As It Was in the Beginning

As it was in the Beginning, is now, and Ever Shall be;

World without End – Amen

Written by Dan McDonald

Dependent upon the insights of too many to count

 

Planetary nebula photographed by Hubble

From an article in Christianity Today

            What will happen to our present creation?  I know of many Christians who view this world as something temporary, something that will simply be burned up by a great fire and then replaced by a permanent new creation.  I viewed creation that way much of my Christian life.  Sometimes in our church services we would sing a chorus that has made its way from the ancient times of the early church.  I had a hard time singing the words, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end.  Amen.”  Do we live in a world without end?  I wasn't sure about this song.  I won't pretend there aren't mysteries about the future that I have no way of understanding.  But I have begun to believe that the ancients who sang the words of the ancient chorus had a sense of what God plans for our creation.

Chicago nestled against Lake Michigan

The city of man connected to creation 

            It is true sometimes that we Christians understand that we cannot get final satisfaction from our relationship to our present creation.  I will interact with a beautiful and wonderful blog by Christie Purifoy who was able to express her thanks that God granted her to have many of the varied desires she pursued in life.  She wanted to live in a big city and was able to.  She wanted to earn a PhD and managed to do so.  She wanted to teach at a university and did so.  She wanted then to leave that to take up living on a farm, raising children with her husband and writing.  She was able to do that.  But the desires she wanted in this life, even as full and wonderful as they were taught her that in bringing her to pursue and enjoy her desires, that there was yet another home in a future creation that was calling her.  She understood that ultimate satisfaction could not be found in this creation.  The Christian knows this sense that we can have so much here, but the all of life cannot be found here.  We do not find ultimate satisfaction in this present creation.

But there is a flip side to our relationship with this creation.  This was expressed in a blog by Natalie Trust.  Natalie is one of my favorite bloggers, as is Christie.  Natalie is sometimes more provocative, and sometimes is more challenging to my perspective.  I say that to say that I have learned to listen to her, and to think about what she says, for whether or not I always agree with her I know that she has thought, felt, and understood things I have never begun to think about.  She wrote a blog about how she went to the ocean shore and felt as though God was offering her peace at the beach as much as he did in the Eucharist.  If you've ever read Natalie's description of her sense of gratitude for the peace she is granted in partaking from the Eucharist, you would readily understand how she does not take the Eucharist lightly or consider its benefits as merely symbolic or trivial. so when Natalie says she felt as if she had received the peace of God at the beach I don't for a moment take her as being flippant about the matters of the grace offered through the sacraments of the church.  But the truth is we have all likely had one of those moments when we've experienced God's grace as we came to appreciate something about creation.  How could any of us ever have read the Psalms without realizing that the Psalmists often found they experienced nearness to God in God's creation.  We have a relationship with this creation that is part of how we meet God, even if we don't find our ultimate satisfaction in merely feeling close to God in creation.  We hear Christ in the Scriptures, have him given to us in the Supper, know him in a brother or a sister, and yes also we know him in the mountains, valleys, and varied life and scenery of creation.  I think this all meets together so that there is something which validates both Christie's and Natalie's experiences from a truth that has been essential to the Christian tradition since the very beginning.

            It was not very long ago I saw a blurb about a book on Genesis One written by John H. Walton.  The blurb written about Walton’s book described how Walton believed that Genesis One shows the creation as being formed as if a temple were being built.  I never thought of the creation as a temple.  Instead of reading John Walton’s book immediately, I tied to think how the Bible might show the creation as if it were a temple.  I decided to test the theory before reading Walton's book.

 

Central Park, New York City

Creation preserved within the city of Man.

 

 

A bald eagle caught in flight above Central Park

Creation yearning for our redemption

The two above photographs from an article

In the Daily Telegraph, UK

 

One indication of the answer I discovered came to me as I thought of Solomon praising God during the dedication of the temple.  Solomon compared the temple in Jerusalem with heaven and the highest heaven.  He prayed: “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built.”  (II Chronicles 6:18 RSV)  No temple, not even the heavens and the highest heavens, or the heavens and the earth can contain God.  A temple is not a place where God can be confined.  Rather a temple is the place where God bends down to embrace a child or bends down to hear an elderly person's feeble voice.  A temple is where God meets with his people in the midst of the earth.  But when we enter a temple we expect to see icons, paintings, or at least design that seems to make us feel that the God of this temple or cathedral is glorious and majestic.  St. Paul describes how God has given us this sense of the glorious and majestic in creation.  St. Paul writes: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” (Romans 1:20 RSV)  The glory of God, his eternality, his deity, and all has been inscribed into the natural iconography of creation.

This all began coming together for me as I read Christie Purifoy’s blog.  She described how she realized as wonderful as the things she enjoyed were, that ultimately her satisfaction wasn't in this creation.  I wouldn't argue with her conclusion, yes it is true, never is this creation alone enough to satisfy our yearnings and desires for God.  But there was another side to it.  Something almost none of us noticed but St. Paul did.  If we did not find satisfaction in the creation, neither did the Creation experience satisfaction in us.  St. Paul said the creation had been suppressed into futility.  He said creation was in a state of travailing, and that it was groaning hungrily for the day when God reveals his sons and daughters in glory.  For that would be the day when creation found its fullness.  That is when I realized that our redemption has been intertwined with creation’s final restoration.  Our human redemption and the earth's full restoration are forever intertwined.

