Day 27 - Tuesday Travel from Reykjavík to Minneapolis - Reykjavík and Hallgrímskirkja

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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Day 26 Monday in Reykjavík - Harpa, the Harbor, Landakotskirkja, Elliðaárdalur

Our last full day in Europe! (If, that is, you include Iceland in Europe -- which is really a challenging thing to do once you’ve been there.)

Our last day was very low-key and leisurely.

We started off by enjoying the interior of the Harpa, another controversial architectural wonder of Iceland. In this case, the controversy was largely around the cost of the concert hall given the economic crisis that hit Iceland in 2008-2011.

Apart from its timing, I can’t imagine this having been controversial in Iceland, however. Like the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Harpa is a public space that is centered around the performing arts. A coffee shop and spacious interior provide a place for tourists, readers and casual visitors all day long. It seems perfect for Iceland.

From the Harpa we walked down to the main harbor of Reykjavík, which revealed another side of Iceland altogether. Icelandic fisheries compose over a quarter of Iceland’s GDP. It was great to get a little glimpse of the blue-collar industry there in the harbor.

The next visit of the day was to Landakotskirkja, formerly Christ the King Cathedral -- the only Roman Catholic church in Iceland. When I first encountered Hallgrímskirkja, I assumed that it was a distinctively Northern Protestant aesthetic I was encountering -- with a particularly modernist flavor. But here was a Roman Catholic cathedral predating Hallgrímskirkja by approximately fifty years that looked cut from the same stone!

I would later learn that Landakotskirkja and Hallgrímskirkja were in fact designed by the same architect -- Guðjón Samúelsson, one of the state architects of Iceland. But one way or the other, whatever aesthetic was acceptable to those who commissioned Hallgrímskirkja was also previously acceptable for the small number of Roman Catholics in Iceland.

The last major site we visited in Iceland was described as a hidden gem of Reykjavík -- Elliðaárdalur park. This was one of the purely leisurely portions of the trip, strolling through an urban reserve with wildflowers, trees, and the salmon filled pools of the Ellidaár river.

The kids ran on ahead and hid in various places, waiting for us to walk by without seeing them. We paused at a large pool. Enjoyed some familiar and some unfamiliar flora.

The river seemed to be at a low or moderate flow, but nonetheless we happened upon a fisherman at one of the pools who caught a salmon on a fly. I seriously considered getting a license. Dietrich found a recently dead salmon (maybe a fishing kill) and when he held it up with a club in his hand to make a joke drew more attention than we were hoping for.

We took the bus back to the motel, and Jen and I went strolling in downtown Reykjavík for one last European evening.

Day 26 Reflection

You could argue that going to a park like Elliðaárdalur is a waste of one’s precious time in a foreign land.

After all, in one sense, this is an experience that can be replicated in any major urban area that has maintained even some dim connection to the living world beneath and before it. I experience something like Elliðaárdalur every time I make the hike from Minnehaha Falls to the Mississippi River. I have experienced this in a slightly different way in places as diverse as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and San Antonio. There is nothing genuinely unique about Elliðaárdalur.

But it is not the idiosyncratic alone that one goes in search of when one travels. It is also the universal -- the familiar smell of the city receding, flowers uncontained by neat garden walls, the Icelandic fisherman’s joy in his catch so like my joy, a joy even deeper than the catch.

As Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It:

“I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”

Perhaps I should save anything more for a final reflection upon Europe.

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Day 25 - Sunday in Reykjavík - Hallgrímskirkja, Hellisgerði, Hólavallagarður (with allusions to Gullfoss and Geysir)

I woke up early Sunday morning and walked around the town -- our hotel was just to the east of the main part of Reykjavík on Rauðarárstígur. (Doesn’t that just make you want to learn Icelandic?)

First a note of delight -- discovering that the thorn (þ) and eth (ð) remain as characters in the alphabet! (They also have the ash (æ) which isn’t quite as interesting, because it’s also in Latin.)

When I teach Beowulf to students I introduce them to a little bit about genuine Old English and talk about the thorn and the eth -- which roughly equate to our two different ways of pronouncing “th” -- as we do in ‘with’ (unvoiced) and as we do in ‘then’ (voiced). The ‘th’ in ‘with’ is roughly equivalent to the thorn (þ) and the ‘th’ in ‘then’ roughly equivalent to the eth (ð). See the sign below for their presence in the icelandic language:

One surprising discovery of being out at at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning was that there were still people up from the night before!

Partly because of their extreme relationship to the sun, to light and darkness, and to summer and winter, Reykjavík night life does not begin to heat up until around 11:30 p.m. So at 6:00 a.m. the streets were quiet but not yet empty of revelers. Most people had gone home, but there were still a few quiet clusters of people drinking beer and smoking as the sun came up on the city -- much as you might find some people still sitting on a park bench at 2:30 or 3:00 am in a major European or American city after others had called it a night.

Wandering around, I noticed that Reykjavík is filled with street art and public art -- so much so that the two seem to blend into one another. It’s difficult to tell what might be commissioned and what has just been added to the common life of the city without, so to speak, permission.

This morning ramble was also the first time I walked up to the Hallgrímskirkja -- the somewhat controversial church that dominates any view of Reykjavík. It’s an amazing piece of modernist-expressionist architecture with it’s overall gray, minimal landscaping and stunning carven door. I didn’t have a chance to go in that morning, but did come back later to check out the interior.

I also discovered that there are a number of wonderful bookstores in Iceland, both new and used. The bookstores in Iceland are everything you would want them to be -- legitimate places to hang out and think, jumbles of ideas old and new. 

Here was one sign I really liked:

After I got back to the hotel from wandering, we split up for the day, as we had done several times on this European jaunt.

