Surviving War and Terror: Sister Hildegard

Sister Hildegard in her apartment

On my second day in Dresden, I met Sister Hildegard.  She is 84 and has lived in Dresden all of her long life.  During that life her world has changed dramatically again and again.

She was born in 1937, one of four children of German parents. Her father was a member of the Nazi party. Her mother had left the Church so there was no religion in her early life.  The war began in 1939 when Hildegard was two and soon her father left to serve in the army.  At the beginning of 1943 her father was reported "missing presumed dead" in the Battle of Stalingrad.  

Also in 1943, Allied bombing of Germany began in earnest.  Hildegard and her siblings went to the country for school.  In February 1945 the beautiful city of Dresden was smashed and burned in consecutive nights of Royal Air Force fire bombing raids.  

The war ended in May of 1945, with more trouble ahead.  Dresden was in the Soviet occupation zone so the communist East German government was in charge.  When Hildegard turned 14 years old in 1953 she had to find a job. She could not continue her education. The problem was not that her father was a Nazi, it was that her parents were educated. Preference for education under the communists went to the children of workers. 

Hildegard found work at a Catholic hospital in Dresden. At first she cleaned bricks to help in rebuilding the hospital which was nearly completely destroyed in the fire bombing of 1945.  She eventually trained as a nurse and decided to become a sister in the order of nuns that work in the hospital.  Her mother returned to faith in 1947 and would become part of the Land of Kanaan sisterhood in Darmstadt.  

Until 1961, Hildegard and her family could cross back and forth between East and West Germany with little difficulty.  But the Berlin Crisis in 1961 led to a fully closed border.  Hildegard was in Dresden. Her mother was in Darmstadt and it would be many years before they were reunited.  

With the communists in full control, Hildegard took charge of the OB GYN section of the hospital from 1967 to 1997.  She worked under increasingly harsh control by the communists then suddenly in 1990 they were gone.  One of the things that made life bearable under the communists was everyone in her community and in other faith communities were clear that the danger was the communists. The communists had spies everywhere.  As devout Catholics the nuns were always under suspicion.

But believers were all united in opposition to the communists.  When communism fell, the freedom that followed led to competition and the end of opposition to a single enemy and the unity that went with it.

Sisters who had lived through the Nazi era said life then was very different. During that time, some of the sisters were devoted Nazis and some were ardently against the Nazis.  The challenge was to keep the community together when the worst strife was within.  Hildegard said after the war, the sisters who were devoted Nazis either repented or left the order.  The purge was rapid. 

My friend Cliff and I visited Sister Hildegard in her room in the hospital residential area for nuns and women in long-term care.  She speaks no English. I speak no German. Cliff and Hildegard talked and every ten minutes of so, Cliff would give me a summary of what he learned. I asked questions in these intervals. 

Cliff (Bruder Timotheus) and Sister Hildegard

Part of her story was in a speech she gave in 2015 explaining the many radical changes she lived through.  She and Cliff reviewed the speech which was written in neat handwriting while I watched and wished I had learned German.  She does not have a computer or a phone--except the phone with a wire on her desk. 

Sister Hildegard has retired from nursing but still a leader in her community. We ate lunch in the hospital cafeteria and sat at her table.  As the guest, I got to sit in her chair and eat some very good goulash and mashed potatoes.  On the walk to and from the cafeteria she greeted everyone we met with a smile.  She is in every way a gracious host.

Fun with Five Euro Notes

 

This morning we visited the Terezin concentration camp.  We parked in the designated lot.  When it was time to leave, the automatic parking exit would only accept Czech Koruna--no Euros, no credit card.  

Beside the parking lot was a vendor selling drinks and ice cream.  I asked her about changing Euros.  She looked a little sad. So I said "Zwei eis und kleingeld in koruna." She smiled at that. Probably as much at my bad German as with not having to be a money changer.  I got 45 koruna in change. The parking cost 30 koruna ($1.50) so Cliff and I were on our way with paid parking and ice cream cones.

Late in the afternoon we got burgers in a burger restaurant in Old City Dresden.  The woman who waited on us was a very happy person.  We made a couple of jokes with her.  When we were ready to leave she came to the table and said, "You would like to pay?"  

I said, "We would like to pay. In fact we would love to pay you."  She laughed out loud. I then said I hoped she would be rich and famous, make millions of Euros and become the most successful restaurant owner in the world. She and Cliff were both laughing. American exaggeration sounds very strange in Dresden.  

Cliff asked if my drink was really alcohol free. She said they had put vodka in my drink. 

She gave us the change. I gave her back a five-Euro note and said it was the start of her first million. 

   

Christian Nationalism in Fort Worth, Texas, Calls Itself Mercy Culture, Preaches Hate and Division. Church of Trump Worship.

