On Tuesday while we got all packed and ready to go, we had a little fun with the camera. Our room in Iceland had the most delightfully large keyholes and I thought I would try to shoot through them. Fortunately, Anna has the most delightfully direct eyes and work perfectly for shooting through keyholes!
Then we tried our hand at what at the time I did not know was called “horsemaning” -- posing two people so it looks like one headless person holding a head in his or her hands. Great fun. Hours of entertainment.
We had a just a little while before we had to catch the bus back to the airport, so we walked up to Hallgrímskirkja to get a look at the interior (stopping at a cute little playground we discovered.)
I know it is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I really do enjoy Samúelsson’s expressionist take on the cathedral interior. I don’t know what I would think if I had to worship there on a regular basis. (You could even argue that this approach to the interior of a church bends towards the gnostic and iconoclastic.) However, there is also something that fits the culture of the church to the culture of Iceland that it inhabits -- everything from elves to the dependence upon twilight time to the ethereal music of Icelandic bands. (See more in Reflection One below.)
We had one last leisurely stroll through the Laugavegur district, stopping for photos, public art, shopping, and lunch. One particular piece of public art was a take on the elf-house, I think, but with small figurines of various materials and styles, ranging from crude clay sculpture to porcelain.
We also wandered into one of those many bookstores I mentioned -- a delightful chaos of piled up intellectual detritus with seemingly random articles and paraphernalia hanging on every wall. Looking through books in this store was like beachcombing after a storm on the Pacific coast. This was everything a used book store should be. (See more in Reflection Two below.)
One final blessed discovery was a store full of Moomin memorabilia. I have no idea how the Moomin books by Finnish author Tove Jansson somehow came into my late childhood life, but they had a substantive impact upon my imagination when I read them in those years when I was neither still a child nor yet grown up -- Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden, Snufkin’s wanderings, Moominpappa’s who-knew exploits, the indomitable Little My, melancholy Toft.
In Europe and even Asia the Moomins are a cultural phenomenon (somewhat to the detriment of the books themselves, I’m afraid.) But when I mention the Moomins to other people in the United States it is rare to find anyone who knows what I am talking about.
Yet here are some of the reviews:
- We need Moominland for its gentle pace, its sense of beauty and awe, and its spirit of friendliness and empathy--now more than ever. (The Horn Book)
- A surrealist masterpiece. (Neil Gaiman)
- Tove Jansson is undoubtedly one of the greatest children's writers there has ever been. She has the extraordinary gift of writing books that are very clearly for children, but can also be enjoyed when the child, like me, is over sixty and can still find new pleasures with the insights that come from adulthood. (Sir Terry Pratchett)
- The most original works for children to be published since the Pooh books, and possibly, since Alice. (Saturday Review)
- You will declare yourself a citizen of Moominvalley and call the stories your own--the Moomin world is that compelling. (Riverbank Review)
If you have a 4th or 5th grader run don’t walk to your local independent bookseller and demand a copy.
But at long last, after a very nice lunch, it was time to catch the shuttle back to the Keflavík International Airport and board the plane for the flight back to the United States of America.
Iceland is such a genuinely enchanting place, that I spent some of my time on the plane ride back reading a little book I picked up to avoid overly romanticizing Iceland (Alda Sigmundsdóttir’s delightful The Little Book of Icelanders: 50 miniature essays on the quirks and foibles of the Icelandic people). I also took advantage of Iceland Air’s excellent entertainment system to listen to some additional Icelandic music. The top two discoveries were Kammerkórinn Carmina’s recordings of the Hymnodia Sacra and the band Árstíðir.
At this point, I do not remember landing.
Day 27 Reflection One -- On Church Architecture and the Surrounding Culture
The tension over church architecture is a microcosm of all tension between church and culture.
What is the appropriate marriage between Christian faith and forms and the many cultures into which it has, as its Lord, become incarnate? And what responsibility does the church architecture bear to clothe that marriage the garment wood, stone and glass?
It is easy to have a knee jerk reaction to modern or postmodern church buildings like Hallgrímskirkja, the Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church in Osaka, the Jubilee Church in Rome, Mexico’s Parroquia San Josemaría Escrivá or Minnesota’s own St. John’s Abbey Church. These buildings are jarringly not the familiar, easily understood architecture we recognize as ‘Christian.’
However, it’s important to remember that the architecture we do understand as familiarly Christian was adopted from a purely Roman civic design -- the Basilica.
It is also worth noting that what many of us consider the epitome of Christian architecture, the Gothic style, gets its very name from a term of derision and possibly derives some of its key features from Islamic art.
When Christ has come into contact with a culture through the evangelization of that culture by his people, there has almost always been a Christian reinterpretation of the existing art, philosophy and even religious practices within that culture. This is known as Interpretatio Christiana and was articulated famously in a short letter from Gregory I to the British Abbot Mellitus in the earth 7th century in which he advises Mellitus, among other things, not to destroy the pagan temples, but to remove their idols:
“For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they we converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.”
In this post-Christian, secular age, something different is going on, no doubt. But what we need now is not an insistence upon our own previously established forms. The architecture of our buildings, just like our philosophy, poetry, and music must be in dialogue with the culture in which we live and to which we bring the gospel if we are to be a genuinely evangelical people. Though we no longer face pagan cultures utterly unfamiliar with the basic narrative of the gospel, we do face a culture that needs the same kind of “reinterpretive grace” that Gregory proposes.
On the other hand, there is always a legitimate concern that our openness and willingness to reinterpret pre-Christian or post-Christian forms will lead us to adopt things that are not of Christ and that are incompatible with our intentions.
So the tension will remain. May it remain a healthy tension!
Day 27 Reflection Two -- On Independent Bookstores
Yes, I do buy books from Amazon.com. And I do shop at both Barnes and Noble and Half Price Books -- massive chain stores providing a market-driven approach to bookselling, book buying and therefore to the intellectual life. I recognize that we live in an age of convenience, and I don’t quite have the will to resist. But there is nothing quite like browsing for hours in an independent bookstore whose identity is shaped not by huge market forces but by the idiosyncrasies, whims and casual neglect of its owners and operators. It is the incarnation of the life of the mind not the dictates of the invisible hand that one encounters in a great independent bookstore.
When a Barnes and Noble closes in my neighborhood, I react with annoyance at the impending inconvenience. But when a great old bookstore closes (as too many have) it is a personal loss.
It reminded me of the great “bookstores I have know” in my life.
- The Book Bin in Corvallis
- Yesterday’s Books in Modesto
- Powell’s Books in Portland
- Midway Books in St. Paul
- Loome Theological Booksellers in Stillwater, MN (though I miss the distinctive experience of the old church building, which was not heated in the winter and in which you could see your breath as you went about looking for books)
I also love happening across bookstores while travelling -- little independent sellers in tourist towns sitting next to antique stores or taffy shops with pulling machines in the front window. These are all places where I have made discoveries that lie impossibly outside of any contemporary “market.”
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