Gramps, Grams, Dietrich and Anna went by bus to the spectacular Gullfoss and Geysir -- both features of the Continental Rift. I don’t have any pictures of my own, but the ones I saw made me half regret that I hadn’t made the trip! Here are a couple of pictures from the internet:

Gullfoss

Geysir

Meanwhile, Jen, Emily, Nora, Charis and I took a much shorter bus ride to Hellisgerði park in Hafnarfjordur -- home of the Elf Garden!

In order to get a sense for the Elf Garden, you have to understand that somewhere around half of the Icelanders do actually believe in elves, or the Huldufólk (“hidden people”). For reasons I don’t entirely understand and that are apparently somewhat sensitive with respect to “outsiders,” so many icelanders believe in elves that it is an issue when new construction threatens traditional elf dwellings.

The Elf Garden in Hafnarfjordur is full of volcanic rocks covered in green mosses and grasses, sparse Icelandic trees, and semi-groomed paths. It was easy to see how, if you believe in hidden people (of which more later), this is where they would live.

After walking around the Elf Garden we spent a little more time in Hafnarfjordur -- got coffee in a coffeeshop, walked around the shops and towns. Some of the pictures included in the slideshow are of the local architecture.

We took the bus back to Reykjavík, got an ice cream, and walked back towards the motel.

On our way, we discovered the Hólavallagarður cemetery -- probably one of the most naturally beautiful and powerful cemeteries I have been in, comparable to the great cemeteries of New Orleans.

We first encountered it as as what seemed to be a walled garden, with occasional gates that seemed closed, but eventually found our way in.

Each plot in the cemetery really has a distinct sense of it’s own space, with a boundary, often a tree, and some very unique headstones or standing stones. The layout is labyrinthine and idiosyncratic. It would be easy to get lost. I thought of how much my mother would probably have enjoyed it.

Like the cemeteries in New Orleans, the place really does feel like a city of the dead. Only here at Hólavallagarður, it is more like a partially kept-up ghost town where the trees and other flora are given free reign. There’s a connection between this approach to cemeteries and the belief in elves. I’m almost certain. The two sites felt absolutely akin to one another.

In fact, there is an Icelandic legend that the first person buried in a cemetery does not rot, but becomes the guardian of the cemetery. In this case, that is Guðrún Oddsdóttir.

If we would have stayed longer in Iceland, I would have certainly spent more time photographing this spot.

One interesting sidenote from this excursion, we discovered the self-cleaning public toilet. The ones in Iceland are not much larger than a portable outhouse here, but when you exit, the door closes and it does some sort of legitimate wet cleaning cycle!

Really a great idea.

Public toilets are so gross in the United States.

Day 25 Reflection One

I really appreciated the sense that Icelanders have for the place of art in their civic life.

In spirit, it reminded me a little bit of some of the “artsy” corners of American and European cities I’ve been in (Lowertown St. Paul, Uptown Minneapolis, the Southbank of London) but on a much more all pervasive scale -- as if the “arts” were not a corner of the civic life, or a destination, but essential to the fabric of civic life. This was one of the more impressive aspects of Iceland.

The same could be said of the bookstore and fashion cultures of Iceland. They are not segregated into subcultures or corners of the city, but are simply a part of a widely shared way of life.

Of course, all of these are in part made possible by Iceland’s intensely cautious immigration policies and consequent homogeneity.

Day 25 Reflection Two

It’s time I confess.

I too believe in elves.

But before you write me off entirely as a nutcase, hear me out.

As an orthodox Christian, I do not, in fact, cannot buy into the disenchantment of the world.

Max Webber wrote in “Science as a Vocation:”

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”

It is no longer considered credible or respectable to believe in supernatural causes -- or at least not to talk about them publicly. We have entered, in Charles Taylor’s language, a “secular age.”

But I think that orthodox Christians have responsibility to reject the thinking of a thoroughly secular age and to embrace, to a significant extent, a pre-Enlightenment openness to causes and realities that cannot be proven or demonstrated scientifically, accepting along with this the consequence of being thought “unenlightened” by secular peers.

Let me illustrate.

As an orthodox Christian, I believe in “angels.”

In the Jewish scriptures, these beings went by several names including mal'āk̠ 'ĕlōhîm (messenger of God), mal'āk̠ YHWH (messenger of the Lord), bənē 'ĕlōhîm (sons of God), haqqôd̠əšîm (the holy ones), ’ir (watcher) and hā'elyônîm (the upper ones).

I believe these beings are possessed of personality, will and power.

I believe they can have a range of actual effects in the natural world.

I believe they can appear as to human beings in a sensible form.

I also believe that some angels, like some humans, turned away from God. They became what we call ‘demons’ or ‘false gods.’

I believe these fallen angels have all the same metaphysical qualities of the angels, but have lost their status as messengers of God.

I believe that they too have personality, will and power, can affect the natural world, and can appear to human beings in a sensible form.

I also believe that these demons desire to possess or inhabit this world rather than be cast out of it. The story of Jesus casting the demons into pigs (Matthew 8:28-34) is noteworthy.

I believe they are capable of masquerading successfully as benevolent.

I also believe that they, mixed in with man-made superstition, are the true origin of pagan gods.

Taking this all together, it is absolutely no stretch at all for me to think  that among these beings I believe in as an orthodox Biblically informed Christian are some that would be encountered as the Icelandic Huldufólk.

Metaphysically, I can see absolutely no distinction between the Huldufolk (or other European versions of the elves) and what I would call lesser demons, mixed with some local superstition regarding their habits and behavior.

So there you have it.

I believe in Elves.

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