World Cup Churches 12. Poland

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.

Poland is rare among European nations in having increasing numbers of churches.  The land of Poland has an unfortunate story of being a very suitable place to wage war, and as everyone knows, war is a historical preoccupation of Europeans.  Even as I write this blog, Poland is only over the border from Europe's latest war in Ukraine.

Perhaps it is heartening that such a troubled area has increasing numbers of Christian (mostly Catholic) sites.  Here is on such church, in a former Nazi SS Headquarters building:

This Church at Birkenau is, however, very controversial.   It is just down the road, as it were, from the infamous Birkenau Camp - also known as Auschwitz 2. Whilst, looked at from the perspective of Christian - Catholic - tunnel vision it is surely heartening to see a place of such dishonour being redeemed for Christian worship, this is most certainly not how it is perceived by the Jewish community.  And as such it brilliantly illustrates the problem of Church History.

There were, of course Catholic Christians (and other Christians) who died in Nazi Concentration Camps.  But the broad sweep of the Catholic response to Nazism was ambiguity - at best.  Pope Pius's attitude has been the subject of volumes of claim and counter-claim but that his official position was largely neutral is the best that can be said for him.

Hence the problem with this church.  Had it met in the building when the Nazis were there - and challenged them - it might have its rightful place.  But for the Jews it simply reminds them that they were ignored then and ignored now.

Churches need to be good news first and buildings second.

Top Ten Funeral Songs 2018: 9. We'll meet again (Vera Lynn)

2018:  The Co-operative Funeral Services list of Top Ten Funeral Songs (now containing no Christian songs or hymns).  I'm looking at the merits and demerits of the top ten, and number 9 - We'll meet again, sung by Vera Lynn:

Why it's good for a funeral:

It sounds hopeful.

Why it's bad for a funeral:

Dying is not much like going off to war (the song dates from 1939 and the hope of sunnier, post-war times down the track).  Over 99% of UK military personnel outlived the Second World War.  The percentage for general death survival hovers around 0%.  (Though at the time of writing Vera Lynn is closer to cheating this statistic than most of us - she's aged 102!)

Line that's most like a Christian song:

We'll meet again

Line that's least like a Christian song:

Don't know where

A Quote from (performer) Vera Lynn:

Seeing a severely disabled five-year-old smile, or his parents laugh, reminds me that giving up isn’t worth it — persistence can be so rewarding.

Why I don't want this song at my funeral:

I wasn't alive in World War 2.

A better Christian alternative:

.

[Ten Thousand times Ten Thousand . . .]

O then what raptured greetings

On Canaan's happy shore.

What knitting severed friendships up

Where partings are no more!

Then eyes with joy shall sparkle

That brimmed with tears of late;

Orphans no longer fatherless

Nor widows desolate.

World Cup Blogs 12: Germany

One of the great values of international sport is that it brings people together, albeit in a competitive way.  However, when Argentina recently cancelled a game they had scheduled in Israel we were reminded that sport is not really above politics but is merely allowed brief glimpses of an unrealistic utopia.

Germany are winners when it comes to the World Cup.  But the country faces battles and has worked very hard to redress its 20th century story, a story which put paid to many sporting events.  There was no World Cup tournament in 1942 or 1946.

One, I think, very moving and impressive feature of Germany are Stolpersteine.


In the pavements of several German cities, towns and villages you may find them - in English literally stumbling blocks.   Stolpersteine are embedded stones with a small plaque on top. On the plaque is the name of someone who lived in a building nearby and who was taken away by the Nazis in or before World War II, never to return. Gunter Demnig, an artist from Cologne, made it something of a life's work to place these wherever research shows people were deported.

I photographed those below in an anonymous inner city street in Frankfurt am Main. Seven people whose 'crime' was to be Jewish.

Such is the irrational injustice of anti-Semitism that if I had stood in that street in the war as a Briton - the declared enemy - though I may well have been killed as a spy, I might have talked my way into a prisoner of war camp. 

