I have never been able to improve on what I wrote four years ago today. Here is a more “timeless” version of that essay, with the dated political bits chopped out, and some eerily appropriate lyrics that couldn’t stop playing in my head today. (The original edition is here. How naive it all seems reading it again today…and how prescient, in some regards. But rather embarassing, in retrospect.)

September 11, 2002

Like a building that’s been slated for blasting,
I’m the proof that nothing is lasting,
Counting to eleven as it collapses.
And tell me, baby: baby, I love you.
It’s non-stop memories of you.
It’s like a video of you playing…

Tell me baby, baby–why do I feel so bad?
–Aimee Mann

The only time I visited the World Trade Center was in the fall of 1995. It was part of an eighth-grade class field trip to New York City over five activity-packed days. Before we arrived at New York we were all given spiral-bound workbooks, filled with blank spaces and lines for reflections, writing assignments, and other graded material. For the World Trade Center, the assignment was to write down what we saw and felt from the observation deck, and it happened to be a cloudy day. When we arrived at the observation deck, all we could see were opaque, gray clouds. Not even the ground right below the towers was visible. So most of us just stood around the lobby, looking at some of the trinkets being sold in the souvenir shop or talking amongst ourselves–anywhere but outside. Everything was shrouded by fog.

We eventually went down the elevator to the gilded, marble-clad lobby, and left the Towers. Within just a few blocks the clouds and mist had rendered them invisible. It would not be the last time I would see the World Trade Center, as I would go back to New York several more times in the days to come, but that was the first and last time I had ever been inside.

I have never visited the Pentagon, either before or after the day one year ago.
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This entry kicks off a new feature this year, the New Aether Chronicle Friday Review. Each Friday’s entry will feature a review, essay, reflection, poem, or anything really–just something other than journal-like entries about my life. These are going to be better planned in advance than the journal entries, and longer, so the full text will appear behind a link.

The premiere issue of the Friday Review will revisit a topic I touched on a while ago: sophistication in popular music. So without further ado…I present Music for English Majors!

EDIT, 1/8/06: Links and pictures have been added, and sentences tightened up.
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As an English major who concentrated in creative writing, and hopes to combine theological and literary study one day, I’m always tickled pink by any music that satisfies one or more of those interests. Many of my favorite artists over the years have, to varying degrees, been unusually literary in their pedigree and approach, and I’d like to highlight some of them today.
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HEARING THINGS
On Taste, Melancholia, and my Favorite Music

Sophistication: The Search for Intelligence in Popular Music

When I was in elementary school, my mother used to tell me that the oldies and pop music I listened to was “too simple.”  She was a classical music fan who had owned dozens of classical records in her youth, and found most pop music predictable and trite (though, when pressed, she admitted liking Neil Diamond and the Beatles sometimes).  Now I was the kind of person who liked to please other people, especially my parents, but I never got the same kick out of classical music that I did with a great pop or rock song, like the Beatles’ “Let it Be” or Petula Clark’s “Downtown”.  Deep down in my young heart, I think I felt some shame over this.  Pop and rock music was supposed to be inferior, simple, ephemeral; it did not have the sublimity of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or the emotional complexities of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.  The age of popular music is measured, at most, in decades–but that was nothing compared to centuries for classical music.  So I always carried this subconscious inferiority complex about the music I listened to.  I had this feeling that I had to somehow justify my tastes in “common” music, to show that it wasn’t just silly pop music but something more elevated, more artistic.  

At first, I found the answer in progressive rock.  When I read over last week’s entry about prog rock, I realized that I neglected to even explain what progressive rock is–and that’s a big oversight, because the majority of the people I’ve met that are my age at least don’t know what it is.  To put it simply, it is complex rock music.  Many of the early 70s bands in particular had ambitions to rival the complexity and grandeur of classical music, though in retrospect, most of them failed. (I’d say that Yes’s Close to the Edge and much of the output of Renaissance came the closest to that goal.)  In either case, progressive rock was non-commercial, lengthy, and demanding music that went far beyond pop formulas both musically and lyrically.  It required full attention to appreciate its nuances.  

So here, at last, was music I could feel a little more proud of listening to in the car with my parents.  My mother even liked some of the quieter passages in some early Genesis albums like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and A Trick of the Tail.  Also, the lyrics were often strange and, sometimes, silly, but at least they weren’t offensive or rebellious in the way, say, Eminem lyrics are.  That was a relief to my parents.  I wasn’t listening to that awful rock and roll stuff–I was a progger, and that meant that it had some connection, however tenuous, to Culture.

Eventually my loyalties to prog rock loosened, but by the time they did, I was already fully committed to popular music that not only had beautiful melodies, but also well-written lyrics.  By “well-written,” I meant literary–eloquent and poetic, or at least true to the human condition.  Nothing like “I wanna rock and roll all night/and party every day” for me.  I wanted meaning.  I wanted poetry.  Initially, I wanted lines like

Listen as the syllables of slaughter cut with fine precision
Patterned frosty phrases rape your ears and sow the ice incision
Adjectives of annihilation bury the point beyond redemption
Venomous words of ruthless candor plagarize assassin’s fervor
                           –”Assassing,” by Marillion

When I was 16, this seemed really deep, or at least really clever.  I mean, look at it: the alliteration, the imagery, the metaphors!  It was enough to set my budding literary analysis skills on fire.  Now, when I look at it, it seems really overwritten and overwrought.  Fish, the lyricist and singer of Marillion at the time, would go on in his solo career to write far less wordy lyrics.  Back then, I thought this meant his skills had declined.  Had his vocabulary shrunk?  I thought it was simply because he had sold out; the fact that the later, Steve Hogarth-led Marillion had simpler lyrics was a sign that they had sold out too.  If it wasn’t sophisticated, it wasn’t worth my time.

In my experience, there are generally two kinds of “literary” rock lyrics.  The first kind are lyrics that are simply eloquent or well-written, and express the idea or emotion in evocative ways.  In my teenage years, I associated this with elaborate wordplay and verbosity, like in the example above.  But there is a second, rarer kind: lyrics that make actual allusions to literature or high culture.  And the ultimate practioners of this sort of lyric writing was the progressive rock incarnation of Genesis.

You will be astonished at how much I learned about Western and English literature through being a Genesis fan.  It made sense: most of the founding members of Genesis attended the prestigious Charterhouse boarding school.  There, they received classical educations, and they all absorbed Greek mythology, the Bible, and Romantic poetry in ways that shone clearly in the songs he wrote.  “Watcher of the Skies” is basically a long allusion to a poem by Keats, as is their song “Lamia.”  “Supper’s Ready” is a bizarre, unorthodox retelling of the Book of Revelation.  “The Fountain of Salmacis” is a retelling of a Greek myth, “Your Own Special Way” contains an allusion to Christina Rosetti’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?” “Eleventh Earl of Mar” tells about the Jacobite Rebellion of early 18th century Britain, there is an instrumental that is titled after the last lines of Wuthering Heights . . . . and let’s not even get started on the entire The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album.  Genesis was drenched in literary allusion, from the band’s name on down.  Add classical influenced keyboard and piano playing, and complex songwriting, and here was a real marriage of high culture and rock music.  In my opinion, they came the closest to getting it right.  Granted, the lyrics themselves were often clumsy and incomprehensible.  For instance, the story in The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway defies any meaningful interpretation.   But it was smart, and it made me feel smart for understanding its origins.  Take that, Spice Girls fans!  Did YOU know that “Can Utility and the Coastliners” is actually about King Canute?

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Over time, my tastes have broadened and–I do not hesitate to use this word–improved.  I look back at a lot of progressive rock lyrics and cringe.  But some of my basic impulsees have not changed since my prog rock fanboy days.  I still look to the best popular music for uplift and genuine intelligence.   In fact, a good lyric that provides literary and emotional pleasure can save otherwise predictable or boring music.  Nick Cave, for instance, is one of the finest lyricists in popular music today, though the music that accompanies the words seems dull sometimes.  He is one of the few who can combine the two kinds of “literary” lyrics.  In “The Mercy Seat,” he masterfully combines vivid imagery, Biblical allusion, and extended metaphor in a description of a man going to the electric chair, which is like the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant and also like the throne of the Last Judgment:

In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I’m told
All history does unfold.
It’s made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I’m yearning
To be done with all this weighing of the truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I’m not afraid to die.

So here we have it: a doubly layered Biblical metaphor, taken from Old and New Testaments, applied to a relevant contemporary image–not a decontextualized, meaningless reference for effect.  (I’m talking to you, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Hideaki Anno.)  That is what good art, grounded in tradition, does.  (I think that Mel Gibson’s Passion does the same.)

Nick Cave isn’t done.  Look at the simultaneous earthly and spiritual longing expressed in “Are You the One that I’ve Been Waiting For?“

O we will know, won’t we?
The stars will explode in the sky
O but they don’t, do they?
Stars have their moment and then they die

There’s a man who spoke wonders though I’ve never met him
He said, “He who seeks finds and who knocks will be let in”
I think of you in motion and just how close you are getting
And how every little thing anticipates you
All down my veins my heart-strings call
Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?

This song, along with “Into My Arms,” is more sublime than the “I need you, I need you and want you” kind of lyrics one hears in contemporary worship songs so often.  Or in most Contemporary Christian Music, for that matter, save that of Sixpence None the Richer.  They are into literary allusion too, but to writers like Pablo Neruda or Rainer Maria Rilke instead.  Avoiding the saccharine, overly positive cliches of the praise song or the “love song to my boyfriend/God,” Leigh Nash sings instead in “Still Burning“:

The hand that is breaking
is the hand that is making
all the dead things in me grow
The gift of a holy loss
This burning of the dross
So when you break my arms
I’ll take hold of you
I know your heart is a hand
that takes hold of me

I mentioned last time that Sixpence had a lot to do with my eventual shift away from prog rock exclusivity.  This song illustrates one of the reasons why–genuine spiritual insight married to a beautiful source text by Rilke.  (The Rilke poem this song is based on is now one of my favorite poems.)

Good poetry, of course, is more than just allusions; concrete imagery helps us see the ordinary things of the world in an extraordinary light.  Wordplay is not enough, and when simple words are grounded in physical reality, they can have tremendous power.  It took some time, but I eventually got over the need to hear SAT vocabulary words in my music, and learned to simply listen to the stories and the images the words tell.  The plainspoken Bruce Springsteen seems to know how to do this naturally in “Thunder Road“:

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely,
Hey that’s me, and I want you only
Don’t turn me home again, I just can’t face myself alone again.