Do you see the implications?  It means that Christ came into creation to save creation.  He has not only come into humanity to save humanity, but also has come into creation to save all of creation.  It also means little things, like what might happen when this spring Christie is working on the  garden and maybe some frustration sets in that she might be able to laugh at it all and say to her garden “I suppose you are feeling the futility of it all upon you, well we are in this together.”  This creation isn't a disposable towel to throw away at the end of the universe, but is our home and temple wherein God will meet with man and all of his creation.  Natalie can still feel the ocean waves coming against her as if a gift of God speaking peace to her soul.  She will know that this temple, this creation, defiled as it were by sin's presence on this earth, is yet a temple God plans to restore.  So whether one feels as if God has spoken to them in the good things of creation, or if God beckons to us from beyond this creation, we wait for the revealing of the sons and daughters in the day of Christ's glory.

            I can hear an objection to all this, an objection I once voiced.  Someone asks, “Isn’t this all going to be burned up?  But will we believers not also likely be saved as through fire?  What sort of a fire is it that burns wood, hay, and straw but allows gold, silver, and precious stone to pass through the fire?  It is a refiner's fire intended to incinerate dross but to preserve gold.  The dross is burnt away in the fire, while all that is precious is passed into the new vessel.  The old passed away as the dross dropped out of the refining process.  The new is composed wholly of fine precious things.  That is why I can sing with great joy the song, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”  It will be a world where Christ, creation and the redeemed of the Lord rejoice forevermore.  We will hear the “Peace be with you” at the seashore and we will also know that now we have come home, truly home.

 

Molten gold – burning away imperfections

Bringing new out of the old

Are you connected?

Are you connected?

Written by Dan McDonald

            A perceptive Facebook friend, who has known me for probably twenty years (“time keeps on slipping into the future”), said as we were exchanging messages:  “I hope you are connected and complete.  Take care of yourself.”  She was sort of asking a question, but knowing me she was putting it in the form of a sentence.  With the Lenten season approaching her sentence sort of affirms what I have been feeling lately.  I need to focus on my connections.

            Everyone has their own perceptions of what the important things are in life – but I think most of us know that being connected is among the most important.  For a long time I’ve had this theological framework around what it means to be connected to God in Jesus Christ.  If I remember correctly I came to see this theological framework concerning connectedness in the theology of Martin Luther, either as discussed in Roland Bainton’s biography of Luther entitled Here I Stand or in Philip Schaaf’s volume on the German Reformation in his eight-volume set on Church History.  Luther, during the German Reformation came to believe that God reveals Christ to us in three loci (or places of revelation or channels of revelation).  Luther’s concept of “Sola Scriptura” did not mean that he viewed the Scriptures as the only place where we met Christ.  For Luther, “Sola Scriptura” meant that the Scriptures were the highest authority by which Christians and the Church could determine what was doctrinally correct.  He believed the Bible taught that normally speaking God was revealed to His people through the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and the Church.

            His Biblical reasons for these were simple.  Jesus when discussing eternal life with the religious leaders who either failed to understand him or actually opposed Him, said to them “You search the Scriptures for eternal life, and it is they which testify of Me.”  The Scriptures, according to Luther’s understanding, revealed eternal life because they revealed and pointed to Christ.  The Scriptures were the means to an end, not the end of the means.

            The sacraments were also important.  This truth was understood in simple ways.  Christ described the elements of the Supper he was distributing to them as his body and his blood.  Whatever perspective we might use to explain this, our participation in the Supper became a physical way of remembering Christ's death until he comes.  The idea of remembering is not a mental only remembrance, but a physically active reenactment in which Christ offers us his body and blood and we partake.  I am not going to try to figure out in a blog which of the varied traditions of understanding the Lord's Supper and the taking of communion is the most perfect.  I am just pointing out that Christ called upon his disciples to partake of his body and blood in the supper and so we in some manner do that not by forming mental images in our head but by eating and drinking what we are given.  Sacraments are physical acts requiring something even if not a lot in regards to the employment of our bodies.  Sacraments help us to respond bodily to the reality that Christ entered into humanity with a human body to die for our sins and to rise for our eternal life.  He entered the physicality of our world and we receive this gift and the promise of his presence partly by partaking of a supper in which he reaches out to us and says "Take" - "my body" - "my blood".  Baptism is similar.  We have our bodies anointed or immersed in Christ, into his death, burial, and resurrection.  Luther also spoke of “confession and the absolution or forgiveness of sin as a sacrament.  He wasn't always consistent, as he wanted people to feel free to confess to God apart from the sometimes legalistic way the practice was conducted in the late Middle Ages, but he viewed confession and absolution as something Christians could do with one another to encourage one another in the Gospel.  We should be able to smile at some of our differences, for if I have been to Protestant churches where the Roman Catholic practice of confession and penance and absolution are condemned, these same churches often have a counseling ministry where people may talk about their struggles, be given Biblical counsel or directives (not penance mind you) and forgiveness (nah this isn't absolution keep moving, we're Protestants).  The point is Christ is presented to us and us to Christ in baptism, the Lord's Supper, and in confessing and having our sins forgiven through the ministry of the Gospel.