But had I been a Jew, and that was my home city, perhaps the very street I grew up on, I would more certainly have been killed and my family with me.  We must never let the warm waves of sporting internationalism fool us into thinking that injustice can be eradicated by donning football shirts and kicking a ball.  It might help.  But justice costs more than that.

Bless

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

We thought about these words on Sunday.

We ended with this remarkable prayer from a Serbian bishop and a World War II concentration camp:

Bp. Nikolai Velimirovich was a Serbian bishop in the last century who spoke out courageously against Nazism until he was arrested and taken to Dachau. This is a translated extract of his famous prayer:

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have.
Friends have bound me to earth, enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.
Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world. Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary, having settled myself beneath your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul.
Bless my enemies, O Lord. They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.
They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself.
They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.
They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.
Bless my enemies, O Lord, Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish.
Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a dwarf.
Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background.
Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out.
Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of your garment.
Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends.

A Baptist President

Being attached to a label over which you have no control is an occupational hazard in many walks of life, including ministry.  Ask a Muslim, or a worker at Trump International, for example.

'Baptist' is a term that a vast range of churches can adopt so there are plenty of reasons to be wary of over-indulging it as a label.

Donald Trump is not a Baptist.  There have been Baptist presidents of the USA: four in all - which is four more than the number of Baptist Prime Ministers of the UK.  Given the new arrival in the White House I imagine the two that are alive - Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter (though he's no longer a Baptist) - are not feeling very happy just now.

But the one that arrests my attention is the one before them - Harry S Truman.  He was certainly not a Donald Trump.  In listings of US Presidents by wealth he occupies a very lowly position.  He grew up on a Midwestern farm and his parents could not afford to send him to College. But for the intervention of World War 2, may have stayed there but that war brought out leadership qualities in him that led to the Senate and at last to the Vice-Presidency.

And then, 82 days into a fourth term of office in 1945, the near-legendary President Franklin D Roosevelt suddenly died.  FDR had led the USA through the War following Pearl Harbor but also through the post-Depression 1930s.  His death was not on the radar.  And Vice-President Harry S Truman became President.

On his inauguration day he turned to the reporters and said, "Well boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now".  Within a few weeks he had to decide whether or not to drop nuclear bombs on Japanese cities with the intention of bringing the war to an earlier close.  It was a decision to take tens of thousands of lives in order to save more tens of thousands of lives.  The only person who has ever authorised the use of nuclear weapons was a Baptist.

There is amazing incongruity in that.  Baptists are often somewhat pacifist, sometimes committedly so, and rarely devotedly pro-military by comparison to many other people.  It is a reminder that whatever our stories in Sunday School the world thrusts difficult - perhaps cataclysmically difficult - decisions upon us.

We will all have a critical opinion on the decision that will forever mark his name.  But perhaps the lesson to learn is that we must pray for our leaders - whether they know we must or whether they don't.  Some of them have thought they are God, but none of them are.

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.

No Island is an Island

Her Majesty the Queen and dozens of Commonwealth leaders have gathered in Malta - and with some relief one imagines.  Threats have been issued (of course) and security strengthened (of course) but in the whole scheme of things a small Mediterranean island looks like a good idea just now.

Yet even a modicum of historical awareness suggests otherwise for, as we were reminded during our  family holiday in Malta, this is an island whose history is bathed in blood.  In living memory it was the heroics of the Second World War when, as effectively the allied mid-Med military base the island was mercilessly, but unsuccessfully, attacked by Axis forces.

But the really bloody story of Malta is that of the Great Siege - a historical epic of mind-numbing proportions when the Knights of St John, representing Christian Europe and based in Malta, held out against an Ottoman siege by four or more times as many men through a whole summer.

Soberingly, given the cheap view of life demonstrated recently in Paris, a historian wrote thus, 'The disregard of human life among the Ottoman Turks at this time was almost incredible: to try to attain their end in war they sacrificed thousands upon thousands of men with callous indifference.'

