So this entry might be a bit long. Apologies. But there are some corkers in there somewhere.
Last week I was going to meet Elaine to pray, and I was writing a postcard on the bus. I try to use my constant time on public transport doing useful things like writing to people, reading or praying. Praying is a great thing I find to do in the morning really early on the way to school when I don’t want to open my eyes and look at people, or feel like people are seeing me all grotty in the morning. However, back to the anecdote. I was on the bus, writing a postcard, and had to get off. So I did, and the lady next to me called after me and passed me my lovely glove, which had fallen to the ground. So I said Vielen Dank and all the other standard things, and got off. Then I looked in my bag, and realised that I had somehow dropped the other one as I said thank you to her. And the bus had gone. And they were lovely Christmas-present-from-the-parents leather gloves.
So I meet Elaine in a flap, thinking about my materialism and whether as a Christian I should actually let it go, but she is very understanding, and we walk to the other side of Unter den Linden (kind of like Oxford Street) and wait for the bus to come back (it goes in a circle) … and so we waited for a couple of buses and then I got on the one I recognised the driver of, and there was my glove right by the door. It should have been kicked off, and the driver should have cleared it up when he did his rounds at the end of the journey. But I think God didn’t want me to freeze.
And goodness me it has been really cold. And snowy. I seem to have found some wind tunnels as well which means the Baltic wind really cuts through the thousands of layers I shamelessly pile on. Some of the layers are now new stash. Exciting. Though the Germans don’t get excited by stash. I now have school and IFES stash. But the school stash – although awesome – is just their sports jumper.
As well as their indifference to stash, the Germans also have a different concept of friendship, which can make it hard to think you’re getting anywhere until you understand where they’re coming from. I have been thinking for aages how few friends they have, and put it especially down to the crazy amounts they work – both because they have to, and because they seem generally more conscientious. This remains true, but there is also a key difference. The word Bekannte is used far more frequently than our equivalent, acquaintance, and they will call people Bekannte way after we would call them friends. There is definitely a point with English where we go from saying “I know him/her” to “he/she is my friend” … but we are much more flexible with the level of trust needed and time spent together and so give that title much more easily. And so only in the last two weeks I have noticed a very clear shift in the way people get on with me: I am now a Freundin of more people, because they are taking the initiative with me, inviting me out, arranging things and including me – in short, doing all the things I’d excepted them to do long ago, but didn’t realise the reason they weren’t was because I was still a Bekannte.
I have had some great times recently. A particular highlight of the last week was having a three-hour discussion with my team leader about Knowing God – the book we’re studying this year – but the discussion was in German! And it was awesome, it was tiring but I felt such exultation afterwards, especially when thinking what the discussion was about.
We read two chapters, one on Jesus and one on the Holy Spirit. They were mind-altering chapters, but it was our discussion of the author’s comments on the role of Jesus that really have stuck with me. At the beginning of John’s gospel, the bit they read out at all every church service, Jesus is described as the Word:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him
nothing was made that has been made.” [John 1:1-3]
And it got me thinking about how God created the world. However the world was created the Bible makes it clear that it was God who created it, and he just said, and there was. Which is really interesting, because he said – and said means using words – and if Jesus was there in the beginning (ie he was not a created part of the Trinity – he just was) then our idea of God articulating himself in the way we articulate ourselves might be way way off the mark. If Jesus is the Word – and the Holy Spirit as Packer says the breath of God as he utters such words – then God’s articulation that brought about creation must be so deeply bound up with Jesus that it cannot be just about the words “let there be light”.
I don’t really know how to explain what I am thinking. But what I do know is that the very fact of explaining my thoughts about language in another language was totally liberating and got me thinking about how much can actually be explained in one language. If you can never translate a word exactly – which I don’t think you can – even colours for example will have a different cultural connotation – then surely learning to speak more than one gives you a wider view not just on the world but on actual meanings of things, and possibly a unique experience of God? Certainly hearing about God in German is something that teaches me something it could not were it translated. Perhaps it’s the way it sounds, perhaps it’s the context it’s being spoken into, perhaps it’s the attitude with which I listen.
And that brings me onto the last really interesting thing I have to say. This evening I went to a women’s evening at my church where this lady was speaking. She had just got the German equivalent of the OBE for her ‘social services’ … and was a half-Jew – in the half that meant that she was persecuted, forced to wear a Star of David and lived her adolescence in constant fear that she would die the next day. She told of how she was told by her (Christian) mother to have the flat cleaned by the time she returned home – her (Jewish) father had already fled to America – and while she was cleaning she suddenly heard a song on the radio and the advert that her mother’s favourite singer was coming to Berlin in a week. So she decided to go and queue for tickets. She was behind the person they shut the till on, saying everything was sold out. When she returned home, however, her neighbour, aghast, told her that only twenty minutes previously the SS had been at her flat looking for her. She then fled Berlin and lived on a farm, often not knowing whether she would live or die, but she knew then that some higher power was watching over her.
Her story of forgiveness and reconciliation was remarkable. She told us how in our heads we think we have forgiven, but then God puts a mirror to us and shows us that our hearts are still holding on. One striking story of this was how she had been playing with her godchild in the sixties in a wood in Berlin which bordered a graveyard. They noticed that a gravestone had a Bible verse on it, and so they went to clear it up, but as they cleared it up they spilt some liquid on the neighbouring gravestone which would have stained the white marble had they left it, so she ran to get water and carefully cleaned it back to its former glory. Later that day she was in the city library and next door there was a photo exhibition which she went to in her lunch break. Many men were lined up in one picture and the names were written underneath. She said she screamed and nearly fainted when she saw the name of one. It was the man whose grave she had just cleaned, and his role underneath was the chief instigator of anti-Semitic hatred into the German police force – a man whose incitement sparked Kristallnacht and whose influence led to the gas chambers being introduced. And this half-Jewish lady had just unwittingly cared for his grave.
Her graciousness was a real example – her knowledge and experience had not made her bitter. She was full of love for Germany and Germans, knowing that it is belief in the living God that counts, not hatred or revenge or guilt.
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