            The final channel, in Luther’s perspective, through which God revealed Christ to his people, is through the Church.  The Church is described as the body of Christ.  But perhaps we think of the Church in an abstract way.  I also think He intended it to be characterized by mystery until it was revealed in the Great Day.  The Church by a minimal definition is the body of Christ, in which those who are being redeemed by the grace of God are being grafted into the body of Christ.  If we define the Church as the body of Christ in which all believers are being grafted, then we discover an amazing truth in the Gospel regarding how you and I will be judged in the final day.  Jesus never described how we would be saved by giving a right answer about how we were saved.  He didn't even tell us that we can't be saved without believing in justification by faith.  He instead told a story about the separating of sheep and goats based very simply on how we treated Christ through the way we treated the "least of these."  That is how much we see Christ in the Church.  We see him in the least of these.  We see him in the brother and sister.  We can have a religion that has all the right answers doctrinally but doesn't have the right response to when we see him in the least of these.  He is there even if we don't see him.

            If you want to understand what a healthy church is, it is the place where “the least of these” is welcome.  It is the place where the least of these are being given a haven in which to reside, to seek, to confess, to be forgiven, to be taught, and to learn to love one another in the Gospel.  It is a place where through the teaching of Holy Scripture sin will be identified, but it is also the place where when sin is identified the weak will be reminded that this is the house where the least of these are welcomed by a Savior who has died for our sins and has risen for our eternal life.  The strong will likewise be reminded that this is where they find salvation by how they show love to Christ in showing love to the least of these.  Let every Church have a cross on it and let every believer seeing the cross think of how this means it is for the least of these.

            I am drawing near to the time of Lent in my church tradition.  I know what my focus needs to be.  It needs to be on making these connections, especially those to my church and those to the least of these people within my church.  One of the things I am tentatively thinking about doing during Lent is not writing on my blog.  I will spend a strictly limited amount of time on Twitter and Facebook, so as to focus on making connections in my local church and in my community.  I will keep reading some of the blogs I read because you have important things to say.  But I have some needs at this time and I will be addressing them during the season of Lent.  May God richly bless every person reading this.

Blogging to you, listening to you, and changes have come

About a Year of Blogging to You,

And some Seasons of Listening to You

Written by Dan McDonald while reflective and a bit dour

 

            I grew up when no one had heard of the Internet.  We imagined that as we read books without pictures we had come to begin reading what was important.  But in the day of the blog, it is always important to have the right pictures.  Today’s blog has no pictures.  I present some thoughts and sentiments after a year of writing blogs and a few months of listening to a whole new group of bloggers and some Facebook friends, and some Twitter friends.  I’ve learned some things, probably forgotten some too, and I think have changed a little and need to change some more.  That is what this blog is all about.

            I am writing this blog with a few different fonts.  I wrote with a sort of whimsical font for my title because this blog is the sort of piece someone writes when still affected by an Ebenezer Scrooge morning after experience.  He pulls his hair out and makes crazy faces because he can’t take himself seriously anymore as if life is all about his business and his interests.  He realizes he is absurd and discovering that we are absurd is sometimes as close as some of us will ever come to being able to see ourselves created in the image of God.  I think that is true in some paradoxical manner.  When I take myself seriously I am almost always far removed from God.  But when I see myself as absurd I am often at that moment nearer to the Kingdom of God than at any other time.  I wrote my introduction in ordinary script because it was ordinary.  I write this paragraph in a sort of friendly cursive manner to say I am trying to write this blog as a heart-felt letter to the friends I have known for a long time, to the new friends I have discovered in recent months, and to say that all of you the old friends and new friends are all a part of me, whether I am so new to you that you don’t know what to make of me or so old to me you don’t know what to make of what has happened to me.  I am writing a heart-felt letter to all of you to tell you what has happened since I started blogging a year ago and listening to an ever growing diverse group of people whom I know perhaps mostly by the internet, but the distance and virtual-ness of the internet doesn’t mean you aren’t true friends. To all of you this blog is a letter from my heart.

 

                Q.  What have I learned in a year of blogging and a few months of listening to others?

                                I am writing of truth I have learned sort of like framing a catechism.

                A.  I have learned to appreciate two things; diversity and Jesus beyond the camp.

1.  I have learned to appreciate diversity.  I have gotten to know people who when I first heard them speak with their different perspective than mine I wondered if they were some sort of crazy.  But then as I listened I realize that sometimes you made some sort of sense.  And sometimes it scared me because sometimes you made a whole lot of crazy sense.

