to ultimately control your legacy would be to rise again from the dead.

Austria

Mountains are amazingly emotive.  This despite them being nowhere near as alive as Julie Andrews implied in The Sound of Music.  In the average lowland marsh there are countless more living things, so what is it that makes the traveller gooey eyed about mountains?  Why do we climb them, leaving ourselves exhausted?

 

Long before the Victorians were sea-dipping people were heading for the hills and I suppose it is about perspective.  The greatness of the view, the greatness of the mountain itself, somehow St Gilgan looks attractive in the photograph even though you cannot really see it.  It's beauty is made by the mountain perspective.

 

Isn't that what faith in God does too?