The opening images are simple, but so specific: a screen door, a girl named Mary, a porch, Roy Orbison singing a song on the radio.  There is a story behind the words too: the narrator is afraid of being turned home again.  It immediately sets a mood, a time, and a place in just a few lines.  That is the power of concrete imagery.  Springsteen is a master of this kind of writing, as is Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  

A recent writer of concrete imagery in song lyric is Ben Gibbard, of Death Cab for Cutie.  The quality of his writing astonishes me: it’s some of the best writing I’ve seen in popular song in a long, long time.  His imagery is so sharp and evocative, it is more like short literary fiction than rock lyric:

Whenever I come back,
the air on the railroad is making the same sounds,
and the shop fronts on Holly are dirty words
(asterisks in for the vowels).
We peered through the windows: new bottoms on barstools
but the people remain the same,
with prices inflating, as if saved from the gallows.
There’s a bellow of buzzers and the people stop working
and they’re all so excited.

Passing through unconscious states
when I awoke I was on
the onset of a later stage
The headlights are beacons on the highway.
               –”A Movie Script Ending“

The final stanza is an example of pun and wordplay done responsibly: it is non-intrusive and subtle, yet meaningful, with a memorable final image to cap off the metaphor of the psyche being like an interstate highway.  Someone with this kind of talent almost doesn’t belong in songwriting; he ought to be writing novels or short stories instead.  Heck, in a few verses, Ben Gibbard expertly evoked the mood I tried to express in a 20 page short story, Grace Abounding.  Here is “Passenger Seat“:

I roll the window down and then begin to breathe in
the darkest country road and the strong scent of evergreen
from the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

Then looking upwards I strain my eyes and try
to tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites
from the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

“Do they collide?” I ask, and you smile.
With my feet on the dash, the world doesn’t matter.

I wish I wrote that.  I wish I could write that.  What could have been a cliched situation–a couple driving alone at night and feeling romantic–almost becomes transcendent when married to song and to rich detail.

NEXT WEEK: Melancholy and the Sublime.

OK, I know I said in the very last entry that I wouldn’t do any more multiple part entries.  That said, I think this one is different.   This is going to be a multipart series, but each essay can stand on its own relatively well; it’s not a single piece broken in half like my Eternal Sunshine review. 

Warning: overwrought nostalgia ahead, with a lot of insider references.  Nostalgia is dangerous, kids.  Don’t indulge in it at home!

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HEARING THINGS
On Taste, Melancholia, and My Favorite Music over the Years

Scenes From a Memory: Prog Rock Days

I’ve always been a musical snob, thumbing my nose and gleefully putting down whatever bands were being played on the local Mix stations or the VH1/MTV juggernaut.  In my teenage years, I wore my progressive rock fandom like a badge and reveled my friends’ looks of incomprehension when I rattled off names like Marillion, King Crimson, Dream Theater, and especially the-Genesis-that-was-before-Phil-”the anti-Christ”-Collins-ruined-everything.  “Progressive rock?” they’d chuckle.  “Is that like rock in favor of high taxes and socialist medical care?”  

There was only one other progressive rock fan that I knew in high school, Chappell.  He was the pianist before me in the school jazz band, and he was an accomplished pianist, guitarist, organist, and percussionist who went on to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester.  He had shoulder length, badly combed blond hair and wore flannel shirts and granny glasses.  Like a hippie, I thought, and we got along well with our common instrument and common taste.  I lent him Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood album, and he lent me King Crimson’s Lark’s Tongues in Aspic in return, and we signed each others’ yearbooks boasting that we were “the only progressive rock fans in 50 miles!”  We went to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square on a NYC band trip to buy Yes and King Crimson Projeckt CDs, snickered about how one of our teachers was named Jo(h)n Anders(e)n*, and shared news about when some of our favorite bands were going to be town for a show.  

I wonder where Chappell is now. EDIT: I found him! Wow, I’m going to have to drop him a note . . .  
 
One of the hallmarks of adolescence seems to be that Gnostic joy in the obscure, the delight of knowing things few others understand.  On the Internet newsgroups and mailing lists–the Web had yet dominate all other forms of communication–we fans crowed about the sheep who bought Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys records.  We put down the lazy alterna-punks who didn’t know how to play Ionian scales on the guitar or drum in 9/8 time, or were so dense as to use traditional song structure.  ABACAB song structure was for wussies, like the sellouts Genesis had become with the album of that title.  Real men (and we were men; intense proggers tended to scare the ladies) wrote 20 minute epics about Supper being Ready, playing five minute keyboard solos on the Minimoog with washes of Mellotron for texture.  Rock music reached its height in 1972.  The fact that most people couldn’t stand it was the point.  When I was finally allowed to give people rides to and from church youth group, I usually made sure I had a good prog rock CD loaded up on my Discman.  Playing it might lead to curious questions–like “what is this strange, wonderful music?  Isn’t that Peter Gabriel’s voice?  I didn’t know he was in Genesis!” or “That was so heartbreakingly beautiful.  What was the name of that band again, Marilli-?”  We fans didn’t call it evangelism for nothing.

And evangelize I did–or so I tried.  My most memorable attempt was on a girl.  She had heard me plucking a riff from Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood on the guitar one day, from a song called Kayleigh.  She asked me what it was, and I told her, it’s by Marillion.  

“Who’s Marillion?” she asked.

“A progressive rock band.”  

“What’s progressive rock?”  

That, of course, is the ultimate question, longed for by all true prog rock evangelists.  I launched into my explanation with relish.  I don’t remember the details anymore, but at the end of it, she asked whether she borrow the CD.  I graciously said yes, assuring her that the music was soulful and complex, and the lyrics heartfelt and intelligent.  After all, with lines like

Huddled in the safety of a pseudo silk kimono
A morning mare rides in the starless shutters of my eyes
The spirit of a misplaced childhood is rising to speak his mind
To this orphan of heartbreak, disillusioned and scarred
A refugee

it just had to be profound, filled with the truths of the human condition that no one but me understood.  But maybe she’d understand too.  

And it was just my luck that Marillion was coming to town that year.  So I had a plan: I’d lend her the album.  She would like it, and then I’d ask her whether she wanted to come see the band with me at the Birchmere.  We’d stand in the dark together as Stephen Rothery launched into one his keening guitar solos and Steve Hogarth emoted painful words into the microphone: “So say goodbye/to season’s end . . .”  The air would be charged with the sound and invisible electricity that made our skins tingle to the same songs.  And then, maybe, as Mark Kelly was holding down a long, mournful chord on the keyboards, the pathos would overwhelm us and hands would touch and eyes would meet, and both heads would nod in time before the kiss.

Well, she came back with the album one day in church youth group.  “What did you think?” I asked, a bit loudly.

She screwed up her face in disdainful puzzlement.  Even so, she still looked cute.  “It was weird,” she replied.  “I liked the first three songs, but after that . . .it just got weird.”    

Uh oh.  “Weird?  How?” I asked in surprise. Misplaced Chilhood was Marillion’s most accessible album, after all.  The first three full songs are poppish songs that all became hit singles in Britain in 1985-1986.

“Like, it all just ran together and stuff.”  

“Do you want to go see them in concert soon?” I blurted out.  Now or never, I thought.

“Um, I think I’m busy then.  Sorry.”

“Oh.  It’s–it’s OK.”  A sigh, the CD in my hand.  She walked away.

Most of my efforts to create more prog rock fans in a 50 mile radius ended similarly.  It would confirm my outsider status and my suspicion that most people simply didn’t care about art, about the finer aesthetic experiences that were only open to those with the patience, attention span, and taste for abstract lyrics and concept albums.  I’d think about which albums I’d buy once I earned money from a job and which concerts I’d go see once I was out of the house.  Those would be great days, days filled with music and shared laughter from insider jokes and jabs at Phil Collins.  I couldn’t wait to grow up.

* * *

I did grow up, but my exclusive loyalty to progressive rock began to fade by the end of high school.  The turning point was hearing that infectious radio confection Kiss Me, by Sixpence None the Richer.  It was a sunny spring day, and I was driving down Rockville Pike with the window rolled down, past White Flint Mall.  The song came on while I was driving through the green light.  I was graduating in a few weeks, my grades were great, I had just finished a battery of IB and AP tests, and there, on the radio, I heard Leigh Nash sing.

Lift up your open hand
Strike up the band and make the fireflies dance
Silver moon’s sparkling . . .

And I smiled, and dreamed of the kiss I never got at that concert a couple years before.

With the exception of Iona, a Celtic prog fusion band, I loathed most Contemporary Christian Music.  I considered much of it to be sentimental pap that was not only musically mediocre, but theologically lacking as well.  The constant aping of popular trends endemic to much of the genre turned me off, seeing that I was opposed to trendiness in all forms except for my own.  But upon finding out that Sixpence, a “CCM” band, wrote such a surprisingly literate (and catchy) love song shook my faith in prog’s natural superiority to all forms of music.  

“Kiss Me” wasn’t complicated.  It wasn’t depressing.  It had poetic references to Dylan Thomas, and was on an album with a song based on the poetry of Pablo Neruda.  And it was played on the radio.

One thing lead to another, as they say, and it wasn’t too long until I started buying Depeche Mode and New Order albums over the latest King Crimson release.  And when I finally admitted that Phil Collins could write a hook or two.

The last prog rock album that absorbed me completely, in the way that albums did in my teenage years, was Dream Theater’s 1999 album Scenes from a Memory.  It was the last album where I sat in front of the computer speakers, the crease of the liner notes caught between my thumb and forefinger, my eyes following the words as the singer belted out the concept album’s tragic storyline.  The old chill ran up my spine when the guitar solos reached their emotional peaks.  The keyboards washed and the drums bashed in odd meter, and as the band’s music swirled to a climax, he sang:

And the ending draws nears
Spirits rise through the air
All their fears disappear, it all becomes clear
A blinding light comes into view
An old soul exchanged for a new
A familiar voice comes shining through . . .

Even then, the album felt like a culmination and an ending of an era.  And so it was; I never sat down and did nothing but listen to a rock album again.  A season’s end, indeed.
 
NEXT WEEK: The snobbish pleasures of “literary pop,” and on being a non-Goth Cure fan.  

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*for the unwashed masses: Jon Anderson is the lead singer of Yes, the biggest prog rock band of them all.  I’ve seen Yes live twice, and Anderson STILL sounds like he hasn’t gained any testosterone over the years.

My 11th grade physics teacher, John Andersen, passed away shortly after our band trip, due to heart failure.  He was one of my favorite teachers.  Alas for the death of good men.