From the  Washington Post

An American Kingdom

A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP

 

FORT WORTH — The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants. Greed, the map read over the west side. 

Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south. 

It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.” 

Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four “high-ranking demonic forces.” That all of America was in the grip of “an anti-Christ spirit.” That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the “Year of the Supernatural,” a time when believers would rise up and wage “spiritual warfare” to advance God’s Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing. 

It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown — a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country. “Say, ‘Cleanse me,’ ” the pastor continued as drums began pounding and the people repeated his words. “Say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servants are listening.’ ” 

The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party. It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. 

Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country. 

 This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God. 

 Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. 

Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. 

They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity. None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades. 

 What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of NAR-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas. 

 That is where the pastor wearing the bright-red T-shirt, Landon Schott, had been on the third day of a 40-day fast when he said the Lord told him something he found especially interesting. It was 2017, and he was walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth asking God to make him a “spiritual father” of the city when he heard God say no. What he needed was “spiritual authority,” he remembered God telling him, and the way to get that was to seek the blessing of a pastor named Robert Morris, an evangelical adviser to Trump, and the founder of one of the largest church networks in the nation, called Gateway, with nine branches and weekly attendance in the tens of thousands, including some of the wealthiest businessmen in Texas. 

 Morris blessed him. Not long after that, a bank blessed him with the funds to purchase an aging church called Calvary Cathedral International, a polygonal structure with a tall white steeple visible from Interstate 35. Soon, the old red carpet was being ripped up. The old wooden pews were being hauled out. The cross on the stage was removed, and in came a huge screen, black and white paint, speakers, lights and modern chandeliers as the new church called Mercy Culture was born. “Mercy” for undeserved grace. “Culture” for the world they wanted to create.  That world is most visible on Sundays, beginning at sunrise, when the worship team arrives to set up for services. 

 In the lobby, they place straw baskets filled with earplugs. In the sanctuary, they put boxes of tissues at the end of each row of chairs. On the stage one recent Sunday, the band was doing its usual run-through — two guitar players, a bass player, a keyboardist and two singers, one of whom was saying through her mic to the earpiece of the drummer: “When we start, I want you to wait to build it — then I want you to do those drum rolls as we’re building it.” He nodded, and as they went over song transitions, the rest of the worship team filtered in for the pre-service prayer. 

 The sound technician prayed over the board controlling stacks of D&B Audiotechnik professional speakers. The lighting technician asked the Lord to guide the 24 professional-grade spotlights with colors named “good green” and “good red.” Pacing up and down the aisles were the ushers, the parking attendants, the security guards, the greeters, the camera operators, the dancers, the intercessors, all of them praying, whispering, speaking in tongues, inviting into the room what they believed to be the Holy Spirit — not in any metaphorical sense, and not in some vague sense of oneness with an incomprehensible universe. 

Theirs was the spirit of a knowable Christian God, a tangible force they believed could be drawn in through the brown roof, through the cement walls, along the gray-carpeted hallways and in through the double doors of the sanctuary where they could literally breathe it into their bodies. Some people spoke of tasting it. Others said they felt it — a sensation of warm hands pressing, or of knowing that someone has entered the room even when your eyes are closed. Others claimed to see it — golden auras or gold dust or feathers of angels drifting down. 

 That was the intent of all this, and now the first 1,500 people of the day seeking out those feelings began arriving, pulling in past fluttering white flags stamped with a small black cross over a black “MC,” in through an entrance where the words “Fear Go” were painted in huge block letters above doors that had remained open for much of the pandemic. Inside, the church smelled like fresh coffee. “Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said to people who could tell stories of how what happened to them here had delivered them from drug addiction, alcoholism, psychological traumas, PTSD, depression, infidelities, or what the pastor told them was the “sexual confusion” of being gay, queer or transgender. 

They lingered awhile in a communal area, sipping coffee on modern leather couches, taking selfies in front of a wall with a pink neon “Mercy” sign, or browsing a narrow selection of books about demonic spirits. On a wall, a large clock counted down the final five minutes as they headed into the windowless sanctuary. Inside, the lights were dim, and the walls were bare. No paintings of parables. No stained glass, crosses, or images of Jesus. Nothing but the stage and the enormous, glowing screen where another clock was spinning down the last seconds as cymbals began playing, and people began standing and lifting their arms because they knew what was about to happen. Cameras 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were in position. The live stream was on standby. In the front row, the 85-year-old retired pastor of the church this used to be secured his earplugs. 

