Saturday, April 01, 2006
X. Kirken & Kongen [originally posted Wednesday 24 May 2000]
“I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.” -- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Inspired by a comment from one of you (OK, it was Marcus Borg), I’ve been reading Twain’s 19th-century travelogue and reflecting on the tradition it represents: that we travel not just to learn about foreign cultures, but because of what the encounter with foreign cultures can teach us about ourselves. That’s certainly why I came to Aalborg - not as a sightseer, but as a temporary expatriate, who wanted to be transported somewhere totally unfamiliar to me, and then attempt to become familiar with it and perhaps discover something more about myself in the process.
I’m still not really certain how successful my pilgrimage has been, but I did stop on the street the other day when I overheard two men pouring over a map and speaking to one another in English, and was able to give them directions back to their hotel. The people at the local bakery and at the small, inexpensive restaurants where I sometimes eat, all recognize my face and greet me with a smile, and I have an awful lot of friends to say good bye to before I leave here at the end of the week.
This will also no doubt be the last installment of these e-mails, since even though I still plan to be traveling here in Europe for another month, I will no longer have access to this computer account. I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading these e-mails as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. It really has helped give my sojourn here what little focus it has enjoyed, even if the narrative does occasionally descend to the level of what I ate for dinner and the price of beer!
I’ve been thinking about some of the “travel lessons” I have learned here - nothing particularly original, I’m sure, but truth rarely suffers from repetition. First, believe the old maxim about bringing to Europe “half the clothes and twice the money.” I sent home a pretty sizable bundle of clothing with my mom last week, and I’m still probably carrying around twice what I really need. I’m even thinking about mailing home another bundle, but I’m a little worried about what it might do to my marriage if Margie were to open up a parcel from Paris and discover only my dirty socks. As for the money, I think it is good to travel on a fairly tight budget - it forces you to live a little closer to the ground and to solve problems rather than simply buying your way out of them. But it is horrible to feel you have to bypass an interesting opportunity simply because you are worried that you can’t afford it. Like anyone else, I hate paying more than I have to for something, and I particularly hate having to pay for the same thing twice. But sometimes these things happen when you travel, and its good to know that you can afford to make mistakes without it ruining your trip. Likewise, if you ever get in the position where you feel you absolutely MUST have a clean pair of socks, you can simply walk into a story and buy them. They do have stores in Europe. Sometimes you can even find a bargain.
Along somewhat these same lines, if you do insist on traveling with four thick guidebooks (as I am; it must be some kind of sickness - even living out of a backpack, I have to carry along a library), it helps a lot if you open them BEFORE you arrive at your destination, instead of waiting to read later about the things you didn’t see. If I had opened my guidebooks before arriving in Göttburg on my way back from Norway, for example, not only would I have discovered that there is a map which shows a much more direct and scenic route between the train station and the ferry terminal, but I might also have learned that only 800 meters up the road from the ferry I took there is a competing ferry line which would have taken me back to Jutland on a hydrofoil in an hour and a half for only about $12 more. Books are like eyes, or minds, or parachutes...they really work best when open. But I might also have easily gotten along with only one guidebook, plus maybe photocopies from the others regarding destinations where I knew in advance I would be traveling later.
I guess I am also becoming a convert to the belief that “less is more” in other ways as well. When I have done my reading in advance, for instance, I tend to be somewhat ambitious about how much I think I can cram into a day (just as I tend to feel somewhat optimistic about how much I can cram into a backpack as well). But just because I can fit it all in doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to exhaust me to try to carry it all out. So it’s good to have priorities, and to know those priorities, and to live according to those priorities, without getting too distracted by every little distraction that attracts your attention along the way. Not that an occasional distraction isn’t an attractive option on occasion. But it really is important to stay focused on one’s priorities, and to let some of the small stuff slip away if it becomes too much of a burden.