We live in a diverse world, and none of us are ever comfortable with diversity.  I laugh at those who say how much they love diversity and then tell about how they hate the narrow confines of that place from which they have escaped.  The reality is that often the little groups we came from that we have learned to be ashamed of, they too are part of the diversity we somehow imagine we love because we have learned to despise something of a former narrowness.  That is what diversity is, it is living in a massive society composed of all sorts of groups with their narrow perspectives and it is only as we listen to one another sharing our narrowness with another narrowness that little drops of rain fall into mud puddles, run off into creeks, merge with other creeks, enter a river, merge with other rivers, become a mighty river and empty into a vast ocean.  Appreciation of diversity is the journey taken by a drop of rain looking to find its way to a vast ocean.  Beloved this appreciation of diversity usually began for us in the narrowness of our little backgrounds.

2.  The other thing I have been learning is that Jesus is discovered beyond the camp.  I was learning this by getting to know people that weren’t part of my original camp or tribe.  I think of a couple of ladies, one that I almost didn’t follow on my Twitter page because I thought from something she said one day, “wow she is really liberal.”  But as the months have passed I have realized that she is probably to the left of me on some things which doesn’t make me necessarily right on those things, but I have realized that she prays the lectionary and finds Christ probably more consistently than I ever have.  Listening to people from varied camps has changed me.  I’ve learned from people with a passion for social justice that there are injustices that should anger us and break our hearts.

I realized how much all this had changed me the other day when I was writing about some things I had thought about in connection with having watched the German movie “Downfall.”  A year ago I had written a blog about Sophie Scholl.  I had watched the movie “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days” and had read a book entitled Sophie Scholl and the White Rose by Jud Newborn and Annette Dumbach.  Sophie Scholl is one of my heroes from history.  I suppose that part of the reason is that I am an older man that didn’t marry a young woman when I was that age when young men marry young women, and she was a young woman who was executed for standing for justice before she could marry a young man.  Maybe that should or shouldn’t be part of why you find someone to be one of your heroes, but I’m sure that is part of it for me.  I’ve imagined, and though it won’t likely happen for me, that someone who gets the chance to bring a little girl into the world could do worse than naming the little girl “Sophia Magdalena" in honor of Sophia Magdalena Scholl.

I say all that to say that when part of my blog this past week was connected to Sophie Scholl I didn’t link what I had written about her.  I didn’t because I felt that I had too much described her life in relationship to Jesus, as if a way to present Jesus as understood by my tribe.  I realized that is not really how Jesus came into our world or how he remains a part of our world.  He came particularly as a Jewish man, I know that and am not arguing about his coming to a specific time and people.  But he came also as importantly to be part of the whole of humanity who could heal a Syrian woman or declare with great joy how a particular foreigner had more faith than he had seen in any of his countrymen.  He came for the world of humanity and not just for a little camp.  When the Pharisees or Sadducees tried to own him he let them know they did not.  When John and James tried to own him he let them know they did not.  When Simon Peter tried to own him he said “Get thee behind me.”  He comes into the midst of our humanity and we all try to form camps and tribes around him and claim to own him within our camps and tribes but we never get to.

That is what I’ve learned.  So now if I write something about Christ I want you who read it to feel like this Jesus has taken his place right in the middle of our humanity, each of our own expressions of humanity and he is right in the middle of our humanity.  He has come into the middle of humanity to speak to the whole of humanity and yes in that to you and me.  He is speaking in the midst of humanity and to all of humanity whether we are hearing him say to us “O ye of little faith” or “To him who has ears to hear” or “Well done good and faithful servant”.  I want that when I write about him to make you feel whatever camp or tribe it may be in which you reside that he is speaking from the midst of humanity to the whole of humanity, and addressing you as to your whole humanity.

That is my story of a year of blogging.  That is my dream for days ahead.

 

Sincerely yours

Dan McDonald

 

Dialogue with the Movie Downfall - Part 5- Sorrowful Reflections

 

Dialogue with the Movie “Downfall”

Part Five:  Sorrowful Reflections

Written by Dan McDonald

Traudl Junge interviewed a couple of years after World War II in Bavaria.

 

            Trudl Junge spoke of feeling helpless and angry after Hitler committed suicide.  She was angry because he had abandoned them when they most needed leadership.  She remembered frightening images Hitler spoke of when he contemplated a defeat of Germany and National Socialism.  On 1 May 1945 Germans, who had largely ceded their independence of thought to their leader (Fuehrer is the German word for leader) were thrust into the chaos where each person for a few days had the horror of having to think and act without a recognized leader. 

The movie “Downfall” gives us a symbolic but possibly misleading view of what happened next.  In the movie Junge and a boy are seen passing through celebrating victorious Russian soldiers as they make their way outside of Berlin and to open lands in the West.  But this is a symbolic ending.  The intended German audience familiar with Junge's story would understand that she spent a time confined by the Soviets although not charged with any crime.  Eventually she made her way out of the Russian sector to her original home in Bavaria.  People unfamiliar with her story might see this as misleading but those who knew the story would have seen the ending as a way of showing that the Soviets were a temporary hindrance that eventually she overcame in her desire to go home and begin a new life. Where the movie "Downfall" ends the story Junge tells in the documentary "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary" continues.  She described how immediately after the war Germans tended not to reflect much about what had happened under Hitler.  They focused on rebuilding.  But things were changing.  She talked of how they had so many fears for the future based on what Hitler said would happen if they lost the war.  But almost everything he had imagined and warned of proved to be another lie.  It was only a short time after the war that Germans in the West, and especially in the American sector felt such a sense of freedom as they had never known it before.  So changes were taking place but it was not until the 1960's that Germany began seriously and as a culture to reflect on what had gone wrong that led to the realities of the Nazi era.

