Lutherstadt Wittenberg: Guided and minded

Setting out

My visit to Lutherstadt Wittenberg was planned for a Wednesday. Two days before I had booked my train ticket from Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Hauptbahnhof is main or central station and it is usually written as Hbf. I decided on using the high-speed Intercity-Express (ICE) train. The journey would have lasted 40 minutes and it was the second stop from Berlin.

That morning, I had to ply an alternative route to my boarding station from my hotel because the suburban train link from Berlin-Zoologischer Garten Station to Berlin Hbf was not running, I had plenty of time.

When I finally made it to the station, I first cooled my heels in the DB lounge before boarding my train as I reminisced about the affordability and comfort of high-speed trains on mainland Europe.

Walking through

On arrival at Lutherstadt Wittenberg, the station was being refurbished and the information point at the exit was really for buses, however, the lady at the counter kindly informed me that I only had to walk into town for the tourist information office. What she did not say was that it was at the far end of the main street.

The borders of the footpath to the town centre had beautiful aromatic flowers that released a fragrant scent of sweet smelling savour, like some scriptural sacrifice preparing one for devotion, yet the flowers looked wild rather than tended.

I followed the directions into town and then began to notice the signs in front of historic buildings and plaques to famous indigenes, citizens, residents and visitors to many of the buildings. When I got to the tourist information office, I had literally walked passed everything of significance, I was just not adequately informed about the places.

Guiding oneself

The guided tour was only in German, though you could obtain an audio guide in a number of world languages including English to walk through town and key in the numbered locations as indicated on the map that accompanies the guide. The numbers differ from the numbers on the signs in front of the historic buildings. I think whatever organisations are involved should align themselves and synchronise their efforts.

To be given the audio guide requires you offer some identification or pay a refundable deposit of €50.

I started with the gate/door on which Martin Luther is purported to have nailed the 95 theses at the Castle Church, the episode that apparently kicked off the Protestant Reformation. In the church itself were memorials for Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon who carried on the message after Martin Luther’s death.

Not much in the church was original, having been besieged, plundered and razed through the centuries. It was, however, beautiful, colourful and quite serene apart from the fact that you can walk up to the altar, enter the precept and take pictures too.

Other interesting stuff

Even with a full day’s visit, it was not possible to see all the notable places, like the old Wittenberg University where Martin Luther earned his doctorate; dissolved in the 19^th Century, but presently known as Leucorea University and a campus of Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Leucorea is the Greek translation of the German Wittenberg, which means white mountain.

Lucas Cranach the Elder was a contemporary and friend of Marin Luther, a painter and printmaker, and once owned the largest homestead in Wittenberg. He with his son Lucas Cranach the Younger painted portraits of prominent Protestant figures as well as some religious scenes.

Having majored in electrical engineering, it was interesting to realise Wilhelm Eduard Weber who along with Carl Friedrich Gauss, invented the first electromagnetic telegraph was from Wittenberg as well as the electrical engineering pioneer, Werner von Siemens.

The main street has a cosmopolitan feel to it with typical high street shops in mostly old buildings.

A Lutheran Service

At 16:00, I attended a short Lutheran services presided over by an America priest. The language  was Old English and as is traditional for such services, we sung A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, written by Martin Luther. The service was held in the sacristy of the city church where Martin Luther frequently reached.

I am not sure of where the tradition for standing up at the reading of the gospel emanates, but we did stand for the gospel at the Lutheran service, just as I have noted that we stand in the Anglican Communion, such a tradition is not normally observed in Pentecostal churches. However, a biblical reference in the book of Nehemiah appears to suggest the Genesis of this tradition.

5. Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up.
6. Ezra praised the Lord, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, “Amen! Amen!” Then they bowed down and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Nehemiah 8:5-6 (NIV)

The day was long, as I walked around other sections of the city, the Martin Luther garden being prepared for the quincentennial of the Protestant Reformation in 2017 has 500 trees planted by global Lutheran organisations, with an additional tree planted in the locality of the organisation. Late in the day as things closed, I returned to the main station to catch my train back to Berlin.

Lutherstadt Wittenberg: My most avowed intent, to be a pilgrim

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Some background

I have had a long-held desire to visit Lutherstadt Wittenberg, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, in the east of Germany. Germany has many historic towns, but in my many visits to Germany since 1995, I did not know that Wittenberg was in this part of Germany.

The discovery was by accident, in June 2010 as my whizzed past that Wittenberg station towards Bitterfeld on my way to a wedding in Raguhn, I caught a short glimpse from my train window and nursed a desire to visit since then. I could not get to Raguhn station because that week happened to be one in which the Deutsche Bahn, the German train company was conducting repairs on that line.