I’m feeling a little crazy tonight. Before anyone asks–please, I am not depressed over being single on Valentine’s Day. In fact, what came out just now has nothing to do with love or romance! This was probably inspired by the political discussions my family sometimes has at dinner, and watching a documentary about the making of Stephen Spielburg’s WWII coming-of-age film, Empire of the Sun. As for events for the past few days–nothing important, really. Schoolwork, mostly.

At first, I was tempted to call this a “prophecy” or a “vision,” but that sounds far too presumptuous. I think I’ll call it a stream-of-consciousness rant instead, with pretensions to political poetry. I dunno. Make of it what you will.

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The Eve of the Storm
Tonight, we wait in our houses, huddled inside heated comfort, as the threat of snowstorm and terror looms. The Washington area has been full of snow for the past winter, and the weathermen are now saying that the weekend will bring us a whole foot of the fragile white crystal crumbs. (As I write, there has been nothing so far. Perhaps this is another one of those routine exaggerations, but after the dumping of this year’s season, now I’m not so sure.) The media atmosphere has also been thick with rumors of terrorism, of orange alerts and stories of people lining up for duct tape. Washington, D.C. and its suburbs seem to have the fragile neuroses of an expectant lover on Valentine’s Day, eager for relief by the presence of the beloved, but always fearing the worst–an accident, or a betrayal. This city is, after all, one of the few places in America where September 11th was real, not just a media event; where a sniper shot at dozens last fall; where the imperial blackguards and powerbrokers plot war, while the foundations of the global empire stand in anxious guard for the earthquake to come. Stakes are high in places like these.

World events don’t overshadow most of my entries here, but as we march inevitably to Iraq, as we stay cooped in our middle-class shelter, it’s getting increasingly difficult to just think of “ordinary life.” In the 1990s, when there seemed little to write of except for the tabloid excesses of the President and the latest uptick of the stock markets, the quest was to find meaning in the hollowed-out abundance of life. We were at the end of history, Francis Fukuyama said. We’d won. Things were only going to get better. All that was left was to “find ourselves” as we stumbled across the years, contented but not wholly satisfied with what we’d won after the Cold War. Now the cycles of rise and fall, action and reaction, have returned to remind us of human nature’s eternal verities and that we are part of a bigger world. I could, for instance, write about how my spending six hours on cryptology homework last night is a microcosm of the human struggle for achievement. And perhaps, for me, the brief moment of exhilration before bedtime that it stirred points to the universal. But now we live in times where self-absorption, of looking at the world from just the personal point of view, is unaffordable. Reading the newspaper drags us to see the larger forces at work, the powers and principalities that the Scriptures speak of. They make the individual look so small and helpless by comparison, in an age centered around “mass”-ive entities–mass communication, mass transit, mass murder. Who am I to take my little lenses–my eyes and eyeglasses–and see only what I can out of them? To some extent, of course, I can’t help it. But shouldn’t I try to look through other lenses and other views as well?

I remember being so gosh-darn excited when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991. War is cool for many a sheltered little boy, with its fighter planes, helicopters, tanks, and explosions accompanied by breathless CNN reporters. I made up little songs and poems about defeating Saddam Hussein, who has outlived far more intimidating derision, assasination attempts, inspection regimes, and saber rattling from the world up to now. I don’t think I was particularly patriotic then, stirred by those abstract forms of “country” or “duty” or “militarism.” It was just Take Out the Bad Guys With Cool Weapons. I wonder if, at heart, George W. Bush and his hawks think like that. I’m against the war in Iraq, but I try to see from the other perspective too.  I don’t think all the reasons cited for going to war are bad ones. Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein are bad; oppressing and gassing one’s own citizens is probably worse. While those things do not cancel out what I believe is the moral absolute that one should never attack first unless imminently threatened, they are far from the crass reasons cited by many anti-war opponents, like oil or another abstract concept, “imperialism.”   Many anti-war opponents are blinded by their own bias against American power and George W. Bush, who inspires many Western leftists to apoplectic rage.  They too, need to open their perspective, to realize that the world is a dangerous place that that force should not be always ruled out to stop injustice and evil.

But then I wonder.  I wonder sometimes, with the rhetoric from the Bush camp sounding almost eager for a showdown, whether all the good reasons for war simply sit atop a far more primal, human, and sinful impulse for vengeance. Vengeance for not finishing the Gulf War, for hanging on so long, for trying to kill George Bush I. To be vengeful, you have to be unable to see another’s point of view, to lack perspective. Bush, admirably, has actually curbed his seeming war-enthusiasm and tried to go through the UN route, only to find out that the UN, France, Germany, and others are motivated just as much by a lack of perspective as every other human institution. France and Germany, it seems, base their opposition on the popular opinion of their citizens and possibly by their lucrative Iraqi oil contracts. But I think it’s too easy to dismiss all their objections about letting the inspectors continue their work. A tough inspections regime could indeed contain Saddam, the only question being how long and how effectively. Peace/containment involves risks as much as war, and my moral beliefs dictate that the risks of peace are more worth taking than the risks of war when the war is avoidable. But what those risks are are hard to tell. That’s the tough part of this foreign policy profession, trying to basically predict the future course of events and influencing them for the best outcome. A profession like that requires a lot of prudence, wise judgment, and sound thinking. It needs perspective and maturity, things that I lacked when I was much younger.

We’ll see how the war goes and what is revealed about the character of the leaders who wage it soon. I hope the war ends quickly, as it is pretty much inevitable at this point that it will be waged. I hope, for our nation’s and world’s sake, that our trust in our leaders’ wisdom will not be misplaced. We cling to the hope that human beings are not as variable as weather predictions.

But we never know, really. It’s like peering into the dark sky, where no star shines through the thick layer of invisible clouds, waiting for the snowflakes to fall. They haven’t fallen yet, and all around the world seems peaceful and still, streetlamps glowing in yellow orbs and tree branches’ spiky talons bare of leaves and ice. The forecaster has readjusted his prediction just now: the snow will arrive tomorrow morning, not tonight, and the accumulation will be less than expected. Minute by minute, we inch toward the future. God is invisible and no guarantees are shouted from the heavens. The way forward is illuminated by the glancing headlights and the streetlamps that only show the curves on the road when you arrive there. Sudden turns on slippery roads, traveling in the dark: it’s going to take a lot of faith to navigate the icy weather for the next few days.

I

The only time I visited the World Trade Center was in the fall of 1995. It was part of an eighth-grade class field trip to New York City over five activity-packed days. Before we arrived at New York we were all given spiral-bound workbooks, filled with blank spaces and lines for reflections, writing assignments, and other graded material. For the World Trade Center, the assignment was to write down what we saw and felt from the observation deck, and it happened to be a cloudy day. When we arrived at the observation deck, all we could see were opaque, gray clouds. Not even the ground right below the towers were visible. So most of us just stood around the lobby, looking at some of the trinkets being sold in the souvenir shop or talking amongst ourselves–anywhere but outside. Everything was shrouded by fog.

We eventually went down the elevator to the gilded, marble-clad lobby, and left the Towers. Within just a few blocks the clouds and mist had rendered them invisible. It would not be the last time I would see the World Trade Center, as I would go back to New York several more times in the days to come, but that was the first and last time I had ever been inside.

I have never visited the Pentagon, either before or after the day one year ago.

II

On September 11, 2001, I awoke around 8:50 AM with a cheerful song by Rush in my head (“Show, Don’t Tell”) and the television muttering outside my closed door. I wondered why my roommates had turned on the television at such an early hour. I then checked the morning’s e-mail and Washington Post and discovered something going on with the World Trade Center. So I opened the door and headed for the television in the living room, and there it was, those burning towers smoking like cigarette butts from the distance the aerial cameras shot them. And as we watched the footage that would become oddly stale with its constant rebroadcasts, portions of the song looped endlessly in my head.

The song, of course, was irrelevant to the events of that day, lyrically (it is about the right to be skeptical) and musically (it is a defiant, funk-influenced tune). However, the song has an instrumental section punctuated by synthesizers and deftly-played bass that, to me, sounded something like the faux-heroic fanfares played on the evening news. It sounded a little like the bits of music played before and after the commercials, or the background tune played during traffic reports on the radio and TV. So when the cameras whirled around the towers, I could almost hear the spitting chopper blades and the cheerful traffic reporter yelling, “expect delays from all outbound lanes coming from Manhattan, the Lincoln Tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge are both at an absolute standstill. No incidents to report anywhere north of Midtown but the streets are filled with pedestrians, and that’s just making the traffic situation even worse for this morning’s commute . . . .back to you, Glen–”

But of course the voices of the anchors, who are trained to be cheerful, were actually solemn and uncertain. There was no music playing at all, only the dull, low whine of static or the rush of air blowing through the microphones of field reporters. Then the towers fell, one right after another. But they fell silently as well, to those of us witnessing the event on television. Then there was a clip they showed over and over again of well-dressed businessmen and women running from the scattering debris, their mouths wide open in yells and shouts to their neighbors, to their cell phones, but again we heard nothing but the voices of the anchors overriding them. And still my song kept playing in my head alongside the numbness that I felt watching thousands of people die, live from New York on Tuesday morning.

Then, when the same overhead aerial shots of the burning Pentagon were shown, the song became quieter. The Pentagon was around here. Then rumors of bombs at the State Department flew, and my roommate said, “well, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a flash in the western skies . . . and that’s the end of us.” The numbness ended then, and for that moment the music in my head stopped. I headed back to my room and tried to call my parents and my cousin, who are all federal employees and had been let off from work following the attacks. My mother and cousin both work in downtown Washington, and with destruction seemingly going everywhere, it was important that I reach them. After calling in to take the day off from work, and after two hours, I finally accounted for all of them. By then the day’s event had largely passed, though rumors still persisted and speculation had already begun on who the perpetrators were. And then the Rush song kicked into my head again as the networks repeated the footage of the collapse and the fleeing people.

The illusion of television is that it makes you think that you are closer to an event or to people then you actually are. Everything is pre-packaged, with the fanfares and the coiffed reporters, whereas real life is rougher and not accompanied by a soundtrack you can hear outside of your head. Neil Postman says the danger of television is that it can make you respond emotionally to illogically ordered, irrelevant non-events (like Princess Diana’s funeral). Having a cheerful Rush song playing while thousands of people die is a sign of how I, too, am a child of these times and of the television age. A heroic-sounding song hardly signifies heroism; after all, most of the real heroism being done by the perished firefighters, police officers, emergency workers at the site, never made it on the camera. All we saw were people fleeing for the lives, the smoke, the white ash, and the debris of broken computer screens, staplers, post-it-notes, and a confetti of memos scattered on the ground. Just like the movies, as many people who were not there said afterward.