            Trudl Junge described the event that led her to confront her own connection to Nazism.  She tells us of that event in these words:

           [ “I wasn’t able at first to see the connection with my own past.  I still felt somehow content that I had no personal guilt and had known nothing about it.  I had no idea of the extent of what happened.  But then one day I was walking past the memorial in Franz Josef Street to Sophie Scholl, a young girl who opposed Hitler and I realized that she was the same age as me and that she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler.  At that moment I really sensed that it is no excuse to be young and that it might have been possible to find out what was going on.”]

            Junge saw a mirror image of herself in the life of Sophie Scholl.  They were both born the same year, and in the decisive year when Junge went to work for Hitler, Scholl took up actively encouraging Germans to do all in their power, to withhold their cooperation and submission from the Nazi regime.  She and other members of a group calling themselves the White Rose expressed a vision for a replacement government that would respect liberty and human rights.  This led to Scholl’s arrest, as well as others in their group.”  Scholl was executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943.

I have written about Sophie Scholl elsewhere.  I am sure I would write it differently today than I did a year ago.  I wrote a year ago as one who saw the world as divided between Christian and non-Christian.  But now I see the world as this world into which Christ entered into our humanity and spoke to our humanity, so that when we proclaim the truth Christ would have us proclaim then we would speak from within humanity to all of humanity.  So I think I would write the article on Sophie Scholl with a different perspective now.  But that said I must admit that Sophia Magdalena Scholl is one of heroes in the history of humanity.  So I instantly took note when Trudl Junge described the pivotal scene where she saw herself differently by seeing the plaque, the monument with the remembrance of Sophie Scholl.

Trudl Junge came to a different understanding of her relationship to Nazism and the atrocities of Nazism as she stood at the memorial honoring Sophie Scholl.  She saw how weak and unsatisfactory her sense of innocence based on her not knowing anything was.  Junge did not know about the secret atrocities taking place in Germany.  She realized, however, looking at the memorial that Sophie Scholl also hadn’t known much, and their young age meant neither of them could really claim age as an excuse.  The great difference between the two ladies had been that Sophie Scholl refused to accept as the final presentation of reality the thinly veiled veneer of normalcy hiding the ugly truth of what was taking place under the Nazi regime.  Scholl had asked questions and probed into the veneer of normalcy until she opened a tear into that veil and could see evil behind the appearance of normalcy.  Scholl followed her instincts when sensing that something didn't fit and her investigation pierced through the veneer to the truth.  The façade crumbled when she pushed against it.  A world of evil opened up to her eyes and she could no longer be silent.  Sometimes someone might imagine that a young lady like Sophie Scholl was so brave because she didn't imagine what would happen to her if the authorities captured her.  But a woman who knew her told of how Sophie Scholl confided in her that she lived in constant fear and that she often cried herself to sleep.  She was not brave because she was under some illusion that she wouldn't face consequences but she spoke because she had seen what was behind the veil of normalcy to the evil beyond it and she felt that she had to speak.  But it seems to me that Traudl Junge's story needs told just as much as Sophie Scholl's story needs to be told.

There are so many ways Junge’s experience during World War II can be understood in a context outside of war in an ordinary office where there is a façade of normalcy hiding some evil.  There are plenty of staff members who have served with employers who seemed respectable that proved to be hiding an evil secret.  Trudl Junge’s story isn’t confined to a consideration by World War II scholars.

I will speak of just one application because I have known a couple of ladies through the internet who have sought to deal with the tragic evil of child abuse, and especially with the sexual abuse that has taken place quite often within respected Christian ministries, whether they be Catholic or Protestant.  One of the great sorrows, expressed by these ladies is how often when credible accusations are made against abusers, there are staff members who rise instantly to their defense and then try to undermine the victim's willingness to come forth to point out the abuser so that his cycle of abuse might be ended.  Trudl Junge’s relationship to Adolph Hitler helped me see what might be taking place in these situations.  Junge had met Hitler and her perceptions of him included his being a gentleman, a soft-spoken man, and someone who showed genuine respect to his secretaries.  This perception was viewed as if it were the fullness of reality.  We human beings are not omniscient.  We never see the fullness of reality.  But we continually imagine that what we see is reality, and so we take what we see and imagine it to be all there is to reality.  We fail to recognize that always what we see is a limited perception of reality, a façade and not the whole scene.  An insufficient perception of reality made Junge slow to imagine that Hitler could possibly be a monster.  That same sort of phenomenon happens in so many abuse cases.  It may not be for months or years until a staff member wondering why he or she never noticed the evil notices a door and then has an “O my God” moment.  The loyal staff member looks at a door and thinks back upon how often the trusted minister or staff member took a child behind a closed door and described it as counseling.  He assured the rest of the staff that the child had special needs to address.  Somehow all the closed doors seemed strange, but this child had special needs.  Only afterwards does this staff member realize how she had failed to understand the situation, mostly because he or she had assumed this man could not be guilty and yet he/she had seen numerous closed doors but did not question the situation.  This is one of the reasons why I began to believe that Trudl Junge's story was a plausible one.  She spoke like one who believed in her employer only to discover that all along there were those things that could have shown how he was a monster if only she had followed some of those things that did not quite fit.