In five hundred years humanity has not learned very much, for all its apparent learning.

It's Missing: 4. The Cenotaph

Last Sunday Her Majesty the Queen and a great many others laid their wreaths at the Big Empty in Whitehall.  Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty's not-so-Loyal Opposition, Republican and Pacifist, was watched by the circling media in case he blew his nose at the wrong time,  His bow was deemed lacking in bendiness and an empty gesture.

The Cenotaph is, in its own stark way, an empty gesture.  Despite the momentarily heart-warming 'THE GLORIOUS DEAD' engraved on it, it is missing the dead.  Indeed, a cenotaph is by definition an empty tomb, associated with death but without a body or from which (in other cases) a body has been removed.  In Whitehall this Cenotaph makes manageable the otherwise unmanageable, for nowhere in Westminster is there room to bury the bodies of those who have died in the wars that Britain has fought.  Instead, a column and a grand description makes the multi-million life carnage seem almost homely.

An empty tomb that cannot accommodate the number of dead is one thing.

An empty tomb where the occupant has defeated death and lives for ever more?  That's Easter.  That's a cenotaph where the missing causes our heads to be lifted up in worship instead of bowed in thoughtful regret.

Holiday Pics - No 1 Peace and War

Friends post lovely holiday pictures on Facebook.  Except that about this time in August it is hard to look at another 32 pictures from wherever having seen 932 already!  I virtuously posted only five.  So far.  On this blog I've decided to post some different ones that I can write about.

This picture comes from Malta.  I think it is fairly idyllic though on the wall to the right is a solemn reminder of one of the many great conflicts that the island has been involved in - in the case of the War Rooms here the Second World War.

With a bit of preacher's squeeze-a-meaning there is a lesson here about the transitory nature of this world's idylls.  But I didn't need that.  The point about this picture is that - like all photographs - it is silent.  As no people, animals or vehicles can be seen it even lacks the implied sound that many photos contain.  This was not, however, a silent scene at all.

It was a very hot afternoon. Mad dogs and Englishmen (let the reader decide which I am) went out in the midday sun, locals stayed indoors - as here.  Stayed indoors but did not stay quiet.  At the moment I took this photo two women were having the most ear-splitting row in the building at the top of the stairs.  I mean the sort of row that one half expected to end in a scream with someone being pushed over a balcony.

 

Sunshine doesn't reach the human heart, though it can greatly affect our skein.

Too Late

London has many leftovers from World War II and only this year more than one unexploded bombs have been discovered in the course of building work.  

London is also full of mysteries and many books have been written about them.  These include tunnels nobody has ever used, an underground station that was built but never opened, a railway station only for funeral trains and so on.

Here's a picture of Putney Bridge Station.  Unremarkable one may think, as a southbound train heads off across the Thames.

But wait a minute.

Isn't that a bunker to defend the station?

This seems doomed to remain a permanent mystery.  A cursory glance at a London map will confirm that if the storm-troopers of the Third Reich had reached Putney Bridge there was not a lot of London left to defend (and certainly the District line might as well have been written off).

We live in a culture that has many defences like this.  We jealously protect little children having surrendered any serious attempt to similarly defend teenagers who are left to go in whatever direction things take them.  We protect those teenagers from the worst abuses only to leave them from the age of 18 to live life with every vice and no guidance at all.  We provide universal healthcare to bring us safely to old age whereupon we become unwanted, unloved and very expendable.

Most of all, we have human rights but no idea why it matters that we are human.

All in all, it is not only Putney Bridge Station that has inexplicably strong defences in the wrong place.

Holocaust

I was struck by the crafted words of a journalist reporting on today's commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz:  Those who survived Auschwitz lived through one of the 20th Century's worst acts of hatred and inhumanity.

 

In a world where hype so often hides the truth here is the truth: one of one century's worst.