 What happened next was 40 nonstop minutes of swelling, blasting, drum-pounding music at times so loud that chairs and walls seemed to vibrate. The huge screen became a video of swirling clouds, then a black galaxy of spinning stars. The spotlights went from blue to amber to gold to white. A camera slid back and forth on a dolly. Fog spilled onto the stage. Modern dancers raced around waving shiny flags. 

One song melded into the next, rising and falling and rising again into extended, mantralike choruses about surrender while people in the congregation began kneeling and bowing. A few rows back, the pastor stood with one hand raised and the other holding a coffee cup. And when the last song faded, a worship team member walked onstage to explain what was happening in case anyone was new. “The Holy Spirit is in this room,” he said. Now everyone sat down and watched the glowing screen. 

Another video began playing — this one futuristic, techno music over flash-cut images of a nuclear blast, a spinning planet, advancing soldiers, and when it was over, the pastor was standing on the stage to deliver his sermon, the essence of which was repeated in these kinds of churches all over the nation: America is in the midst of a great battle between the forces of God and Satan, and the forces of Satan roughly resemble the liberal, progressive agenda. Beware of the “seductive, political, demonic, power-hungry spirit that uses witchcraft to control God’s people.” Beware of “freedom that is actually just rebellion against God.” Beware of confusion. 

Beware of “rogue leaders.” Beware of a world that “preaches toleration of things God does not tolerate,” and on it went for a full hour, a man with a microphone in a spotlight, pacing, sweating, whispering about evil forces until he cued the band and gave instructions for eternal salvation. “Just say, ‘Holy Spirit, would you teach me how to choose to obey you,’ ” he said, asking people to close their eyes, or kneel, or bow, and as the drums began pounding again, the reaction was the same as it was every Sunday. 

 People closed their eyes. They knelt. They bowed. They believed, and as they did, people with cameras roamed the congregation capturing peak moments for videos that would be posted to the church’s website and social media accounts: a man with tattooed arms crying; a whole row of people on their knees bowing; a blond woman in a flower-print dress lying all the way down on the floor, forehead to carpet. When it was over, people streamed outside, squinting into the bright Fort Worth morning as the next 1,500 people pulled in past the fluttering white flags. “Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said again. 

By late afternoon Sunday, the parking lot was empty and the rest of the work of kingdom-building could begin. One day, this meant a meeting of the Distinct Business Ministry, whose goal was “raising up an army of influential leaders” across Fort Worth. Another day, it meant the church hosting a meeting of a group called the Freedom Shield Foundation, a dozen or so men huddled over laptops organizing what one participant described as clandestine “operations” around Fort Worth to rescue people they said were victims of sex trafficking. This was a core issue for the church. 

Members were raising money to build housing for alleged victims. There were always prayer nights for the cause, including one where church members laid hands on Fort Worth’s sheriff, who sat with a Bible in his lap and said that the problem was “the demonic battle of our lifetime” and told those gathered that “you are the warriors in that battle.” Another day, it meant the steady stream of cars inching toward the church food bank, one team loading boxes into trunks and another fanning out along the idling line offering prayers. A man in a dented green sedan requested one for his clogged arteries. A man trying to feed a family of seven asked in Spanish, “Please, just bless my life.” 

 A stone-faced woman said her mother had died of covid, then her sister, and now a volunteer reached inside and touched her shoulder: “Jesus, wrap your arms around Jasmine,” she said, and when she moved on to others who tried to politely decline, the volunteer, a young woman, gave them personal messages she said she had received from the Lord. “God wants to tell you that you’re so beautiful,” she said into one window. “I feel God is saying that you’ve done a good job for your family,” she said into another. “I feel God is saying, if anything, He is proud of you,” she said in Spanish to a woman gripping the steering wheel, her elderly mother in the passenger seat. 

“When God sees you, He is so pleased, He is so proud,” she continued as the woman stared straight ahead. “I feel you are carrying so much regret, maybe? And pain?” she persisted, and now the woman began nodding. “And I think God wants to release you from the past. Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my shame.’ Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my regret,’ ” the volunteer said, and the woman repeated the words. “ ‘You know I tried my best, Jesus. I receive your acceptance. I receive your love,’ ” the volunteer continued, and now the woman was crying, and the food was being loaded into the back seat, and a volunteer was taking her name, saying, “Welcome to the family.” 

 Another day, the Kingdom looked like rows of white tents where a woman in a white dress was playing a harp as more than a thousand mostly young women were arriving for something called Marked Women’s Night. “I feel the Lord is going to be implanting something in us tonight,” a 27-year-old named Autumn said to her friend, their silver eye shadow glowing in the setting sun. “Every time I come here the Lord always speaks to me,” her friend said. “Yeah, that happens to me all the time, too,” said Autumn, who described how the Lord had told her to move from Ohio to Texas, and then to attend Gateway Church, and then to enroll in a Gateway-approved school called Lifestyle Christianity University, where she said the Lord sent a stranger to pay her tuition. 