I have an old high-school classmate attending New York University who was there at the site that day. The first thing he says he remembers was the stench, something that can never be transmitted over television. He felt the ground rumbling from the collapse. He saw tiny bodies fall out of the windows to their deaths. He had a camera with him, and he has taken pictures of the day and posted them on his website (so he promised), but I never went to his site and I have no desire to do so now. Even a picture is a mediator between me and the reality. The media version of September 11th, even when it wasn’t smothered in cheap patriotism and bathos, bears only passing resemblance to what the people in New York and the Pentagon actually witnessed. I wonder if the people there had songs running through their heads as they fled, and what they were. Perhaps they were too frantic to pay attention or remember the way I do with my song.

Later, through completely unrelated events, I lost the CD that contained the song. My boss, who was the one who borrowed it, promised to pay me back. I told him it was no matter, and indeed, it’s true. The song is no matter at all, and I have no wish to hear such irrelevance again.

III

It may be that life on earth, seen in the long run, is just like war: stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of terror. It can also be argued that there has been no time on earth, ever, where there was not an armed conflict going on somewhere. Peace is a rare, precious thing, seen from a global scale, but as communal creatures, most people tend to think of war and peace in terms of their own countries or neighboring lands. During the 1990s, Americans thought all was going well with the world, even as genocidal war ripped through Bosnia and Rwanda, millions throughout Asia struggled to make financial ends meet, bombs exploded in Palestine, and while terrorists plotted our destruction in cells and training camps all over the world. When the battles that consume the rest of the world at last landed on our soil, then for that brief moment we had the feeling of terror in the midst of trivialized boredom. We had momentarily forgotten that no human being, no group of human beings, and no nation can remain apart from the world for too long. This is especially true if that nation is the United States of America after the Cold War, a lone superpower and, in the eyes of many throughout the world, a lone target.

“What is to be done?” That is the question on everyone’s minds once the shock and numbness of the event has settled, and the recovery process begins. It’s interesting how easy it is to come up with vague, stirring calls for patriotism, to fight an amorphous “War on Terror,” and to call American citizens to “responsibility,” “watchfulness,” “service,” and “freedom.” What those words mean in concrete reality are often hard to define, but they evoke certain passions within us, and when a President uses enough of them in a time of crisis, he can bring people to standing ovations. In the definitive speech about September 11th, President Bush was compared by some in the media to Winston Churchill, to Franklin Roosevelt, to Abraham Lincoln.

I am skeptical of those claims. The media’s attention span and propensity to hyperbole have been proven time and time again. Only history will tell us in the long run whether Bush has led us well through this fight or not. Time is often a good winnower between empty rhetoric and powerful speeches that actually call entire nations to action and selfless service. The present evidence, especially after the end of active warfare in Afghanistan, seems to indicate uncertainty in the Bush Administration’s handling of affairs. Moreover, the media has slipped into its sensationalizing habits and the pattern of life has not visibly changed for most people since September 11th. But history, too, will be the judge of whether this seeming complacency matters or not. Life must go on, after all, and as CS Lewis once said, war changes nothing in the human condition. But history also tells us that complacency is deadly. We dare not sleep while our enemies plot.

IV

Who are our enemies, then? How do we fight them? The idea of just war, at its heart, is that armed conflict is a last resort and is a defensive measure. Having been attacked first, with considerable loss of life, some sort of national retaliatory response is justified-but how, and against whom? Those who protest against the Afghan war as if it were like Vietnam have little sense of proportion: this was not, at any point, a full-scale invasion of a nation with hundreds of thousands of troops landing on the shores. A pariah Taliban government was toppled in a mere few months, and for the most part we have allowed the Afghans to form their own government, rather than propping up a corrupt dictator as we did in South Vietnam. Most of the active fighting was over in a matter in a few months. So in general, the Afghan conflict fits the definition of just war much more closely than the Vietnam War ever did.

But there was “collateral damage,” as there is in all armed conflict, and some of the key goals of sending troops-such as capturing Osama Bin Laden and his senior Al-Qaeda officials-have yet to be met. So the Afghan war can, from that perspective, be judged as only a partial success, and only partly just as a result. Possible war crimes committed by our Afghan allies have also been revealed recently, and it is appalling for an American government that claims to fight for freedom and human rights to look the other way.

I am not a pacifist, though I am a Christian; nevertheless, a Christian whose loyalty is ultimately toward another Kingdom must live in tension with the demands of the state against the ethical standards of God. We must, then, deplore any loss of civilian life, and any indecencies committed by our own troops or those of our allies. It is the only way that any semblance of justice and proportion can be maintained in a fundamentally evil thing such as war. Supposedly our “smart bombs” and “surgical strikes” can help us prevent needless casualties. But technology always has a point of failure, and ultimately there must be a will on our side to not fight for vengeance, but for right and to cripple the enemy’s capabilities to harm us-and no more. A just war is always proportional, limited, and has a clear goal. Once that goal is met, the war must end.

To me, the planned invasion of Iraq has little to do with the actual war on terrorism. From the dissension among Bush’s senior staff and military chiefs, it seems that many in the administration think so as well, and increasingly they are outspoken in what seems like a naked use of war for political aims-or worse, for personal vendettas against Saddam Hussein. Iraq was dangerous several years ago, and there is no compelling evidence it is any more dangerous now than it was then. I am skeptical of the claims that Al-Qaeda and Hussein are somehow in league with each other-even the Administration has recently dropped those ideas-and as for its nuclear, chemical, and biological programs, if they can publicize some evidence that they are imminent threats, then my mind will probably change. To pre-emptively invade Iraq alone is a clear violation of the just war criteria.

My proposal is to send UN weapons inspectors, but with troops behind them for protection and to ensure enforcement of the inspection regime. Then, if hostilities begin, as they almost certainly would, it will be in defense of the clear mandates of the Security Council, and not a unilateral action taken by the United States. This would give Bush the international mandate he needs to remove Saddam Hussein, who certainly is a menace to be stopped as soon as possible. But it cannot be done morally without proper authority (the Security Council mandate) and without just cause (refusing weapons inspectors in clear violation of the Gulf War surrender terms).

It still needs to be asked, however, whether Saddam Hussein is the same kind of enemy that Al-Qaeda and other radical groups are. Hussein is not a religious man, by most reports, and he is motivated by a sheer lust for power than for any ideology. A lust for power, of course, can be incredibly dangerous. But, as a recent Policy Review article states about “Al-Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology,” the dehumanized way fanatics of any stripe-Communist, Islamic, Christian, Fascist-see the world means that no ethics or morals constrain their methods, and no rational strategy underlies their battle plan. They see themselves as two-dimensional actors on a great world stage, enacting a drama where they are the pure victors and their enemies the evildoers bound for eternal punishment and retribution. They end up dehumanizing themselves in the process-that is why suicide bombing is palatable to them-but in their wake can be the very worst sort of atrocity. The twentieth century is littered with fantasy ideologies, from Nazism to Communism, and the history of Crusades proves that Christians aren’t immune to the same disease.

I believe that we face a similar enemy today, and that requires some rethinking of our security and foreign policy strategies. We are facing an irrational enemy, and so we cannot pretend that we can simply fight them the way we fought Germany or Japan in World War II. But the one thing we must not do is to become like them, seeing ourselves as actors to punish the “evildoers” because we are good, pure, and righteous. Yes, we must punish the terrorists. The things that they do are surely evil. But we must not also delude ourselves and puff ourselves up with pride as a nation or people, and think that somehow our actions can never be wrong or unjust when we fight our battles. Otherwise we will end up sacrificing our most essential rights at home for the sake of “freedom,” justifying war crimes for the sake of “human rights,” and turning masses of people worldwide against us for the sake of “democracy.”

I am not seeing this kind of reflection in Bush or much of his administration at the moment. For an openly Christian leader like George W Bush to not have this sense of proportion and humility before God is disturbing, not to mention dangerous. He must show us that in the process of fighting terrorists, we will not become like them, and that we will not gut the things we are fighting for as Americans.

V

The words “September eleventh,” by themselves, seem so mundane. The date “9/11″ may carry some overtones of emergency, like the telephone number, but it too is just a series of numbers and a slash to separate the day from the month. Yet the words and numbers have become icons for people in America and all over the world. They point to the reality of the events that were said to have “changed the world,” though perhaps it was our illusion that we were unlike the rest of the world that has changed. “Never forget” was the phrase passed around a year ago, and today. I suspect the words “September 11th” or “9/11″ will not be forgotten for a while. Everybody was watching television that day, after all. The words and numbers have acquired something like religious significance for Americans, or at least for the media. The footage of fleeing people, fires, and falling towers are icons, too. They will be etched in the world memory for many years to come, and in the history books as well.

But in another way we already have forgotten what kind of day it was. I am not watching TV or listening to the radio today, because I do not want to be disgusted by the maudlin tributes and sentimental pap that suffices for “closure” and “remembrance.” These are not genuine tributes to the people who suffered on that day, they are naked attempts to capitalize on people’s genuine shock and grief and turn it into ratings, attention, and self-promotion on the part of the media. I had hoped that we would be a little more serious after the attacks, as we seemed to have been for a few months. But we have already, in one year, trivialized the day by making it an opportunity for national therapy. Television tells such lies. There is no such thing as a national “psyche” that has been wounded, because, while the death toll was horrible, the vast majority of Americans were not anywhere near the sites of the attacks. For nearly 260 million and for the rest of the world, September 11th was a day entirely seen on television. For us to pretend that the media tributes can bring us “closer” to the people who are actually suffering-the widows, widowers, childless parents and parentless children-is to make a mockery of their grief. We were not really there; we were not “all New Yorkers” on that day.

No. We were instead, watching on TV with horror, fascination, and great sadness as our complacency came to an end. But complacency, while a bad thing, is often the result of hard work and dedication to build a strong, prosperous, and stable country. It is the response of fallen humanity to the moments where things really are pretty good, when we are doing as well as we can on this vale of tears. We can’t exempt ourselves from sin, and thus from humanity, by pretending that we will always be as watchful and careful in the future. So we will, and won’t remember September 11th, 2001, in the days to come. We will certainly remember the images. I think we have already begun to forget the ugliness and soberness of that day, and in time, all the melodrama and bathos associations will likely fade away.

