But for the grace?

                                                              
Note: This is fourth and final in a series about my trip to Europe last summer, part of which I spent exploring religious and family roots.

I began my Summer of 2009 European tour getting in touch with my Anabaptist heritage of religious persecution in Canton Berne, Switzerland. I ended it in Nuremberg, Germany, exploring another and even more extreme example of human inhumanity that is very much a part of the shared history of most of the modern world.

Nuremberg was the home of the Nazi Party and the site of massive annual Nazi Party rallies, one of which was immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl in the film Triumph of the Will. I particularly wanted to go to Nuremberg because of the film. It is one of the finest examples of pure propaganda ever put on film, and I have long used excerpts of it in the classroom to teach critical thinking and viewing.

The sites represented in the film still exist in Nuremberg, and seeing them firsthand was a special lesson even for me, the teacher, in the gap between cinematic reality and physical reality. Of course, the sites have also changed. Gone are the flags and banners and gigantic swastikas, and the stadium seating of the rally ground is mostly overgrown.

Hitler made speeches at Nazi Party rallies from the platform behind the rail high on the façade of the Zeppelin Field Grandstand. A gigantic swastika once stood on the top of the Grandstand. Wikipedia has a brief clip of it being blown up.

           
But the monstrous edifice that dwarfs human figures and presented Hitler at a god-like height above the crowds to make his speeches is still an awesome sight. The Grosse Strasse, or Great Street, for parading military might is a road-building marvel: 1.25 miles by 44 yards of precisely cut black and gray granite squares laid on a road bed able to support war machinery and ranks of marching men.

However, it was not these impressive monuments that gave me new insight into how so horrendous an event as the Holocaust could happen. Rather, it was the careful, historical reconstruction of the rise of Nazism out of patriotism and human desire for community, the creation of the “Fuhrer” myth out of a charismatic leader, the birth of a military juggernaut out of an army of proud workers, and the consequent horrors of death camps and world war—all presented in unflinching detail inside the Documentation Centre museum on the site—that prodded me to a new level of understanding of how we humans can be seduced into inhumane treatment of those we deem less worthy.

My response in the Summer of 2009 was, "There but for the grace of God..." I was remembering the surge of patriotism and anger in the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that led us to invade one country and manufacture a war with another. But in the summer of 2009, with those wars seemingly winding down, I thought we were moving on.

Today, in the face of our own U.S. version of homegrown terrorism against Muslims--burning mosques under construction, threatening to burn Korans, and more--over an Islamic community center with a prayer space* at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan, I'm not so sure.

*Note: I will not call it a mosque because I have heard and read arguments both ways and consider that to be an open question. And I will not say it is "at Ground Zero" because it isn't. It can't even be seen from Ground Zero.
                                        

Anabaptist Roots: Bern

                                                    
Note: This is third in a series about my trip to Europe last summer, part of which I spent exploring religious and family roots.

Last summer's exploration of my Anabaptist roots culminated in Bern, the Capital of the Swiss Canton of Bern and the center of the severest persecutions of the Anabaptists. On the outskirts of town, we passed a castle where Anabaptists were imprisoned.
                                                                                                                                       

In Bern we saw the Rathaus, or City Hall, where Anabaptist trials were conducted. We walked down the Gerechtigkeitsgasse, or Street of Justice, where Anabaptists were flogged and beheaded. How tragic it is that people engaged in the greatest injustices often attempt to cover their tracks by creating symbolism—like the name of this street—in direct contradiction to what they are doing. Today the Street of Justice in Bern is laced with flowers cascading from window boxes.
                                                                                                                                           

We ended our tour of Bern in the Swiss Reformed Cathedral, the site of a service of reconciliation between the descendants of the Anabaptists and the Swiss Reformed Church. When, you might ask? In 2004—almost 500 years after the persecutions began! For a people charged with reconciliation, Christians can sure cling to a grudge.

Although Anabaptism is part of my heritage, I no longer am an Anabaptist. I joyfully participate in the baptism of infants into Christ’s Holy Catholic Church. But traveling in the footsteps of the Anabaptists has helped me to understand why, for example, I am fiercely opposed to state or official religion of any kind, and why I stand fiercely on the side of respecting and protecting the freedom of everyone to believe and worship as they choose.

I do believe in Christian unity, but I believe that unity can be found in the spaciousness of the Holy Spirit, without forcing conformity in belief and practice on the community of the faithful.

And, finally, I believe the practice of examining my religious heritage for what to keep and what to respectfully set aside has both strengthened my faith and made me more open to what the Spirit would teach me through the faiths of others.