 

In fact the importance of marking today in our thoughts is not because it was unthinkably bad but because the inhumanity of the Nazis toward the Jews and others is repeatable.  The industrial, secret and targeted scale of it sets it apart, but only in degree.  I witnessed the fears that surround this still in one of my earlier blogs.

Protection for Frankfurt's Synagogue - today

We call it inhumanity because we do not want to think of it as human.  But it is absolutely human.  What other created species sets about its own in such a way?  Certainly none with any moderately developed intelligence.

I like the optimism in the word inhumanity.  I like it but I'm not sure I entirely believe it.  Humanity's best hope lies, I think, in the Man from Heaven.

Trebah

As August comes to its end its most pleasantly memorable day for us was certainly the one spent at Trebah Gardens.  It was one of those perfect days at a perfect place that it is quite possible to get through years - or the whole - of life and never have (especially taking holidays in England!).

 

 

Bathed in glorious summer sunshine, visitors end their walk through the gardens at a private beach area, complete with ice cream of course.  It was almost too hot to sit there but we managed it  . . .

 

 

If only.

If only we could hold these moments as our constant way of life.

 

Poignantly, however, Trebah bears its own testimony to the simple reality that life is not a bed of hydrangeas.  There by the beach is a picture of another year - 70 years ago - at the same spot.

 

 

On our summer idyll came the reminder that as needs must on D-Day this spot had been found to be very suited to launching part of a military invasion.  The walk that we had just done had been the last peaceful walk that many of those soldiers did before losing their lives in Northern France.  It is the stark story of human life amidst creation's beauty.

Berchtesgaden

Alongside the beauty of the Austrian landscape lies the beauty of the Bavarian Alps.  There, at the foot of one Germany's highest mountains, is the town of Berchtesgaden.  We arrived by train.

Berchtesgaden is not tiny, but neither is it a large town.  It is very picturesque, offering ice creams that you could die for - or more accurately die of.  To be fair to Berchtesgaden its most extraordinary feature is its setting and probably its second-most amazing feature is its palace complex where the Bavarian princes lived.

 

 

Yet right up there with the word amazing is the railway station.  Trundled would be the word to describe the winding, single track journey through the mountains that brought us to the town.  Winding and stunningly beautiful.  The trains ran every hour which, given the isolation of the line, was relatively remarkable.  Finally the three coaches clattered over some points (US: switches) and came to a halt in Berchtesgaden station, the end of the line.  There, one could deduce from the timetable, the train stopped for 20 minutes before setting off back through the mountains on its return journey.

 

I think it was on platform (line) 4 that we stopped on.  Platform 4.  But wasn't there only one train at a time?  Why ever would you need four platforms?  And then there is the station buildings themselves.  They are absolutely huge.  Befitting a large town or moderate city perhaps - but a mountain town at the end of a single track railway?

 

It was not always like this.  Berchtesgaden had its railway for many decades in humbler surroundings until, in the mid 1930s a man called Hitler bought a country retreat in the hills a few miles away.  The date on the station says 1937.  It was actually completed in 1938 and here the likes of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were welcomed for meetings of state.  The meetings kept the world leaders abreast with the plans and developments of the Third Reich.  The meetings were about as much use as the monumental station is today - all outward importance, no true function.

 

It reminded me of that other World War 2 railway monument at Auschwitz.  There a bleak track leads to a dead end.  Here in the mountains of Bavaria a beautiful track and a magnificent station are part of the same great dead end that is man's inhumanity to man.

 

A Son's Tribute - War

This picture comes in the BBC history section with the heading 'When Ken Dodd learned Welsh'.

 

We do not choose the when and where of our birth and my Dad was born in a most unfortunate situation from the point of view of Secondary education.  At about the age that we were exercised about 'which school is best', Ken Dodd, my Dad and thousands of others were evacuated from Merseyside to the perceived safety of Wales.

 

This may or may not have been a good idea by the Government though it had the obvious difficulty of breaking up the family.  Families still break up today of course for different reasons.  I was very blessed to be part of a family that was not broken up and this is another reason to be grateful to God for my Dad.  I have met plenty of people whose lives can recover the sense of stability that I enjoyed as a normality.