Perhaps, then, the best kind of memorial to September 11th is the old memento mori: remember death. Not flowers, not memorial services, not TV tributes. September 11th was a day of death for thousands. But we do not serve the dead well by turning them into objects for our vicarious “emotion”, or by fighting irrationally and undermining our nation. But we can remember that nations, groups, and we ourselves as individuals are mortal. We will die someday; some have died much sooner and more violently than they perhaps should. To remember death is to take September 11th seriously as a reminder that all is not right in the world, that it is fallen and nowhere near what God had intended for it.

There is another thing, though. Many HIV patients who will die shortly report that, knowing that their lives will be taken from them, they begin to live more fully. They waste no more time in front of the television or on petty differences with others. Relationships get mended. Books, works of art, and personal projects come into being. Sometimes, by grace, an greater awareness and devotion to God-the God who conqueres death and gives eternal life-takes hold of a soul. Triviality no longer marks the terminal patient’s life, but dignity. It is not without fear, because it is proper to fear death to some degree. But life no longer seems insignificant. Boredom becomes foreign. We shine brightly before we flicker out, and our lights are not hidden under bushels but shatter the darkness around us.

So to the families, victims, and all those harmed on that day a year ago: requiscat in pacem. We remember you, because to remember death is to remember how to live.

–September 11, 2002, 1:33 PM

I spent the late morning and afternoon today doing something rather unexpected, even for me. Last week, you see, my cousin from Taiwan was visiting us, and one of the landmarks that his guidebook pointed out in DC was a Franciscan Monastery, a branch of the Franciscan order that is dedicated to preserving the shrines and landmarks in the Holy Land. The Monastery contains lots of gardens and replicas of some of the altars, grottoes, and tombs found in Jerusalem’s Old City. My mother loved it when she went last week; she wanted to come back again today, as a family, especially since I missed going with my parents and cousin last week due to Book Club.

In addition, one landmark that they missed last week was the largest Catholic Church in the Americas–the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It’s a HUGE church but they didn’t have time to visit last week. My mother and I decided that we’d all go as a family to check out the Basilica too; on the web we discovered they were holding Mass at noon, and we decided that it’d be interesting to join them and then revisit the monastery afterwards.

So, basically, for most of the middle of the day, we were religious tourists in our own backyard, looking at some of the best American Catholicism–which is in such deep crisis now–has to offer. My reflections on today follow.

We headed out from our house at around 11:00 AM. I decided to bring my CD of Bach’s Mass in B-minor–it seemed appropriate. So we were driving along to DC, listening to beautiful church music as I read a printout of a rather provocative article about how the evangelical practice of “finding God’s will” is often more pagan than Christian. (A proposition to which I say a hearty, “Amen!”) We got a bit lost before we arrived at the Basilica, but eventually we found our way there. The church building is enormous. It was only dedicated and finished in the late 1950s, but it looks a lot like one of the magnificent churches in Europe–though, every inscription is in English rather than Latin, reflecting the trends of the modern day Catholic Church. When we entered by the big double doors in the front entrance, we thought we were going to see a service–but it turned out, interestingly enough, that the main upper church (with the giant narthex and towering dome) was not where the Mass was being held. Instead, we only found some tourists and a choir of Chinese Catholics practicing their singing! That was a surprise, to say the least. Thinking that perhaps the info on the website was wrong, we took a look around the upper-level church–at the beautiful mosaics, murals, carved statues, and stained-glass windows. Though the church is recent, you can tell immediately it was built to last for generations.

Randomly, I decided to head down a flight of stairs to the lower level–only to find myself walking right in the middle of Mass in the crypt chapel! We decided to go back up and enter the proper way through the glass doors on the lower level, which we had missed the first time when we came in. I had actually walked in the middle of the sermon–I could tell it was the sermon because I heard the congregation laughing during that moment, no doubt at a lame joke that the priest told. When we entered properly, though, we noticed that everyone was kneeling–so I immediately got on my knees, too, though we couldn’t find seats at the time. We wandered about a bit when it was time to stand up again, feeling rather lost as it seemed that everyone knew the “cues”: when to stand up, when to kneel, when to say the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or other responsorials. It’s like being in a foreign country in some ways for evangelicals like us, who follow a different “script” in our worship (if we have one at all). Eventually we found seats near the back and we sat there, nervously watching everyone else and trying to follow the cues. But my awkwardness couldn’t hide the solid theology that was being preached from the set prayers or the thoroughly holy sense that I got from the service overall. It just seemed so much more serious than the things I’ve seen in other churches, even an informal Mass I attended some years before. I only remember wincing at the references to Mariology and Marian devotion, an aspect of popular Catholicism that still irks me as a conservative Protestant–though the closing hymn, which was in Latin and dedicated to Mary, featured some lovely organ accompaniment and singing. I love church organs. They tingle my spine and they sound so BIG and appropriate for worshipping a BIG God.

After the service’s end we paid a visit to the Bookstore (of course). It was a large, well-stocked bookstore, and it contained a great deal more variety than your average evangelical/”Christian” bookstore. For one, they were mostly selling books rather than trinkets or paraphanelia–there was a seperate gift shop for that . Also, while I discovered that the Catholic subculture has its own self-help manuals, sentimental and to me silly devotional guides (often dedicated to Mary or the saints, one difference between Protestants and Catholics), and various other things that I deplore in my own religious subculture, there was also a good selection of classic writers like Augustine, St. Francis, and others, as well as a decent selection of apologetics and real Biblical studies materials. Prayer books and manuals were also prominent, as were volumes about church history. There’s more balance there than in your average “Family” bookstore. My mother picked up a CD of organ music and a greeting card, and I picked up a $4 copy of the Order of the Mass–basically a printed guide to the Mass “script,” the words used in the service so I won’t be lost in the future. We went to the cafeteria after that and then left the Basilica.

We then paid a visit to the Franciscan Monastery. There was a lot less to see and participate in there; there were some artifacts from the Holy Land, as well as some pictures. We also toured the beautiful chapel/church, which looked in many ways a lot like the basilica–a modern building with classical style. I greatly prefer churches built in that manner over the utilitarian mall/office-park lookallikes that so many churches seem to favor these days. But the main attraction at the monastery was the garden, filled with a large variety of flowers. We walked the path down into the valley, which featured Stations of the Cross on the side, and saw a replica of various shrines, grottoes, and other holy places from other parts of the world. The only monks we saw were the tour guides and the man staffing the counter at the gift-shop, though.

When we were finally heading home, we saw that there had been a wedding at the monastery while we were touring it. Well-dressed people were walking everywhere and the parking lot, which was half-empty when we arrived, had filled up completely. I thought it rather strange to have a wedding in monastery–here you are, among men pledged to celibacy, performing a wedding. I suppose it’s not that strange given that monks are priests too, and can officiate weddings, but that just seemed a bit ironic to me. I’m not a big fan of mandatory celibacy for clergy so if I were in that situation, maybe I’d wonder if I was missing out on something if I could never get married.
(Then again, who knows–at the rate that my social life is going, I might as well become a monk! )

On the way home, I read through some of the prayers in the Order of the Mass book–notable among them “the prayer of resignation,” which basically says, “God, I accept cheerfully all pains and sufferings and whatever form of death You choose to impose on me, Amen.” It takes a brave soul to pray that in faith–so utterly opposed to our modern victim mindset. Perhaps we could use a bit of that. I also read a number of the morning prayers, many of which are dedicated to Mary and the archangel Michael; admittedly I found the latter just a tad flattering. What stood out to me was how gushy and even romantic some of those prayers were, especially to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to Mary. I learned that we hardly have a monopoly as evangelicals with the “God is my girlfriend/boyfriend” problem. Catholics just simply shunt off that energy to the Mary and the saints instead.

And it made me uneasy, honestly. I came away from the Catholic services and facilities thoroughly impressed on one level, and also more certain than ever that I could never become a Catholic. I like a lot of Catholic theology–their worship style, their ecclesiology, their sacramental view of life, their openness to aesethetics/art, symbolism, and supernaturalism, and their outstanding intellectual tradition. I own a copy of the Catechism and I am thoroughly impressed with the depth and breadth it contains. But the Marian intercessory traditions and the saintly intercessory traditions really, really bother me. I understand that it’s not exactly idolatry, and the basis of it is not on terrible theology. But that, doctrines like Purgatory, and most especially making ideas like the Assumption of Mary and the Immaculate Conception dogma–essentials–means that I cannot in good faith join the Roman Catholic Church at this time. I understand too that Marian devotion is, in a sense, “optional” and many Catholics do not heavily indulge in it. But the religious subculture is steeped with it, and they seem to have the same uncritical devotion and sentimentalism I see in evangelicalism toward Jesus. It might be argued that feeling sappy about Mary is preferable than feeling sappy about our Daddy in Heaven. I grant that–but I still believe that intercession via saints is so unnecessary. Catholics nowadays believe you can connect with God directly. So why not get rid of the cumbersome intermediaries?

After reading the Mass Order, I would say further that the Anglican Book of Common Prayer is more appropriate from a Protestant perspective and much more hospitable to me. It is deeply informed by the catholic tradition and the tradition of the ancient church, and yet it incorporates what I think are the best and most valid ideas from the Reformation. It is deeply penitential and reverent, and written in beautiful English, but it also assumes thaat God is someone a believer can feel confident beseeching or praying toward. Anglicanism also has a high view of the Sacraments, and also has an intellectual as well as truly outstanding aesthetic tradition. As an English literature major I deeply admire the church that shaped CS Lewis, TS Eliot, John Donne, George Herbert, and so many others. It seems that Catholicism swings too far in the medieval direction for my liking, with all of its pilgrimages, relics, saints’ days, and other add-ons to the faith, while Anglicanism preserves the best of both worlds (at its best; at its worst Anglicanism tends to be very wishy-washy and unable to define itself clearly).

That was my Catholic tour for the day. I came out getting a deeper sense of what we can do right and wrong as a church, and ironically, I think I came out more Protestant than I was before. So it goes, I suppose. I still think we as Christians overall share more in common on the most important things than what divides us. But there is still a divide, and at this moment, I know which side I stand upon.

Today was a significant Sunday for me, in that instead of going to the regular young adult service at Chinese Bible Church of Maryland, I decided to go with my longtime pal, Andy Chang, to his preferred church here in Maryland: Covenant Life Church. It’s only a few miles up the road from my current church. Though I ended up getting a little lost and coming somewhat later than planned, there was plenty of parking and the parking ushers were helpful–there were spots reserved just for guests. How helpful!

My first impressions of the church was that of 1.) slickness and 2.) size. It is an ultra-modern facility, a new building with the latest sound equipment (the banks of the mixers and recording equipment were in themselves impressive, though expensive-looking), and the sanctuary itself holds about 2,000 worshippers. There is stadium seating in the back, and hanging over the high ceilings were four, yes, four basketball nets–the sanctuary also doubled as two basketball courts. A large stage for the 20-piece professional worship band lay in front, with a large computer screen above the stage for the display of the song lyrics. Andy, his friends, and I were surrounded by casually dressed parishoners, many of them young families with small children. I wrote some months ago about a church that is “not the hugging kind of church”: well, Covenant Life certainly seems to be the “hugging kind of church.” The people seem very outgoing and friendly, which is certainly different from the church environment I was raised in. I sat next to Andy and his friends from Chicago, taking a look around once in a while as the folding seats filled and the worship team tuned their instruments in front. I was somewhat skeptical at this point. The church seemed to me a typical suburbanized, tradition-denuded, marketing-friendly kind of place, the sorts of things that I tend to denounce on a regular basis in these pages. I was aware that Covenant Life was more Calvinist/Reformed than most contemporary evangelical churches, but I was still unsure about how this would translate into the service. The bulletin handed out was certainly very professional produced on quality stock and impressive stationary–though I noted that the order of worship was not printed in it. It was simply a series of announcements and a brief mission statement, little more. I did not take this to be a good sign.

At promptly 10:00 AM, the praise team simply began to play–without fanfare, without announcing the beginning of the service. We stood up. The difference between an amateur and professional band was apparent from the start–this band, with a small backup/choir, pro-level guitarists, song leaders, drummer, violin player, and worship leader/pianist, starting singing in perfect harmony and key. The name of the worship leader is Bob Kauflin, a leader in the praise group known as PDI, and he was a quality leader–he cued all of his spoken interludes perfectly, his singing was perfectly in pitch, and he even spontaneously created a song! The best part, however, was not just the professional playing, as well as the obvious enthusiasm of the congregation to the song–this church forever puts to the lie the notion of “dour Calvinists.” The songs, while contemporary, had theological meat on them. They were centered around the atoning work of Christ on the Cross, not our personal emotions or feelings about God. Kauflin in fact amazed me when he made the distinction between our subjective experiences of the Spirit and the objective work of God that grounds them. If we all had contemporary worship leaders who recognized this, most of my objections to praise music would evaporate instantly. What would remain is my aesthetic preference for traditional forms and older music in general, but my problems with praise songs would then no longer really be theological, as they are now. I also appreciated how well they readapted traditional hymns into new contexts and even new lyrics that–get this–fit the overall arrangement. Overall, Kauflin’s leading sometime seemed a bit repetitive, but Andy assures me this is untypical. I was glad to sing at Covenant Life today. I wish all praise/worship setups were like this.

After this came the administrivia: offering collection, welcoming of newcomers (I was given an info packet, and a pen to take home ). Then, Joshua “I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Said Hello to Courtship” Harris–yes, the evangelical celebrity under 30 and who is executive pastor at the church–came up to make some announcements. He also said something extraordinary, to me: he reminded the congregation that the upcoming sermon was about the preaching of the Word of God. He implored us, especially the young men, to remain respectfully silent and still during the nearly hour-long sermon, and to be attentive and not get up out of our seats. I knew immediately that this was a church that, as slickly produced and crafted their song-leading was, put the sermon and the Word at the heart of their Sunday worship. Now, I would like some grand old liturgy too, but in an age of pop-sermons with little Biblical content, I was refreshed to see some seriousness.

I was not disappointed in the sermon, either. The pastor, who is one of several who rotate their preaching duties, spoke lucidly, accessibly, and intelligently about 1 John. He did something I haven’t heard in church for some time: he exegeted the text! He pointed out to us a couple of verb tenses in Greek that were relevant to the meaning. He explained clearly the dynamics of how God’s love is given to us so we can love others, and so we can be reassured in our faith, and how fear can be cast out by that love. He spoke for 45 minutes, which is much longer than the sermons preached at my regular service at CBC, but I didn’t really notice. I took notes, and I noticed that many other parishoners were too–a sure sign that this was a congregation that took its preaching seriously. Preaching of course should be the heart of any Reformed church service, and Covenant Life would not be much of a Reformed church if its preachers were mediocre or shallow. Its laity takes theology seriously too, as far as I could tell from the people who dared to go up to the “prophecy microphone” near the front of the stage where they could speak their minds and spirits. One woman, in two minutes, well-summarized a passage from Romans. Another read an inspiring quote from Charles Spurgeon. Oh, what I would do to have a lay body that I could debate . . . . .:)

The service did end rather abruptly after the response hymn faded out. I tend to like it better when things are more clearly defined, which is what I think is the benefit of an order of worship. Nevertheless, afterwards it was time to go to the guest reception upstairs, above the bookstore. I had to visit the bookstore, of course. Many Reformed-oriented books by John Piper, R.C. Sproul, and even classic thinkers like Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, and others were on sale. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were sold in the fiction section. No sign of Left Behind, The Prayer of Jabez, or anything else like that, folks. I inquired innocently whether they had Jonathan Edwards’ On Religious Affections–and sure enough, it was behind the front desk! If nothing shows how literate their laity is, it’s their bookstore.

We headed to the guest reception, which was cordial, and one person did greet me personally. I confessed that I was quite impressed with their professionalism and how theocentric their worship was, which pleased the greeter. He asked me how long I had been a Christian and hoped that I would return soon . . . which I probably will, though I am far from sure whether I want to make it a church home. Shortly after refreshments, Joshua Harris himself came up and did a short presentation about the church, took a few questions, and invited us to pick up our free gifts: a sampler CD from the PDI praise team, a tape of one of Harris’s previous sermons, and yet another ballpoint pen.

Unfortunately, I could not linger much longer, as I had a book club meeting to run after CBC’s service ended. I had thoguht that I could make at least the second half of CBC’s service after finishing Covenant Life’s, but it turned out I could not. When I arrived, the service had ended, and also, the members of the book club were unavailable for a meeting this week. I ended up having a wonderful discussion over lunch with my friends Matt and Ray instead. I hadn’t talked to Matt for some time, and so we all talked a storm about theology. Ray, I hope you saw how excited the two of us were about those things, and that it will inspire you to pick up some more books and read too! You made some excellent points today about what legalism and Christian freedom are. May I suggest beginning with Martin Luther’s “The Freedom of a Christian Man”? That’s something I’ll be getting to sometime soon.

My assessment of Covenant Life, briefly, is this: as you can see from the above account, the positives outweigh the negatives considerably. It is a healthy church, a large modern one that is very contemporary and yet remains God-centered in its worship and theological in its preaching. Its Reformed base gives not only the sermon, but the songs too a badly needed theological coherency missing from general evangelicalism. The service itself is note-perfect–it was performed and conducted with such professionalism and grace. I came out of the church convinced that I had seen that the best American suburban evangelicalism has to offer–a contemporary, challenging, and attractive faith that emphasizes the grace of God through Jesus Christs’s atoning work on the Cross, where his love and justice are emphasized with near-equal measure. As I said before, it completely dispels the myth of the dour, sour frozen-chosen Calvinist. These are, dare I say it, “charismatic, enthusiastic Calvinists.”

Nevertheless, and I believe these are more than just aesthetic or prejudicial views, something bothered me about the whole setup. The professionalism of the service impressed me, even excited me–but never did it awe me with the presence of God, something that I found was conveyed even in empty cathedrals in Germany and England. The atmosphere overall was one of seriousness during the sermon, but the rest of it seemed very casual. The architecture of the building was a cut above functional, it must be said, but still resembled a performance or athletic hall than a defined place of worship. The affluence of the church was on clear display, but in a different way than the wealth that goes into the building of a cathedral or other large worship center where artistic craftsmanship is of high importance. Increasingly, I do not think these are irrelevant or snob questions. With CS Lewis, I affirm that man is a physical animal as well as a spiritual being. Our environment and surroundings affect our thinking and our spiritual lives, and are sending messages just as much as the song lyrics or the sermons. These things are not neutral. The structure and the setup of Covenant Life Church is a profoundly suburban, upper-middle class variety, built on a large tract of land in a relatively undeveloped part of the county, detached from larger population centers and requiring a large parking lot. One commutes to it, as I did, like one commutes to the office. I hope I am not alone in my occasional doubts about the goodness of this overall pattern of life; it is of course hardly the church’s fault that it replicates this, but an overall cultural and social problem. My concern is that the church reinforces this impression rather than thinking of creative ways to subvert or perhaps challenge this condition. Does the demand for reverence, awe, and sacrifice in the sermons and songs coincide with a well-lit, comfortable, air-conditioned, and thoroughly familiar-looking building and atmosphere? Perhaps my ideals or intellectualizing have gone too far in this case–because, as I said before, the positives outweigh the negatives a great deal–but these are things I think are worth thinking about. It is surely not something which Covenant Life is to blame; they have clearly made the best of it, and then some.

The church’s overall worship and theology is something to be envied in American evangelicalism. It shows, to me, the clear benefits and fruits of having a clear, distinct theology underpinning its life. I may not necessarily agree with everything in orthodox Calvinism, but one can see even in this highly contemporary church the power and the benefits of having a clear tradition to stand upon. As Joshua Harris pointed out today, they don’t want to do things alone–having some kind of grounding is so essential if you want a church that stands for something and actually worships a real God instead their vague, amorphous “feelings of absolute dependence.”

So, despite my reservations about its bourgeois nature, thank God for places like Covenant Life. They are keeping the Spirit and the Word alive in American evangelicalism, whose devotion to marketing, pop-psychology, and trendy fashion is eroding its spiritual foundation. I am profoundly unsure whether I would want to make a place like that a permanent church home–I am more attracted to the liturgy and even more traditional forms–but, Covenant Life surely is pointing in the right direction for evangelicals to grow. God willing, they will be the kind of churches that produdce real fruit, real disciples, and real worship.

I’m back! I’ve also posted the previous day’s entries, as I’ve been keeping track of the diary every day, but not neccessarily posting them b/c Internet access is VERY expensive here at the Marriott. The minimum amount of access you can buy is 24 hours for 20 euros. That was too expensive to justify for three nights, which would have added up to 60 euros for approximately 3-4 hours of access total. But since this is the last night, I might as do it now.

Today we did two things: see Schleissheim Palace on the outskirts of Munich, and take a train ride to Salzburg, Austria to visit the birthplace of that musical wunderkind and spoiled, nasty brat, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The subways and trains were unusually quiet today: today is Germany’s Memorial Day. That meant few crowds anywhere, church bells ringing throughout the city, and plenty of spaces to sit on the public transportation. I wonder what Memorial Day is like for Germans, though . . . they were on the losing (and in WWII, absolutely the wrong) side of the 20th century’s wars. Of course Germany is totally different now than it was in the 1910s and 1940s, being a functioning Western democracy. But the pain of losing a son to battle is real for anyone, and is all the more tragic when considered to what end they died for. I think I heard it said that the good memorials are always about reconciliation, rather than excuses to stir up old hatreds or grudges as they often were in some places. In either case Germany has reconciled itself to the world since WWII and, I think, thoroughly repented. They are only good to honor their dead as opposed to the leaders who made them die.

Schleissheim Palace turned out to be fairly small in terms of the amount of rooms and objects open to the public, but its Baroque opulence and beautiful gardens were enchanting. Like Neuschwanstein, it was also a royal waste of money–the Elector of Bavaria thought he would be elected Holy Roman Emperor, so he decided to build a Versaille-style palace for the occasion. Of course, he didn’t get picked, and so the palace was left only with its main wing finished and the rest of the grand plans unconstructed. (That perhaps doesn’t sound as crazy as King’s Ludwig’s attempt to live inside a Wagner opera, but oh well.) There was some lovely Baroque artwork inside the palace as well as the Elector and Electress’s beds–which were hardly slept in, of course. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to linger there as we needed to catch the 11:30 train for Salzburg.

The ride was pleasant and surprisingly bureaucracy-free. They didn’t even bother checking our passports or our tickets at the station! It was kind of easy to forget that we were technically in another country when we got to Austria, since Austria is German-speaking, the German trains go there without stopping, and everyone still uses Euros there. Salzburg is a small city, though, of only 100,000 residents and as such there was no subway system. I’ve been pretty good at figuring out subway systems in Frankfurt and Munich, but this time I had to learn the bus system, which was a bit more difficult. Nevertheless, we took the correct bus (which had Mozart’s portrait on it) to the heart of the Old City (Altstadt), and saw some more lovely Baroque architecture at the Salzburg Cathedral and the Residenz palace. Those old Europeans sure knew how to blow lots of money on beautiful architecture and churches for the rich. (Seriously though: it also represents how seriously they took public buildings and houses of worship that are meant to last for generations, not just for a few decades at most. We need permanence like that these days.) We went inside the Cathedral and saw one of the most lavish altars I’ve seen yet on this trip; the only difference was that in this place, lots of tourists were snapping flash photos, which weren’t allowed in most other places. Admission was also free, though they gave you a card that read “We praise God for your donation!” if you dropped a few coins in the box.

We decided not to go to the Residenz’s interior museum in favor of going to Mozart’s Birthplace, which is in a fairly spacious 18th century apartment building further up the road from the cathedral. In the process we forgot to purchase tickets for the other Mozart location in the city, which is the large house his family moved into later on across the river. Nevertheless, there was plenty to see in the museum (where, unfortunately, photos were not allowed inside). Mozart’s first violin, a copy of his original piano, some of his composition manuscripts were all there, as well as a number of fact-filled displays about the time period. He apprently, for example, had an older sister who was reputedly as gifted a composer as he–but her works have never been preserved. Mozart wrote Italian operas in perfect Italian at the age of 12, and started performing around the Austrian court at age 5. Of course the museum leaves out the more interesting parts of his story, like his rivalry with Salieri, his bad behavior, and overall nuttiness that gets covered in all the other biographies like “Amadeus.” Though Mozart is not my favorite classical composer–I prefer the Romantics and Bach more than people like Mozart or Haydn–this kid was a supergenius. If I had his talent at 12 I wouldn’t need to worry about whether I could make a living off of writing. I just need patronage from my local lord, that’s all.

After visiting the Mozart landmark we went up to the town’s hill fortress (and former residence of the Archibishop-Prince), Hohensalzburg Fortress. Some wonderful views of the town and the surroundings could be taken there. Again, due to lack of time, we decided not to go inside the museum, which required additional admission fees beyond the fee to ride the tram up the mountain. My parents also decided to buy lots and lots of chocolate, chocolate with Mozart’s picture on it, after our visit to the fortress. They are all gifts for their friends and office workmates when they return. We made one chocolate merchant outside the cathedral very, very happy as a result.

So we then returned by train to Munich after our fortress visit was over. On the train, I did some work on the upcoming novel, A Crown of Roses: mostly background work on the two kingdoms in the story, some mapping, and some plot outlining. Planning is coming to an end, everyone. We’ll be ready to kick into high gear soon!

Well, the last set of photos has not been updated as of this writing, so I’ll spend some time doing that before I go to bed. Tomorrow morning, we leave Munich for the city of Heidelburg, where Ed and Carolyn are working at the university hospital. We’ll see the sights there, and then on Saturday, my German journey ends on a flight back to Washington.

Until then . . . auf wiedersehen!

Today is best described as “Castle Day.” We spent most of the day on the Austrian/German border looking at two castles built by the Bavarian Royal Family, Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. I had only expected to see the latter, actually, not knowing that the former existed until we got to the bus stop and noticed that there were two, not one, castles in the region. Both of them were situated on top of Alpine foothills, and the train ride there offered some breathtaking views of the mountains, lakes, and villages scattered throughout the landscape. (I’ve taken snapshots of many of them that you can see.)

I probably saw the greatest volume of Asian tourists at these castles than in any other destination we’ve been to in Germany yet. This time there were more than Japanese, which composed the majority of the tourists we’ve seen; there was a large group of young Korean women and an organized tour group from Taiwan, who had their own Mandarin-speaking tour guide. Again I think it’s because both castles, especially Neuschwanstein, are “quaint” in a particularly fairy-tale kind of way and that seems to tickle those of us who are not of European heritage. It’s special in a way that perhaps others who were raised by fairy-tales and Disney movies and European relatives maybe take for granted. But that’s only a theory.

Unfortunately photography was not allowed inside either of the two castles, which accounts for today’s paucity of pictures–otherwise there would be many, many more, I can assure you.

Hohenschwangau is the older of the two castles, built in the 1830s by (Mad) King Ludwig II’s father Maximillian as a vacation home for the Royal Family. We accessed it via a rather steep uphill climb on the mountain. For a residence for royals–admittedly not the highest ranking of royals compared to, say, the British or the French monarch at his height-the castle was fairly small, though there were plenty of expensive decorations, centerpieces, luxurious beds, and other furniture. The King’s reading chair was reclinable and had a built-in book holder. I want that chair. I sure could use a book holder, that’s for sure. I know that if I got one, I might never leave. There was also a hidden passageway between the queen and king’s bedrooms, which seemed oddly appropriate for some reason. (The two of them slept apart normally because the queen snored.) In either case they had two sons, Ludwig and Otto, both who were to become kings for some time and who were to be diagnosed with mental illness. Must be inherited . . .

Next, a thirty minute climb up an even steeper mountain (unfortunately strewn with horse manure since carriage rides up to the top were available on the same path) and a cone of ice cream, we reached Neuschwanstein. It was one of three castles comissioned by an increasingly delusional King Ludwig II, and it was built with public funds that soon ran out. The castle and its builder are quite interesting characters. Ludwig’s life and mysterious death by drowning almost stands as an example of what happens to people who read and listen to too much Wagnerian opera Neuschwanstein was intentionally built to resemble the settings of one of Wagner’s librettos and most of the interior artwork depicts scenes from his various operas. There is even a fake cave inside that is meant to recall a particular setting in one opera. Interestingly enough–despite his prodigal use of money, Ludwig was a profoundly devout Catholic, who built his throne room (whose throne was never completed) in the style of an Orthodox cathedral and had a chapel attached to his bedroom. After the public treasury was exhausted, a psychiatrist pronounced Ludwig to be crazy and the parliament quickly deposed him in favor of a Prince Regent, the old king’s uncle (Ludwig’s brother Otto had already been committed earlier); Ludwig died two days later, his body drowned along with that of his psychiatrist’s in a lake. They claim that the circumstances are still mysterious, and that murder was highly unlikely since he had already been deposed. One tour guide suggested unbearable toothache.

Ludwig is a fascinating character to me. He was a heavily introverted person, though tall (6’4″), handsome, and a king engaged to be married to an Austrian princess; he died in his late 30s lost in the operas and fairy-tale literature he devoured, ignoring his duties as a king since he despised politics so much. We watched a film that excerpted from his diary, and it seems that he was growing increasingly paranoid of the outside world and unaware of just how much money he was spending in order to live out the fantasies he had read and heard. He seems to be an object example of the dangers of fiction combined with profound unhappiness. He doesn’t really seem crazy at all in fact, just in need of companionship (though he pushed it away), and perhaps a little therapy (though he threatened the psychiatrist they tried to send him). In philosophical terms Ludwig is the end result of an aesthetic way of life, a life spent entirely around getting the thrills of hearing Wagner’s soaring music and the wonders found in fantasy literature–things I certainly enjoy and can relate to. And I can certainly understand spending lots of money and time on those things to the detriment of my duties. There, but for the grace of God, go I: but thank God, too, that I am not a king with a public trust to betray. To those who are given much, much will be demanded . . . .

We then headed back to Munich by train after finishing the Neuschwanstein tour. On the train I finished the Hauerwas book, and will start preparing a review soon. At dinner back at the Marriott hotel, I decided that I’ve had too much meat and have decided to return to my partial, fish-eating vegetarianism. Also, after trying some admittedly good white Rhine-wine, I think I’m going to more or less return to teetotalism. Again, not that any of it is wrong; the wine was good, but not good enough for me to see the benefit of continuing to consume it on a regular basis. The same goes for meat, as I symbolically ordered a salad and I think I’ll continue to do so for the rest of the trip.

Tomorrow: royal Bavarian palaces and the city of Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart!

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

MICHAEL HUANG IN DEUTSCHLAND, DAY 5–d’oh. It turned out that Internet access at the Munich Marriott costs about E20 for noon-to-noon access, per day. I can’t really justify paying E20 for a connection that I’m only going to use for an hour or two at most every day, so it looks like this probably won’t be posted on the day it’s been writen along with the previous entry. D’oh d’oh d’oh. Oh well. It’ll have to wait for another day, then.

We went to bed far too early last night, at around 9:30 PM local time. As a result, I and the rest of my family woke up at about 4:45 AM, having slept for seven hours already and plenty rested for the day ahead–which, too, would include a lot of walking. We decided to go out at around 7:00 AM to tour some of the spots in Rothenburg that we missed yesterday, mostly the southern part of town which includes a formidable fortress/gate and a 14th-century bridge that provides a lovely view of the Tauber River valley and the town preserved in its exterior medieval glory. After we had breakfast we then went to the highly entertaining Medieval Crime Museum where torture devices, legal documents, official papers, and other artifacts relating to criminal justice and official matters from the middle ages onward were on display. While entertaining one has to wonder what sort of imaginations the people who invented the torture devices and execution methods had! Devices included wheels used to break condemned men’s bones, chairs with spikes, neck/foot/arm braces, whips, racks, and iron tongs, though no “iron maidens” to my mild surprise. Some of the public shame masks were entertaining as well–people caught gossiping, idling, sleeping in church, or being nosy were all forced to wear different masks (one had a long nose to represent sticking one’s nose in others’ affairs, two horns that symbolized your wife cheating on you, and something else that signified that you’d signed a pact with the Devil). What’s even more interesting were the elaborate criminal court and evidencce requirements needed to begin the torture and/or humiliation process; these weren’t random punishments by any means. Rational people–presumably lawyers with a morbid streak–carefully codified and put these now barbaric practices in use. Unfortunately we had little time to linger as the train departing for Munich would be arriving soon, but that turned out to be the most interesting part of Rothenburg for me.

We ended up missing the 11:00 train to Munich, unfortunately, and so we rested our tired legs for an hour, having dragged our suitcases from our hotel in the medieval section of Rothenburg to the more modern portions where the train station was. I read a good chunk more of With the Grain of the Universe along the long ride to Munich, which included numerous transfers to other train lines along the way. It mostly covered just how compromised Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology actually is despite his reputation for being neo-orthodox rather than liberal, and how triumphantly uncompromising Karl Barth’s theology is by comparison because he makes God, not man, the center of his theology. Not being a theologian except by pretense, I couldn’t grasp all the arguments Hauerwas was making, but now at the end of the book, even I can tell that this work is potentially groundbreaking in its field. It certainly challenges many conventional views of William James, Niebuhr, and Barth and pulls them together in a complex synthesis that is probably even more impressive to someone who is more familiar with those three thinkers than me. (I should be finished tomorrow, and perhaps a review will be eventually up as well.)

We got to Munich (which is actually spelled Munchen in German) in the late afternoon, and it took us some time to figure out the subway system and get to the Marriott Hotel, where the aforementioned disappointment about the high cost of Net access occured. By then I was tired, and didn’t really feel like going out, but I’m glad I did: with the city map as a guide, we walked through the Altstadt (Old Town) sections of Munich. You can see the snapshots I took of the various churches, the magnificent New Town Hall, the Royal Residence, the National Theater, and other landmarks in this majestic city. It’s the second largest city in Germany and is actually fairly conservative even as far as Germany goes; Bavaria in general is more religious/Catholic than many parts of Europe and even most of the people in the crowds that were shopping on the streets were wearing black jackets, making it seem that everyone was dressed in dark colors in public. We stood out with our brightly colored coats and pants. After touring the Old Town, we went to dinner in a restaurant where you collect food, and they stamp the items you got on a yellow card, which they calculate at the end of the meal for your bill. In the spirit of more adventurism I tried some of the bratwurst, which is basically the ancestor of the hotdog (or Frankfurter, as the hot dog too is German)–this more than a year after I swore never to touch processed, hacked meat like sausage or ground beef ever again. It was pretty good, actually, especially with mustard. I’ve been eating a lot of meat in this trip and I think I’ll return to my partial vegetarianism when I return to the States, again for health and discipline reasons. Vacations from vegetarianism (and, as it turns out, teetotalism) are well and good once in a while, I suppose, but they’re not habits I really want to develop. I have no moral objections to either meat-eating or drinking per se. It’s just that in our society, meat and alcohol consumption are more prone to gluttonous excess than other kinds of foods and drinks, and lest we forget, gluttony is a deadly sin. Quite literally in some cases for people with bloated arteries and blasted livers . . . . :/

Tomorrow we shall be going to Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria’s famous Neuschwanstein Castle–a “fairy-tale” style castle complete with the high towers and white paint and the fantasy-look captured in all too many Disney movies. King Ludwig was under a lot of work-related pressure in the late 19th century and he built the castle near the end of his life in order to escape into a fantasy world where Wagner operas come to life, money grows on trees, and where he has real executive power over the kingdom. The castle was built with public money, of course, and his request was to destroy the castle after his death. The people of Bavaria, of course, were far too intelligent to let the mad king waste their money like that, so now tourists from all over the world can share in the same fairy-tale delusions as their insane ruler. It’s two hours from Munich by train so I need to be getting up early, and I better wrap this entry up then.

Monday, May 27, 2002

MICHAEL HUANG IN DEUTSCHLAND, DAY 4–This entry was typed on computer, the day before, so that the continuity of these posts isn’t messed up. There aren’t as many pictures from today (18), and as of today I’m not sure I’ll be able to post them immediately because the Net connection at Munich tomorrow might be prohibitively expensive.

Today we said goodbye to Bad Soden, and I took a few snapshots of the town as a reminder–most tourists don’t usually go into the residential areas where the average German actually lives and works, so in a way it’s special. Traffic turned out to be fairly heavy during morning rush hour as we dragged our wheeled suitcases beside us through the streets to the train station. The train station took us to the Frankfurt Hauptbonhof, where we soon departed for the medium-sized town of Wurzburg by Inter-City Express–the new high speed ICE train that makes few stops and goes about 100-120 kph (I estimate). Wurzburg is the beginning of a path called the Romantische Strasse (the Romantic Road), which is a picturesque path that leads through the Bavarian countryside and ends in Munich. Unfortunately, when we stopped over in Wurzburg, there was seemingly very little romantic about it at all–there was lots and lots of traffic in the streets and it looked like any other modern-day German city, with the exception of the Catholic church in the town’s center. I took a snapshot of the interior, as I have for many of the churches we have visited thus far.

Then it was time to take the train from Wurzburg to tonight’s stop, Rothenburg ob der Tauben. Rothenburg is, admittedly, a tourist-trap town, mostly because it is Bavaria’s most well-preserved medieval city. The city walls around the old sector are completely intact, as are many of the medieval German style houses (think “Hansel and Gretel” or gingerbread houses) and the cathedrals and lookout towers. So far I think Rotheburg is the most fascinating place in our trip yet. It was raining hard when we entered the town, and so we had to drag our suitcases in a downpour through rough, cobblestone streets that still look like they dated back centuries to our hotel–which was a surprisingly clean, almost luxurious, affair. The exteriors of the buildings and the overall atmosphere isn’t quite medieval–there are too many cars and tourist-baiting shops in the old town–but apparently much of the preservation has been quite careful and the landmarks have quite a heritage. The town hall, for example, has stood since the year 1250. Many of the fortifications have stood since 1400 or not much later. We went on top of the town hall’s lookout tower after a steep, narrow climb up uneven stairs; the tower is the oldest part of the town hall, and unfortunately when we got to the top we discovered that the tower was under renovation and most of the views were blocked. I still managed to sneak one picture out of the one remaining lookout, though.

I led my parents and aunt and uncle around the city, armed with the English-language tour brochure that we got at the train station. We entered St. Jakob’s Church, which was first started in 1350 and completed in 1485, and stayed there for quite a bit admiring the elaborate altars and the relic that inspired the building of the cathedral: a drop of Christ’s blood. It is now a Lutheran (evangelische) church, and it’s interesting to compare this cathedral to some of the ones I saw in Amsterdam. The Lutherans have preserved all the decorative and artistic treasures inside the cathedrals, while the ones in Amsterdam have been stripped bare. The differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism are thus immediately apparent. Nevertheless, the Lutheran congregation that worships there today uses a much plainer altar than the ornate, late-medieval monstrosity at the back of the chancel. The huge presence of the churches (there are more than two cathedrals in the town) indicates how important faith was for the people here at the time. Cathedrals in general still leave me in awe, in the way that entire communities can band together over generations to construct one massive building. Rothenburg was a very rich trading town in its height during the 1400s, and so they could afford a particularly grand ediface. Which is nice, of course, for all us visitors.

Historical note: Rothenburg, interestingly enough, was an early convert to the Reformation (1540s), and it thus suffered at the hands of various Catholic nobles during the Thirty Years’ War of the 1600s. A local legend says that a town mayor saved the city from destruction when a Catholic count agreed to spare the town if he could drink 3.5 liters of wine in one draught–which he did. It is now known as the “Meisterdraught” legend and was so entertaining that I think I might incorporate a similar story into one of my own fantasy works . . . .

We also visited a weapons museum where some of the weapons and armor used in the Thirty Years’ War were on display–very interesting and good research for a future fantasy novel I’m writing that takes place in a world at around the tech level of the 17th century. It also featured a dungeon with complete with a torture chamber, including the cell where one of the mayors was imprisoned within. That gave everyone a nice medieval shiver! It included a rack, all kinds of pliers, and the dreaded wheel on which many men have died. Afterwards we got to walk along the city walls and look through the slits where archers used to shoot at approaching enemies. There were also openings to allow boiling pitch and brimstone to be poured on besiegers (and there have been a few throughout the town’s long history as an important trading center). Too bad that when you look through the walls now all you see are modern day cars, streets, and houses right on the other side–it wasn’t quite the medieval siege warfare that all these descriptions seem to bring to mind. Ah well. That’s what fantasy novels are for, I guess!

After walking about for several more hours, we all headed for dinner (Matt, I tried some of the jagerschnitzel you talked about: it was pretty good! It’s pork chops with mushroom sauce on top) at one of the countless restaurants located in the Old Town for tourists. Menus were available in German, English, and in Japanese. There was a strikingly high number of Japanese tourists in Rothenburg, much higher than in the other places in Germany where we went; they were the only Asian tourists we ever saw. I think it’s because the Japanese are in love with quaint European historical places–I remember seeing a large school group at Buckingham Palace in London once, and I have heard that it’s mostly Japanese tourists who go to Prince Edward Island in Canada to visit the home of Anne of Green Gables. Rothenburg definitely has that “quaint” aspect to it, and is thus a magnet for them. There were plenty of other Americans as well. This was a big contrast to Wurzburg, where we had trouble finding anyone who spoke English at all. One of these days if I ever go back here I will probably have learned some years of German (almost required to get a humanities PhD) so hopefully I won’t be as lost!

It’s time for me to go to bed early . . . I’m tired from all the walking we did today. Hopefully there is another entry before this one that means that I was able to connect and update you on Tuesday’s happenings.