Finally, flexibility, patience, tenacity and good humor are the secret ingredients for avoiding discouragement, and to finding creative and imaginative solutions to even the most perplexing problems. Or at least that’s how it looks to me. At the very least I can say this for sure: rigidity, impatience, the tendency to give up at the first difficult challenge and an inability to laugh at oneself are almost guaranteed to cause more problems than they solve. Foreign travel challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about who we are. It confronts us with different ideas about “that’s just the way it is,” turns us from articulate experts into illiterate neophytes, humbles us in ways that are both disturbing and reassuring. And these experiences have nothing to do with museums or cathedrals or great vistas of natural beauty. They grow out of the face to face encounter with other human beings whose lives are dramatically different from ours, and yet are also fundamentally the same.
The thought has occurred to me, however, how much of my sightseeing here involves churches and castles. Religion and Royalty, >>kirken og kongen<< - as though this were some sort of fundamental division in human society echoing back to the days when tribal shaman and hunters gradually evolved into civilization's professional priests and warriors. A community of healers and a community of killers, and the reason the latter got to become the rulers and make the rules is because they quickly proved so much more effective at their job than the former. Which is not to say that these two avocations have existed in opposition to one another; even a pirate (and the Vikings were some of the most successful pirates the world has ever known) has occasional need of “clerical" assistance to help them keep track of their plunder.
Commerce becomes the province of the king, as pirates become merchants and traders, and ships and roads and walled citadels are used to store and transport merchandise as well as military stores. Meanwhile, the so-called “learned” professions of law, medicine, and ministry all derive from the church; a “doctor” is someone who, by virtue of education, is qualified to profess doctrine. Royalty derives its “legitimacy” from the blessings of the Church, which in turn benefits from the patronage of the monarchy, while taxes and tithes are paid alike in “crowns” or “sovereigns.”
And what about the common people? An interesting question when you pause to think: is there really such thing as a “common” person? Or perhaps more poignantly, how much better off will everyone be when people give up their aspirations to lord over others, and start thinking about how much we all have in common with one another? The world would certainly be much better off with less killing and more healing. Which means that we clergy need to become a lot better at our jobs.
I suppose that’s enough of a sermon for today. >>Kom God Hjem<< wherever your own travels may take you!.............twj
“I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.” -- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Inspired by a comment from one of you (OK, it was Marcus Borg), I’ve been reading Twain’s 19th-century travelogue and reflecting on the tradition it represents: that we travel not just to learn about foreign cultures, but because of what the encounter with foreign cultures can teach us about ourselves. That’s certainly why I came to Aalborg - not as a sightseer, but as a temporary expatriate, who wanted to be transported somewhere totally unfamiliar to me, and then attempt to become familiar with it and perhaps discover something more about myself in the process.
I’m still not really certain how successful my pilgrimage has been, but I did stop on the street the other day when I overheard two men pouring over a map and speaking to one another in English, and was able to give them directions back to their hotel. The people at the local bakery and at the small, inexpensive restaurants where I sometimes eat, all recognize my face and greet me with a smile, and I have an awful lot of friends to say good bye to before I leave here at the end of the week.
This will also no doubt be the last installment of these e-mails, since even though I still plan to be traveling here in Europe for another month, I will no longer have access to this computer account. I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading these e-mails as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. It really has helped give my sojourn here what little focus it has enjoyed, even if the narrative does occasionally descend to the level of what I ate for dinner and the price of beer!
I’ve been thinking about some of the “travel lessons” I have learned here - nothing particularly original, I’m sure, but truth rarely suffers from repetition. First, believe the old maxim about bringing to Europe “half the clothes and twice the money.” I sent home a pretty sizable bundle of clothing with my mom last week, and I’m still probably carrying around twice what I really need. I’m even thinking about mailing home another bundle, but I’m a little worried about what it might do to my marriage if Margie were to open up a parcel from Paris and discover only my dirty socks. As for the money, I think it is good to travel on a fairly tight budget - it forces you to live a little closer to the ground and to solve problems rather than simply buying your way out of them. But it is horrible to feel you have to bypass an interesting opportunity simply because you are worried that you can’t afford it. Like anyone else, I hate paying more than I have to for something, and I particularly hate having to pay for the same thing twice. But sometimes these things happen when you travel, and its good to know that you can afford to make mistakes without it ruining your trip. Likewise, if you ever get in the position where you feel you absolutely MUST have a clean pair of socks, you can simply walk into a story and buy them. They do have stores in Europe. Sometimes you can even find a bargain.