Anabaptist Roots: Täufer Versteck

                                                        
Note: This is second in a series about my trip to Europe last summer, part of which I spent exploring religious and family roots.

The oldest continuously operating Mennonite Church in the world is located in the village of Langnau, Switzerland. It was unlocked but seemingly empty when I arrived on a Sunday afternoon in July 2009.

The bulletin board in the vestibule featured a large topographic map of the area marked with “meeting places around 1888.” The persecution of Anabaptists in Switzerland had ended only a few decades earlier. These meetinghouse churches are thus likely to be located in places where the Anabaptists hid from authorities. The terrain depicted on the map makes it clear why: This part of Switzerland is a warren of narrow valleys between forested mountain ridges, offering a wealth of hiding places and making pursuit difficult.

To the left of the map was a photograph of the very church in which I was standing, the “Alteste, Alttäufergemeinde Kehr” or “oldest Old Baptist Community Church.” Of course, the building has changed a great deal, but it is still recognizable as the building in the photo.

In a room just off the vestibule, two very old silver chalices were displayed in a case mounted on the wall. These artifacts surprised me. The Mennonite Church I grew up in would never have owned a silver chalice. Such vestiges of Roman Catholic and Swiss Reformed liturgy were soon judged by the Mennonites to be idolatrous distractions, and they developed instead a plain, unadorned “non-liturgical” style.

The sound of a piano eventually drew me to the main sanctuary, where a young man was practicing. When he found out why I was there, he gave directions to a place called the “Taüfer Versteck,” or “Baptist Hideout,” near the tiny village of Trub, Switzerland, about 20 minutes away.

The Täufer Versteck is in a combination barn and farmhouse built in 1608. It has been in the same family for centuries. During the Anabaptist persecutions, the family built a cleverly concealed hiding place, covered by a balanced piece of timber in the hayloft, such that a person fleeing the authorities could run to the place, jump on the end of the timber and slide into the hole, disappearing in an instant with the timber falling back into place over his head. (It was in fact the male leaders of the movement who were pursued most aggressively, but some women lost their lives as well.)

Although it was Sunday and the Taüfer Versteck was supposed to be closed, the matron of the farm saw me and my travel companion walking about outside. When she learned that I was a descendant of the Anabaptists, she opened the museum, showed us the hideout and demonstrated how it worked, then left us to roam about at our leisure. In one room, we listened to audio-taped stories from the diaries and letters of people who had survived the persecutions. We went into the gift shop, picked out books and souvenirs, and left money for them in an open basket there for that purpose.

The next day we traveled to Bern, the source and site of the severest persecutions in all of Switzerland. That story will be posted next week.

Anabaptist Roots: The Emmental

                                               
Note: This is first in a series about my trip to Europe last summer, part of which I spent exploring religious and family roots.
 
I went on a pilgrimage last summer, in search of my family and religious roots. Actually, they weren’t lost; I’ve always taken interest in and known where I came from. But when the opportunity arose to spend some time in Europe, I wanted to visit the places where my ancestors and their faith were born, and to which they fled to escape persecution for their faith.

My journey began in Zurich, Switzerland, where the Anabaptist movement was founded in the early 1500s. “Anabaptist” means “rebaptize,” and the people who formed the movement believed that only those who were old enough to make a mature confession of faith in Jesus Christ should be baptized into the church. Their name came from the fact that people joined the movement by being baptized as adults, even though they had been baptized as infants.

The official state church in Switzerland at that time was the Swiss Reformed Protestant Church, which perceived the Anabaptist movement as a severe threat to the orthodox faith. It did not take long for the civic and religious leadership to set out to “stamp out the Anabaptist weed,” as it was ordered in official documents of the time. The Canton of Berne, which includes the beautiful and fertile Emmental Valley, was the most energetic and harsh in its persecutions. Anabaptists were beaten and imprisoned, and when that didn’t stop the movement, they were beheaded and drowned. 

A man named Marx Boshart hosted a clandestine meeting of the fledgling Anabaptist movement in his home in Zurich in the early 1500s. He was among the first to be rebaptized and was later imprisoned for his role in the movement. 

My mother’s maternal grandmother was a Boshart. Family historians have not yet been able to establish a link between her and Marx Boshart, but given that her family was from the same region of Switzerland, we strongly suspect there is one and I am proud to claim him. 

Eventually many Anabaptists, including both paternal and maternal strains of my mother’s family and the maternal strain of my father’s family, fled from persecution into the Alsace region of France and the Waldeck region of Germany. Members of my mother’s family in particular were prominent in the formation of the Mennonite Church out of the Anabaptist movement, and members of my father’s family were part of the group that broke away from the Mennonites in the late 1600s to form the Amish Church.