From a grace perspective I try to imagine an interesting imaginary scene.  Two lives, mirroring each other’s life meet at a memorial.  Trudl Junge looks at the monument and is gripped with the understanding that her not knowing did not make her innocent.  She realizes she could have and should have known more.  She is overcome with grief and guilt and laments, “There were things I saw and heard, and I fear I never wanted to understand those things.  Can I be forgiven?”  An emotion more than words replies as if the memorial has a soul.  The sentiment, deeper than words, conveys, as if saying, "I knew and therefore I had to speak.   But you now in your grief and suffering, you too have a story to tell.  You can tell your story better than I".  A pause to allow those thoughts time to sink in was followed by the sentiment being conveyed again.  The voice from the memorial says, "Some people are afraid they will suffer as I have.  But you who avoided my pain must tell of your pain.  For truth be spoken between you and me we know that whether we stand and speak against the evil or hide from and deny the evil, our confrontation with evil wounds each of us.  So please help me to tell this story.  I will tell of how yes there can be pain in standing against evil, but you will tell the story of how there is pain because you did not."  Then it seemed to me as if when these two witnesses who told their story had finished that I heard another voice speaking not sorrowfully but triumphantly shouting - “I have overcome the world.  Fear not little children.”

Sophie Scholl and members of the White Rose,

She asked questions, investigated and made her stand.

She died by guillotine February 22, 1943 aged 21.

Sophia Magdalena Scholl 1921-1943

 

Traudl Junge 1920-2002

Dialogue with the Movie "Downfall" - part 4 - A Secretary Goes to Work for Hitler

Dialogue with the Movie “Downfall”

Part Four: A Secretary Goes to Work for Hitler

Written by Dan McDonald

 

A scene from "Downfall"- helmeted actress Alexandra Maria Lara as Traudl Junge

 

            The movie “Downfall” begins with an elderly woman describing how she came to apply for a position that would lead to her working directly for Adolph Hitler.  The movie ends with the same elderly woman describing how, after the war, she came to realize that her ignorance of Nazi atrocities did not excuse her from having had the responsibility to discover the truths about Nazism if she had wanted to know the truth.  These clips were borrowed by the creators of “Downfall” from an actual documentary wherein Hitler’s youngest personal secretary in the final years of World War II was given the opportunity to tell her story as an elderly lady.  Despite the problems of considering the perspective of a witness whose life was marked by her season of service to one of history’s most recognized men of evil, her story is intriguing.  In this blog and the next blog in this series I will try to highlight Gertraud Junge’s story.

            If a summary of her life might have been written from the things I have learned about her life it might read this way:  Gertraud Humps was born 16 March 1920, married Hans Junge in June 1943, was widowed when her husband was killed in action in August 1944, and died without descendants from cancer at age 81 on 10 February 2002.”  The notes of her life might have said, “she worked during the Second World War as a personal secretary for Reich Chancellor Hitler, but following the war suffered from severe depression, tended to live as a recluse, but did enjoy visiting a home for the blind where she read books to the residents.

            It goes perhaps without saying that having worked as a personal secretary to one of humanity’s most evil figures, her story is not universally accepted.  Some historians regard her story as plausible.  This blogger, while neither an expert on Frau Junge nor in regards to historical method, finds her story to be plausible.  I find as many reasons to view the story she tells as plausible as I do for denying it on the basis that she worked for an evil man.  Her story seems to be one that an elderly lady might tell because she desired to tell the world a simple truth about her life.  She had thought through it for a lifetime.  She had to let the world know that she did not know during her time as a secretary many of the worst things done under the Nazi regime, but she also had to acknowledge that she was close enough to the truth that if she had wanted to know she could have known it very easily.  So she wanted the world to know that she could not hide behind never having known.  There were others who knew less than she yet came to discover the truth about Nazism and they were the ones who made her realize how she had refused to see the truth that was all around her.

            Rather than try to prove the plausibility of Frau Junge’s story, I will simply ask you to imagine the story being true, for then I think it would have great meaning to us.  But I invite my readers to think of this story as something more than another old World War II story.  This is also a human story that should be told because it is more than a war story.  Think of it as a story of a young woman who goes to work for a person that she sees as a kind gentleman.  That is how he treats her and how she sees him.  Then everything at the office blows up and later the young woman discovers that the older gentleman’s life had sordid secrets.  Perhaps he had abused people.  Perhaps he had been a serial killer, perhaps he had ordered the deaths of millions of Jews and ten thousands of gypsies and other people he thought did not merit survival in the world.  This is a story not just related to war, but to someone who worked with a person and never saw them as being evil monsters when that is exactly what they were.  Here is a person that never quite knows what to do with her failure to see that about the evil person she knew but did not know in his entirety.