 

Governments do affect us.  The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought this starkly to light.  The wartime Government is regarded as heroic (presumably, as in the manner of a successful football manager, because it won).

 

It wasn't so heroic for my Dad though.  Having sent him to Wales away from danger but also family it decided it was safe to return after all.  So back he came to his home round the corner from a great shipyard - just in time for the actual blitz.  His teenage equivalent of my football on Saturdays was climbing around bomb craters in the middle of Merseyside.

 

We do well to trust in another Power than that of the State.

Happy Birthday Edith



Today we celebrate various birthdays - including Edith Piaf's.

Edith, short on height (several inches short of five foot) but with an amazing voice, was plucked to fame from the back streets of Paris.

Born during the First World War, she was famed before the Second.  Edith was not noted for her Christian devotion (to the extent that the Catholic Archbishop refused to take her funeral in 1963).  She died at 47 years after a depressingly (literally and metaphorically) familiar story of broken relationships and addictions brought to an early conclusion by a liver that could take no more.

On the plus side, in this famously iconic song Non, je ne regrette rien she hit on the Gospel (admittedly accidentally).

. . . No I regret nothing
It's paid for, wiped away, forgotten . . .
. . . swept away my love stories
And their troubles
Swept away for good
I'll start again from zero . . .

Ah, Edith. 

Your liver was lost but your soul did not need to be.  This is the Christmas joy - Year Zero, a unique opportunity for the human race to start again, no longer in the line of Adam (or the apes - for the benefit of Mr Dawkins) but in the Last Adam, Jesus.  Every life can have no regrets, its debts paid in full, its hope come alive!!

Anyhow, a great 20th Century song, eh?

Except that Piaf's recorded bitter deathbed words (expletives deleted) were something like, "Everything you do in this life, you pay for."

Which seems to show that she was not convinced by the song she made famous.  I suppose the liver drowned out the song.  May God grant us that understanding of the love of God in Jesus that washes away all the regrets in the blood of Jesus. His Son and Mary's Son.
 

Anne Frank

There are few more haunting places in Western Europe than Anne Frank's House in Amsterdam.
 

That is not to say that there are not worse places.  Massacres have littered the history of Europe; massacres on battlefields, in gas chambers, on hillsides and God knows where else.  Europe, whilst being a very nice continent to live as supplied by God through Mother Nature has also been turned into killing fields very many times and the sites are there to visit (together with a Tourist Office of course).

 

Anne Frank's house touristic too.  Annexes have turned it into a veritable museum and although there is a reality about it in some ways there is also a sense (with the Restaurant and Bookshop at the end)  that this could have been recreated from scratch in, say, Las Vegas.

 

Except for me it couldn't.

 

When we visited it on our vacation it was not the House itself that haunted me - though it is despairingly poignant.  It was just one (black and white of course) picture combined with our experience of visiting.
 

Duly warned, we had turned up early - a very strong recommendation given that there was an eye-poppingly long line waiting by the time we exited.  We lined up for no more than ten minutes and next to the canal and the Great Western Church we watched the cyclists scuttle by, the barges and boats glide past under a summer's sky.

The haunting black and white picture in the House was of exactly the same kind of Amsterdam canalside scene.  Only this time there were Nazi security forces and a line of Jewish families being rounded up for deportation.  The same canals, churches, sunshine, and another line of people out on the street.  These apparently glorious delights buried beneath human hatred.

That a setting that delighted me was a terror to Anne Frank: that I was pleased to linger in a place that she was for years terrified to step into; this showed me that the human heart is far more important than architecture, church buildings, summer weather and lining up.

Expensive

Dietrich Bonhoeffer died at the end of World War II in a Nazi Concentration Camp after his willingness to challenge the Nazis.  He wrote

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.



Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake of one will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. 

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "you were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. . .