The interest

Whilst not overly religious, I have made pilgrimages to religious places, shrines and cities, interested in the history, the people and how the personalities involved changed the course of events. The Vatican, Fatima in Portugal and now Lutherstadt Wittenberg had made my growing list of pilgrimage journeys.

Wittenberg became the city from which the Protestant Reformation started after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517. There is much to write about this, since of all the histories I could have studied in school, this one featured prominently in our curriculum.

Strangely, the English Reformation, the other schism that occurred soon after that this, when the Church of England renounced papal authority due to Henry VIII’s need to sire an heir, did not make the curriculum. I am a member of the Anglican Church.

The Lutheran Church is planning a quincentennial celebration of the Protestant Reformation in 2017, many activities will be centred around Lutherstadt Wittenberg.

Thought Picnic: Of Charity and Sacrifice

Welcome to the temple

Back at church today, one was caught between the enduring and the sacrifice, that being the story of Christ and the seemingly ordinary story of two men as depicted on plaques and memorial stones in the church.

There is much to be said of both the magnificence and simplicity of Manchester Cathedral (Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Mary, St Denys and St George in Manchester), its very accessible and welcoming nave and a message easy to the ear, the hearing and the soul.

In the traditional church calendar, today marked the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, the hymns, the readings and the sermon followed this theme.

Accommodation and ceremony

The pamphlet contained everything, this time, not much of a fidget to follow the service. At Communion the openness of fellowship is most evident because members of all Christian Churches are invited to receive Communion, yet you can also step forward to just receive a blessing. By informing a steward before the service, you can also receive a gluten-free communion wafer.

This time we did go High Church with incense at the altar, something the pamphlet informed us about, the pomp and ceremony at church can be quite engaging just as it is spiritual, I would suppose anytime I am in Manchester I would be revisiting my Anglican heritage and roots.

Enduring charity

Humphrey Booth (d. 1635) was a wealthy merchant whose charitable activities are recorded on plaque in the church, but more significantly is that what he bequeathed to Manchester that helped in restoring the church in the aftermath of the Manchester explosion of the 15^th of June 1996. I was in Manchester on that day, just 10 yards from where shards of glass fell on someone not long after I heard a loud bang and wondered until it occurred to me that it was a bomb.

Had he expended his means on ostentatious and hedonistic living, it is unlikely that 366 years after his death any of his substance would have been so remembered and recorded in posterity as I have been able to observe.

More on Humphrey Booth’s legacy – The Humphrey Booth Resource Centre.

Recognised piety

John Bradford (c. 1510 - 1555) of indeterminate birth date is memorialised with a plaque as a scholar, a reformer, a fearless preacher, a prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral and was burnt at the stake for heresy. The heresy being as a Protestant he refused to revert to the Catholic faith that Mary Tudor (Bloody Mary) tried to restore in the land.

English church history has it that the government feared the consequences of putting John Bradford to death, more significantly, the crowds did protest his burning at the stake.

Honour of sacrifice

What caught my eye about his plaque was not that he was a son of Manchester and of great repute to be recognised as learned and significantly opposed to the direction of the royal court but that his last words were, “Oh, What am I Lord, that thou shouldest thus magnify me?”

When I look at traditional Christianity and what passes for it today, especially amongst the leadership, one can only be moved by the stories of charity and sacrifice, charity that endures for centuries and sacrifice where those who suffer by reason of their faith see their suffering in the light of their innocence still count it great honour to so treated for their profession.

One must stop and think, beyond which the search for Good Samaritan humanity that touches people continues in the church and on the streets.

I heard no Hosannas

Ancient & Modern

Sometimes, I crave for a particular religious past, one stated, written and regimented with uniformity.

Sundays with tongue-twisting names like Sexagesimal and Quinquagesimal rather than the well known Palm Sunday where the Common Book of Prayer was opened to a particular page as you followed the vicar in the prelude and response of worship.

The sound of the pipe organ in readiness for traditional hymns in English at times or in Yoruba when I was in Nigeria; the solemnity of it all.

The loud sound of the band

The difference is a band, a keyboardist rather than an organist, two box guitars, two acoustic guitars and the percussionist - a drummer doing the drums.

Cue the music with the beating of the drumsticks and the music begins loud and ready for our voices singing to the text displayed on the screen in the front.