Along somewhat these same lines, if you do insist on traveling with four thick guidebooks (as I am; it must be some kind of sickness - even living out of a backpack, I have to carry along a library), it helps a lot if you open them BEFORE you arrive at your destination, instead of waiting to read later about the things you didn’t see. If I had opened my guidebooks before arriving in Göttburg on my way back from Norway, for example, not only would I have discovered that there is a map which shows a much more direct and scenic route between the train station and the ferry terminal, but I might also have learned that only 800 meters up the road from the ferry I took there is a competing ferry line which would have taken me back to Jutland on a hydrofoil in an hour and a half for only about $12 more. Books are like eyes, or minds, or parachutes...they really work best when open. But I might also have easily gotten along with only one guidebook, plus maybe photocopies from the others regarding destinations where I knew in advance I would be traveling later.
I guess I am also becoming a convert to the belief that “less is more” in other ways as well. When I have done my reading in advance, for instance, I tend to be somewhat ambitious about how much I think I can cram into a day (just as I tend to feel somewhat optimistic about how much I can cram into a backpack as well). But just because I can fit it all in doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to exhaust me to try to carry it all out. So it’s good to have priorities, and to know those priorities, and to live according to those priorities, without getting too distracted by every little distraction that attracts your attention along the way. Not that an occasional distraction isn’t an attractive option on occasion. But it really is important to stay focused on one’s priorities, and to let some of the small stuff slip away if it becomes too much of a burden.
Finally, flexibility, patience, tenacity and good humor are the secret ingredients for avoiding discouragement, and to finding creative and imaginative solutions to even the most perplexing problems. Or at least that’s how it looks to me. At the very least I can say this for sure: rigidity, impatience, the tendency to give up at the first difficult challenge and an inability to laugh at oneself are almost guaranteed to cause more problems than they solve. Foreign travel challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about who we are. It confronts us with different ideas about “that’s just the way it is,” turns us from articulate experts into illiterate neophytes, humbles us in ways that are both disturbing and reassuring. And these experiences have nothing to do with museums or cathedrals or great vistas of natural beauty. They grow out of the face to face encounter with other human beings whose lives are dramatically different from ours, and yet are also fundamentally the same.
The thought has occurred to me, however, how much of my sightseeing here involves churches and castles. Religion and Royalty, >>kirken og kongen<< - as though this were some sort of fundamental division in human society echoing back to the days when tribal shaman and hunters gradually evolved into civilization's professional priests and warriors. A community of healers and a community of killers, and the reason the latter got to become the rulers and make the rules is because they quickly proved so much more effective at their job than the former. Which is not to say that these two avocations have existed in opposition to one another; even a pirate (and the Vikings were some of the most successful pirates the world has ever known) has occasional need of “clerical" assistance to help them keep track of their plunder.
Commerce becomes the province of the king, as pirates become merchants and traders, and ships and roads and walled citadels are used to store and transport merchandise as well as military stores. Meanwhile, the so-called “learned” professions of law, medicine, and ministry all derive from the church; a “doctor” is someone who, by virtue of education, is qualified to profess doctrine. Royalty derives its “legitimacy” from the blessings of the Church, which in turn benefits from the patronage of the monarchy, while taxes and tithes are paid alike in “crowns” or “sovereigns.”
And what about the common people? An interesting question when you pause to think: is there really such thing as a “common” person? Or perhaps more poignantly, how much better off will everyone be when people give up their aspirations to lord over others, and start thinking about how much we all have in common with one another? The world would certainly be much better off with less killing and more healing. Which means that we clergy need to become a lot better at our jobs.
I suppose that’s enough of a sermon for today. >>Kom God Hjem<< wherever your own travels may take you!.............twj
# posted by The Eclectic Cleric @ 1:11 PM 