The actual Traudl Junge in the interview: Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary

 

            We begin with information from the documentary “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary” to a moment in which she has traveled from Munich to Berlin to interview for a government job in Berlin.  She has a sister in Berlin and she has dreams of studying dance and becoming a ballerina, and maybe this job will put her in Berlin where she can take her dance lessons and chase her childhood dreams.

            In Berlin she discovers that the position she has applied for is to be a personal secretary to Adolph Hitler.  He would test the ladies’ secretarial skills by speaking to them as they typed out his words. An elderly Junge described, in this way, the impression Hitler made upon the waiting ladies as he appeared: “And then a kindly old gentleman came up to us speaking in a low voice and giving us a friendly smile.  He shook hands with each of us, looked straight into our eyes with that famous gaze of his, asked us our names, said a few words to us with a sort of friendly, paternal air and then disappeared again.  When he went he just said, “Good Evening.”  When it was over we said, “Now we’re curious.”[i]

            She described how in escorting the ladies to take their test, Hitler would try to help them not be nervous.  The old gentleman, whom some of these ladies had never seen except in his uniform with outstretched arm saluting soldiers at military parades on newsreel or speaking with a powerful dramatic voice to the masses.  But this was not the Hitler they saw in this office.  Here he offered to fetch the ladies an electrical heater if they felt the room to be too cold.  Or he spoke a quiet confidence building word saying he was sure they would not make more mistakes than he had.  This was the man that Trudl Humps (Junge) met and with whom she would work until his death in April 1945.

She tells a story of how her chance at getting the job depended on an intervention.  Despite Hitler’s attempts to help her not  be nervous, the young Trudl Humps was extremely nervous as she began trying to type to Hitler’s speaking.  She didn’t have her fingers starting out over the right keys.  She was typing letters forming nothing resembling German words.  She was horrified.  But just then one of Hitler’s staff members knocked on the door to inform Hitler that Ribbentrop was on the telephone wishing to speak to him.  Hitler excused himself to talk to Ribbentrop.  The nervous applicant took the time to correct her errors, composed herself, and by the time Hitler returned she was ready and confident to begin typing.  She found the task of following Hitler’s speaking to be not difficult at all.  She spoke with that sense of accomplishment that she must have felt the very day she took the test.  She said of the intervention:  “Then thank God, or perhaps unfortunately, his servant came in”.[ii]

There is something very human about the story she told.  She surely had a sense of triumph when she came from her test typing triumphantly after such a horrible start.  There must have been a great sense of accomplishment to so overcome her jitters so as to be able to type serenely and confidently as Hitler spoke.  The intervention had to seem like a gift from God and a wonderful omen for the beginning of her new career.  She was going to be Adolph Hitler’s personal secretary and how many other young German ladies would have wanted this job.  Those impressions must have been so etched into her memories that her first recollection of those events was to say “Thank God.”  But looking back over a lifetime of having been marked as Hitler’s secretary she had gradually learned to respond to her triumphant sense of accomplishment with a subdued addition of “or unfortunately.”  She now knew a kindly old gentleman, but she did not know this gentleman in his sordid entirety.  It would take years for her to see the hidden person she perhaps never desired to see.  It would then require decades of struggle before gaining a sense of how she was to regard herself for not allowing herself to see him as he surely was all along.  She expresses to us a sad but profoundly human story.

 

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[i] Quoted from the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary

[ii] Ibid.

Dialogue with the Movie "Downfall" - Part 3 - History, Justice, and a Surprise Appearance

Dialogue with the Movie “Downfall”

Part Three:  History and Justice and a Surprise Appearance

Written by Dan McDonald

 

Image of Mel Brooks’ satirical version of history

History of the World, Part I (1981) 

            In our previous blog we considered how the vastness of the subject of history requires us to transform the subject of history into stories.  As we shift to a different focus in this blog it might be well to consider how we human beings are connected to the history of humanity.  I think this connection is etched into the fabric of our beings.  Think of what the genetic sciences are teaching us in our day.  Each of our genetic codes is distinctly personal and directs the formation of every cell in each of our human bodies.  Yet our genetic codes also reflect the whole history of the biological journey that has taken place within our ancestry.  Biologically we are connected to an ancient human past.  All that history is mysteriously inscribed into our genetic composition, yet we come into this world as special and unique new unrepeatable individual members of that humanity to which we are connected.  There is not an extreme divergence between who we are bodily and spiritually.  For physically we are connected to the whole history of humanity and yet are individuals, and spiritually we are individuals with our own perceptions and personalities who yearn to connect to humanity and even if with hurting damaged souls we yearn for connectedness.  I have been thinking much about this, especially as I watched this video of the thrilling event of life taking shape in a mother’s womb.  Watching the video, I envisioned two distinct lines of humanity merging together from the millennia preceding our human era and realized that in each of us as individuals the human journey from the time of the ancients to this day and onward to the gathering of the entire redeemed human race in that Great Day is being chronicled in our human bodies and genetic codes.

            In our present blog we move from considering the vastness of history and the nearness of the story of history to consider how invariably when we look at history we contemplate such things as good and evil, right and wrong, and issues we moderns describe as “social justice.”  Have you ever noticed how we do that when we consider history?  As an American sometimes I might look with joy and pride at our westward movement as men and women worked so diligently to create thriving farms, small communities, public schools, churches across a continent, libraries, and varied networks to aid the poor.  But as I would swell up with pride I see that not everything about that story was good, right, or correctly spelled out “social justice.”  The westward movement included conquest and forced removal of the Native Americans already on this continent.  We tricked, lied to, betrayed, slaughtered, and even used blankets carrying the germs of death to push them out of our way as we Americanized a continent.  Much of our early national wealth resulted from a system of slavery that enslaved millions of people based on skin color.  There arose an America with a privileged class and an underclass.  Many of us who began looking back at our American history with pride came eventually to hang our heads in shame.  In this I feel deeply connected with the Germans who created the movie “Downfall”.  I know they had to feel such pain and sadness as they portrayed a dark hour in German history.  It was not just the darkness of a national defeat, but the darkness that from that moment onwards when a German sat down at the table of humanity there was this in his national past; not really so much different than the sort of things I bring to the table as an American.  I suspect that it was painful for the actors and actresses and the makers of this film to portray the men and women of a time which brings Germans to feel shame in their national history.

            We look back at history hoping to find justice but we so often find injustice.  But it seems to me that if a disciple who had heard Jesus teach him about life were in our midst he might point to a field and say “Look over there.  Do you see the wheat?  Do you see the tares?  What do you see in this world?  Do you see wheat or tares, or wheat and tares?  What do you see in the churches?  Are you ashamed that you see wheat and tares in the church as well?  Now what do you see when you look into your soul?  Do you see wheat and tares there also?”  This disciple I imagine standing among us disappears as quickly as he appeared.  I am broken-hearted and yet comforted.  Was there no one who was good?  I looked upon history in search of the good and found where I saw those who wished to do good that they too did evil.  But because I was beginning to realize that I was not separate from my ancestors but connected to them, what I saw in them more easily enabled me to look upon myself and see that I too have wished to do good and have so often become an expression of evil.

“Lady Justice” blind without prejudice

We look for her presence in the past to guide us into the future.

            I think of Lady Justice, how she is pictured standing so firm, so tall, so erect and unbowed by the corruption around her.  But she was a goddess from long ago, a myth of a hope that one day we would learn how to implement justice.  I know that those who thought of her and maybe those who worshipped her had a concept derived from a living God that made them dream of goodness, righteousness, equity, fairness, justice for one and for all.  I have never seen a person in my life quite like her.  I have seen only men and women who have been broken by sorrows, by stabs from unkind words, by being pushed down by bullies, or made hard by becoming bullies.  So I never find someone standing so tall, so completely erect, or so careful to hold those scales so flawlessly so she never judges unfairly, presumptively, or without prejudice.  I find only those who walk with shoulders drooping and their back slouched forward at least slightly, whose scales are tilted towards the side where they looked out for themselves before preferring another.

I could imagine a woman bearing many of Lady Justice’s features but not at all identical.  She would not be wearing a blindfold.  Instead of a blindfold she would be wearing a flower in her hair with a shaft of wheat entangled in the flower on one side and a tare progressing from the other side.  She would not be as stern as Lady Justice, who to be honest I still love with admiring affection.  But this woman would have a slight smile and especially a kind glimmer in her eyes.  I would be almost startled by her presence as she would pass me.  She would probably not speak a word as we passed by one another.  I would, however, feel better for having seen her smile and that wondrous glimmer in her eyes.  It would take me a moment to realize that I knew who this woman was.  She was that middle one of the three sisters.  They were known for how they traveled the world to encourage people in their dark days.  This had to be her.  Yes it was I was sure of it.  It was Hope, sister of Faith and Charity.  I turned to see if she had gone.  Perhaps I was mistaken.  I turned expecting her to be gone, but was hoping to steal one last look at her.  She was standing looking at me if you can believe it!  She smiled a smile of kindness it seemed, nodded her head, turned and then went on her way.

I thought about all those tares.  Then I looked up to the heavens and said “I guess my wheat field will always have a lot of tares.  I guess when in the future someone looks at my fields and my life they’ll have reason to get indignant and ashamed.  I guess that is so.  Still is there something you might have me to do that is good, right, and promotes a bit of social justice on this earth?”  I sort of kept adding words, because I never know when to just honor him with my silence, and thinking of all those people that made “Downfall” I added “and would you make sure Hope makes her way to the Germans too and oh yes to all those who got hurt by the Germans and by us Americans."  By this time I realized I was just rambling and thought of one thing that I should of said that I hadn't said, “O’ and by the way thanks for sending Hope my way.”