My first visit in Switzerland was to the oldest continuously operating Mennonite Church in the world. It is located in Langnau in the Emmental Valley and was founded in 1530. There I encountered a young man practicing the piano who gave directions to a place called the “Taüfer Versteck,” or “Baptist Hideout” near the tiny village of Trub, Switzerland. I will continue with that story next week.

Who are we in relationship to each other?

                                              

Left: This photograph of Indian women praying from The Family of Man exhibit is mounted on the stone wall skirting Clervaux Castle.                              

At the end of World War II, photographer Edward Steichen had a vision. He wanted to respond to the horrors of war and its emphasis on human conflict with a positive statement about “those universal constants of being that all humanity shares.” And so he set out to collect photographs from around the world, and out of them create an exhibit that would make the point, clearly and resoundingly, that the human family in all its diversity had even more in common.

The result of his work, an exhibit called The Family of Man, consists of 503 photographs collected from 68 countries. On January 26, 1955, The Family of Man opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and closed 103 days later having broken a 15-year attendance record. MoMA toured the exhibit to major cities in the United States and the U.S. Information Agency took it abroad. By 1968, it had been seen by more than nine million people in 69 countries. Several book versions of the exhibit have been produced and millions of copies sold.

By most measures, The Family of Man is the most successful photography exhibition of all time. Steichen chose images that show humans behaving in ways we readily see as “universal,” then grouped the photographs to emphasize these universals. Thus, the exhibit begins with photographs of couples hugging, kissing, rubbing noses or otherwise showing affection. These images are followed by a cluster of pictures of weddings; then comes childbirth and so forth, each group of images drawn from many countries. The overwhelming effect is exactly as Steichen desired: Love, joy, hope, anger, fear, pride in family, the protectiveness of parents, the exuberance of children—all come through as universals that unite the human family.

Clervaux Castle overlooks the city of Clervaux, Luxembourg, and is the permanent home of Edward Steichen's The Family of Man exhibit.

                                                                  
But the success of the exhibit is also its greatest weakness. The Family of Man is often criticized for glossing over stark differences among peoples. The exhibit has found a permanent home in Steichen’s native Luxembourg, where people from around the world (including me last summer) continue to visit and write responses in a guest book. One scholar who has studied the exhibit provides two direct quotes from the guest book that illustrate precisely the poles of disagreement. In June 1996, a Luxembourgian wrote:

How lucky we are to be part of this vast “Family of Man”! I believe that despite all the differences we really form a big family. If only we would stop destroying one another!

Just 10 days earlier, a British visitor had written:

The exhibition wants us to believe that we are all the same fundamentally. But we are not. We all are born, have children, and die. But there the similarity between me and an African, a Chinaman, or a Muslim living in Saudi Arabia ends. We all have very different morals and attitudes—we are not a “family.”

The exhibit itself and these two comments from viewers draw our attention inexorably to what I believe is one of the most—perhaps the most—challenging, perplexing, emotionally charged concerns of humankind today: Who are we humans—individually and as members of the social, cultural, political, economic and religious groups we inevitably and naturally form—in relationship to each other? What are the common grounds among us? When are the differences among us significant and worthy and consequential? Can we use our commonalities to overcome our hostilities? What differences are worth preserving, even with violence?

These questions are especially vexing for those whose faith teaches welcoming the stranger and loving the neighbor. I have no easy answers, only a hope and a prayer. My hope is that someday we will move beyond tolerating difference to celebrating the exuberance of human diversity. My prayer is for wisdom to know the difference between valuing diversity and a valueless, “anything goes” relativity, and for the courage to see and to stand against those human practices—including our own—that diminish other humans.

Top photo: This photograph of Indian women praying from The Family of Man exhibit is mounted on the stone wall skirting Clervaux Castle.

iPhone Diary

iPhone Diary: 27 March 2009

In late March of 2009, I began to explore the capabilities of my new iPhone camera. Like most of my projects, this one did not spring full-blown from my mind. Rather, I tend to start doing something, then figure out what it is and why it is interesting.

What it is, in this case, is a series of photographs called "iPhone Diary." Each image is subtitled with the date it was made. iPhone Diary photographs must be composed at the moment of taking on the screen of the phone-camera. Although I upload them to my computer and sometimes adjust the contrast or color to represent the scene as near to how I saw it as possible, I do not crop the images.