Even in my quiet times, I cannot maintain the consistency of a beat over time, the percussionist starts easy and before you know it, a riot of beats descends on us, I thinking surely this can go wrong but it all works out beautiful.

You are left in awe and praise of the drummer who is quite exposed, almost extrovert to a fault and basically commanding the flow of worship even though you have the lead vocalist and at least 2 backing vocals in the band, none of what might be called free-styling ever comes close to the daring-do of the drummer.

A Protestant to Pentecostalism?

As I grow older, loud is betraying the possibility that I might be able to confidently pass off as youth anymore, the jumping to the beat is almost an excess to the High Church Anglican eye.

The service was enlightening and insightful but we had left behind tradition as I knew it, the Palm Sundays of old where we sat in pews and if I had dozed off as I sometimes have done in church lately, the lovely ushers would have caressed the back of my neck with the exhilarating barbs of a palm frond leaf.

Honestly, I do miss the Hosannas; talk less of the overkill of dramatising Jesus on an ass of a colt riding into Jerusalem.

For all said and done, the journey is mine to travel and in every place, blessed still is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

Our Lady of Fátima

Fátima without knowing much

When we lived in the North, in Kaduna and Jos at various times in the 1970s I always wondered why certain Catholic Church institutions had a Muslim name as part of their identification.

I had learnt that the name of one of Prophet Mohammed’s daughters by his first wife Khadija was Fatimah [1] who was considered one of the most devout examples of Muslim living.

There was an Our Lady of Fatima Girl’s Secondary School in Kaduna and later when we moved South, there was the Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Aguda, Surulere, Lagos [2].

The Fátima they speak of

Fátima [3] was a lot further afield than the confines of Nigeria, it is the name of a once nondescript village in Portugal and this is derived from Moorish influence over the Iberian Peninsula.

The greater claim to fame comes from the six apparitions of the Virgin Mary [4] to three shepherd children with instructions, revelations and miraculous events on the 13^th of every month from May to October except in August when she appeared on the 19^th.

The children Jacinta and Francisco were siblings and Lucia the oldest of the children was their cousin; as it all transpired, the siblings have both been beatified, Lucia only died in 2005.

Please read the links within the blog to get the details about the events that have turned the little village of Fátima into a world centre of Catholic faith pilgrimage that has received popes, with Pope John Paul II having visited the sanctuary thrice.

The visit of a protestant

Being in Lisbon gave me the opportunity to visit this fascinating place and observe firsthand the cult of Our Lady of Fatima [4].

As I got on the tour bus after being picked up from my hotel, during the 123 km ride the guide amazed me with the way she said all she had to say in one language before switching to another, it was like having the whole Bible read to you or listening to a whole sermon in one language you do not speak as you wait for your language.

By the time she finished telling the stories, I had probably become the most sceptical on the bus, I almost felt I was being taken for a rather long ride, but then it took the Catholic Church a good 13 years to come to the conclusion that the apparitions were worthy of belief.

The question as I chatted to a devout Catholic couple who had travelled from Australia, devout Catholics to the point that I skirted the issues of homosexuality and abortion was what was a Protestant [Anglican and repressed Evangelical] doing visiting a place of devout Catholic pilgrimage?

How about because it is there and I can get to it? Another thing, the veneration of Mary does really give my theology serious misgivings, I suppose that is why I would remain Protestant.

Between the religious and the kitschy

When I eventually get my pictures up online, they would tell the whole story and I saw and took my pictures – Our Lady of Fatima now hosts the 4^th largest Catholic Church in the world, Igreja da Santissima Trindade [3] – no mean feat for a place that was once a village.

Then we went up to the village of Aljustrel where the shepherd children came from, visited the house of Lucia where time seems to have stood still in 1917 with sheep eating out of trough – now, that is tourism schmaltz, if I ever saw one.

A walk down a path to a well when an angel appeared to the children to prepare them for the visitation of the Virgin Mary had a woman drawing water for people to drink – I only drink bottled water, so I bottled out of that one.

It all looked like déjà vu, I was once a shepherd boy in a nativity play, but then shepherds, sheep, mangers – yes a manger in Lucia’s house, wells, angels and virgins – somebody must be pulling my leg, am I reading chapters and verses of the Gospels of Matthew and John in no particular order?

It was a pleasant day out. I should be walking to Lourdes or Santiago de Compostela next.

The slideshow, the details and comments on the pictures of my visit to Fátima.

Sources

[1] Fatimah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Our Lady Of Fatima Catholic Church Aguda Lagos

[3] Fátima, Portugal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] Our Lady of Fátima - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia