Out and About

The Great Circle Tour

In August the Copy Editor and I got out and about in a much bigger way than usual for us. During this time we managed to set foot in six countries. I regret to report that we distributed Pietisten in only two countries — Norway and Sweden.

Sandy was invited to present the results of research she has done on the status of diversity initiatives in Fortune 500 Companies to the International Conference of Training and Development held this year in Hamburg, Germany. I decided to tag along, and we planned a Scandinavian Circle Tour for two weeks following the conference.

Deustch

My pietistic work in Germany was limited to an attempt to visit Wittenberg one day while Sandy was engaged at the conference. I hoped to find the door on which Luther nailed the 95 theses. I purchased my roundtrip train ticket at the Hauptbahnhof — Hamburg’s magnificent central station — the night before my trip, and at 7:55 am I was on the platform waiting for my train.

I was nervous about getting into the right car for my second class ticket. I discovered that cars with 2 on the side meant second class and cars with a picture of a cigarette emitting smoke on the side meant smoking was permitted within.

When I arrived in Wittenberge, I was surprised to find no sign or mention of Luther. Feeling a bit troubled, I obtained a little map and headed into the city. Unlike in Hamburg, few people spoke English, and it was not until I stepped into the tourist information center that I learned the truth that I reluctantly begun to suspect — Wittenberge does not equal Wittenberg.

The day was not a loss, however. I covered this moderate-sized town on the Elbe pretty thoroughly. I bought my bratwurst lunch at an open air market from an efficient German wearing the red shirt and cap of the San Francisco 49ers.

The return trip was the best part of the day. I wandered into a compartment occupied by a man who appeared to be about the same age as I and who was reading a very thick paperback. I asked him if he spoke English. He shook his head: “Very little.” His very little was good enough to tell me a lot of interesting things and to allow us to make contact.

He is a biology professor at the University of Jena in the former East Germany. He had lived the first part of his life under the Nazis and after the Nazis, the communists. “In the old days,” he said, “we would not be talking to each other because we would fear that our conversation might be recorded. Neither of us would take the risk of speaking. (Ironically, I had a tape recorder in my pocket that I very much wanted to turn on, but didn’t. To do so, I thought, would be pushing things too far.)

My friend told me about not being able to acknowledge Mendel in biology, of a visit from a Russian official telling him and his wife that if their daughter — a grammar school student at the time — had Russian school children to their home again, they would send her to Russia to live.

It was bitter-sweet for him that his son was at the moment in the mountains of Norway and that his daughter would soon be going away to school. He had never experienced such freedom. A concern dampened his joy, however — concern for the environment, especially in Central Europe. “My brother-in-law is a pastor, and he says to me that it used to be the theologians who prophesied the end of the world; now it is the biologists.”

In an effort to demonstrate a bit of knowledge about the venerable University of Jena, I pulled out a Pietisten and showed him what Don Franklin had written about it in relation to Bach’s education. I failed, however, to move Pietisten out of my hands and into his. The time came for me to get off the train. I felt very privileged to have met this person and grateful for his willingness to struggle in English so we could communicate. When I got out on the platform, I looked at him through the window. We waved to one another and the train pulled away. Maybe someday I will reach Wittenberg, but at that moment I knew Wittenberge had paid sufficient dividends.

Norske

It so happened that bad weather in Chicago caused us to miss our connection to Hamburg. Several other passengers were in the same “boat.” At the British Airways check-in to which we were routed, we met another person who had missed his connection. He had been abandoned by Scandinavian Airways to find his own way to Norway. When we learned that he had been at a Luther Conference at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, I pulled a Pietisten out of my backpack and laid it on the counter in front of him. He looked at it with some surprise and proceeded to give us his phone number in Bergen.

Oddvars Jensen is a professor of Church History, and a major area of focus for him is pietism!

Although I have plenty in reserve, some of my ignorance about Norway was eliminated by our trip. Like others, I had heard of the mountains and fjords, but now I have seen for myself (like the Samaritan villagers who met Jesus personally after hearing about him from the Samaritan Woman — John 4).

Look at a map of Norway and survey the western coastline. Then ask, “How do people get from place to place? The map will do a fair job of showing you how much water there is. Almost anyplace you want to go, it seems, is across some body of water. Therefore, you must go across by boat or take a long way around. What the map cannot show as well is the character of the mountains that make up this same territory — reminding me of the maxim affirmed by Roger Hazelton, Gregory Bateson, and many others: “The map is not the territory.”

We had planned to drive from Christiansand Norway to Bergen the day the ferry from Hirtshals, Denmark deposited us on Norwegian soil. Even though Oddvars Jensen warned me: “It is not like driving in the United States — that road is pretty narrow some places,” it didn’t sink in.

We did, however, revise our destination for that day from Bergen to Loftus (70 kilometers and a ferry-crossing short of Bergen). Still, we had not reckoned with the reality of the territory. Nor, had we reckoned with a Percyan/Kierkegaardian rotation we were about to experience.

A rotation, according to Walker Percy, is the experience of crossing a boundary and experiencing something new, something that breaks the grip of everydayness. We were already in a rotation driving along, independent, in a totally new place; but we rotated to an even more unexpected level when our rented Volkswagen Golf deisel sputtered and died in the Norwegian woods.

This was the third major rotation of our trip. The first was missing our connections in Chicago. Being rerouted from the KLM Amsterdam-Hamburg route to British Airways-to-London-and-then-Hamburg route resulted in meeting pietist-historian new friend, Oddvars Jensen. The second was finding myself in Wittenberge rather than Wittenberg, which provided a meeting with the biologist from Jena.

The third rotation, following encounters with several people, led us to Arvid Lantz of Viking Rescue. About 30 kilometers from the Texaco station at which we filled up, our Golf diesel discovered the gasoline I had erroneously put in the fuel tank, and it refused to proceed. Eventually Arvid towed us to his garage in Evje, siphoned out the gasoline from the tank, blew the lines and filters clear, told us and showed us a lot about Norwegian daily life, and set us on our way again. It was after this three-hour delay that we began to encounter the real meaning of Oddvars’ comment. The mountains became taller and the road more unpredictable. We began to encounter signs on an already narrow road warning us that a narrower road was just ahead. This two-way highway was hardly wide enough at times for one-way traffic, let alone meeting trucks and tour buses coming from the other direction. We soon realized that it would take most of another day to get to Bergen, and it did.

“So,” as Howard Garis (author of Uncle Wiggily) says, “if the elephant from Noah’s Ark doesn’t drop a cold penny down the back of the goldfish and make it sneeze,” in the next Out and About I complete my account of the circle tour. I will tell you more of what I learned from Professor Jensen about the history of pietism in Norway, about the hospitality of the Samuelsons of Hällefors and Bovik, Sweden, about the seminary in Lidingö, and of life with the Eldebos. —PJ