My purpose in not cropping iPhone Diary pictures and in seeking to re-present a scene as I saw it is distinctly NOT to reinforce the popular notion that the camera produces a mechanical, therefore somehow "objective," record of reality. Photographers are in the business of framing the world. They impose the physical frame of their camera's viewfinder/screen on continuous reality. What ends up within the frame and how it is organized in relationship to the frame is one of the photographer's primary communicative tools. Deciding to not crop the iPhone Diary images thus requires discipline. I must be very clear and deliberate at the moment of making the photograph about what I see and how to frame it so that others will be able to see it as well.

Is it interesting, and if so, how? To me it is, but the photographs are fragments from my life--like a diary of images. I have a story to go with each one. At the same time, perhaps the pictures also somehow transcend the particular. Maybe they evoke your stories, too?

Happy New Year from NOLA!

iPhone Diary: 31 December 2009

I first came to New Orleans in the 1970s as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa to attend the national conference of a student organization. I don't remember the organization or the conference, but I have been coming to New Orleans ever since.

That first trip, I did all the responsible conference things a serious student should do. But every evening, as soon as I could make an appropriate getaway, I headed to the French Quarter. Of course, I walked Bourbon Street, gaped at fabulous jewelry, art and antiques on Royal Street, and even engaged what were for a Midwestern farm girl raised Mennonite distinctly guilty pleasures: alcohol (thereby discovering the mango daiquiri); window shopping the sex-toy and lingerie shops; actually going IN the voodoo shops.

But it didn't take much of that kind of thing to satisfy my curiosity. By about 8 p.m. each evening, I had paid my dollar and was soaking up jazz in Preservation Hall. I left at 2 a.m. when the last note died, the lights came on and the audience was shooed out the door. At least a couple of those nights were spent sitting on the floor due to overflow crowds. It didn't matter; I was young and both the music and musicians compelling.

That was not my first exposure to jazz. In fact, the first recorded music I bought as a teenager was not Elvis Presley, although I was a huge fan. Rather, it was David Brubeck's first hit jazz album, Take Five. Jazz was and is part of what draws me to New Orleans.

But New Orleans is more than jazz, more than its various wonderful musics, even more than all of its cultural wonders combined: music, cuisine, art, history, architecture and so forth. New Orleans is, instead, an attitude and a way of thinking and living. It is a city with an irrepressible spirit.

Of course, New Orleans has many problems. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which exposed the city's gravest issues of race and poverty and crime, prominent religious people were quick to define the hurricane and flood as God's punishment for the city's "decadence."

New Orleans is a city easy to romanticize and to villify. Instead, I offer the perspective of Robert C. Linthicum in his book City of God, City of Satan.

In the countryside God has used the forces of nature to carve and shape and mold. In the city God has used the creativity of human beings to carve and shape and mold!

Linthicum acknowledges that cities are and have long been plagued with many problems, but rather than abandon them, as many suggested New Orleans should be after the Katrina flood, he argues:

The city is to be celebrated and admired, not simply for itself, but because the city is the creation and primary abode of God.

New Orleans is the best and worst of humankind writ large, a site of struggle between our most honorable intentions and our most venal tendencies, our most beautiful expressions and our darkest secrets.

Happy new year from a lovely tart of a city!

On Life, Music and Blogging

"Dr. K, why not call your blog 'Coming to Terms'!"
 
We were talking about music, specifically, the difference in sentiment and attitude between Country and Soul. Both are musics of lament, I said. Both deal with hard times, disappointment, loss. But Country, I argued, is a music of resignation. It is a fatalistic lament.

I put it on the blackboard: Country -- resignation. Soul -- ?? Then I turned to the class and said, I can't think of a single word that expresses the sentiment and attitude of Soul. It accepts hard times, disappointment, loss, but not in a resigned or fatalistic way. It resists. It's about...

And as my voice trailed off, a student--I don't even know which one--said, "It's about coming to terms with things." Yes, I said, very good. And as I turned to write "coming to terms with" next to Soul, the student named John said, "Dr. K. why not call your blog 'Coming to Terms'?"

So here it is: The Rev. Dr. K's observations of life and humankind in all of our glory and pathos, heroism and hubris, capacity for humanity and proclivity to inhumanity. These observations will be both visual and verbal, for I'm a photographer as well as a writer. They will be both humanist and spiritual, both secular and religious, for I am both a teacher of communication at a university and a Deacon in the Episcopal Church.

Although I am a fierce proponent of the separation of church and state and do not proselytize while teaching at a public institution, I am also not a split personality. I can and do compartmentalize as necessary, yet a thread of continuity runs through the whole. This blog will be an opportunity for me to construct that thread of continuity more purposefully and explicitly.

I hope a few folks out there--friends, critics and not yet either--will want to come along.