Not long after that, the Lord sent her into an Aldi supermarket, where she met a woman who told her about Mercy Culture, which is how she ended up sitting here on the grass on a summer evening, believing that the Lord was preparing her to go to Montana to “prophesy over the land” in anticipation of a revival. “I don’t understand it; I just know it’s God,” Autumn said. “So many miracles,” said her friend, and soon the drums were pounding. 

 They joined the crowd heading inside for another thunderous concert followed by a sermon by the pastor’s wife, during which she referred to the women as “vessels” and described “the Kingdom of Heaven growing and taking authority over our nation.” Another day — Election Day in Fort Worth — hundreds of church members gathered at a downtown event space to find out whether their very own church elder, Steve Penate, would become the next mayor, and the sense in the room was that of a miracle unfolding. “Supernatural,” said Penate, a first-time candidate, looking at the crowd of volunteers who’d knocked on thousands of doors around the city. 

 A candidate for the 2022 governor’s race stopped by. A wealthy businessman who helped lead the Republican National Hispanic Assembly drove over from Dallas. The pastor came by to declare that “this is the beginning of a righteous movement.” “We are not just going after the mayorship — we’re going after every seat,” he said as the first batch of votes came in showing Penate in sixth place out of 10 candidates, and then fifth place, and then fourth, which was where he stayed as the last votes came in and he huddled with his campaign team to pray. “Jesus, you just put a dent in the kingdom of darkness,” his campaign adviser said. “We stand up to the darkness. We stand up to the establishment. 

God, this is only the beginning.” Another day, 100 or so young people crowded into a church conference room singing, “God, I’ll go anywhere; God, I’ll do anything,” hands raised, eyes closed, kneeling, bowing, crying, hugging. At the front of the room, a man with blond hair and a beard was talking about love. “Everyone says they have the definition for what love is, but the Bible says, ‘By this we know love,’ ” he said. “Jesus laid down his life for us, and we are to lay down our lives for others.” 

 He dimmed the lights and continued in this vein for another hour, the music playing, the young people rocking back and forth mouthing, “Jesus, Jesus,” trancelike, until the blond man said, “It’s about that time.” He turned the lights back on and soon, he sent them out on missions into the four demonic quadrants of Fort Worth. 

 One group headed east into Competition, a swath of the city that included the mirrored skyscrapers of downtown and struggling neighborhoods such as one called Stop 6, where the young people had claimed two salvations in a park the day before. Another team headed west toward the green lawns and sprawling mansions of Greed. Another rolled south toward Lust, where it was normal these days to see rainbow flags on bungalow porches and cafe windows including the one where a barista named Ryan Winters was behind the counter, eyeing the door. 

 It wasn’t the evangelicals he was worried about but the young customers who came in and were sometimes vulnerable. “Maybe someone is struggling with their identity,” Ryan said. He was not struggling. He was 27, a lapsed Methodist who counted himself lucky that he had never heard the voice of a God that would deem him unholy for being who he was, the pansexual lead singer of a psychedelic punk band called Alice Void. 

 “I never had a time when I was uncomfortable or ashamed of myself,” he said. “We all take care of each other, right, Tom?” “Oh, yeah,” said a man with long gray hair, Tom Brunen, a Baptist turned Buddhist artist who was 62 and had witnessed the transformation of the neighborhood from a dangerous, castoff district that was a refuge for people he called “misfits” into a place that represented what much of America was becoming: more accepting, more inclined to see churches in terms of the people they had forsaken. 

 “It’s all mythology and fear and guilt that keeps the plutocracy and the greed in line above everybody else,” Tom said. “That’s what the universe showed me. If you want to call it God, fine. The creative force, whatever. Jesus tried to teach people that it’s all one thing. He tried and got killed for it. Christianity killed Jesus. The end. That’s my testimony.” 

 That was what the kingdom-builders were up against, and in the late afternoon, Nick Davenport, 24, braced himself as he arrived at his demonic battlefield, Rebellion, a noisy, crowded tourist zone of bars, souvenir shops and cobblestone streets in the north part of the city. He began walking around, searching out faces. “The sheep will know the shepherd’s voice,” he repeated to himself to calm his nerves. “Hey, Jesus loves y’all,” he said tentatively to a blond woman walking by. “He does, he does,” the woman said, and he pressed on. “Is anything bothering you?” he said to a man holding a shopping bag. “No, I’m good,” the man said, and Nick continued down the sidewalk. 

 It was hot, and he passed bars and restaurants and gusts of sour-smelling air. A cacophony of music drifted out of open doors. A jacked-up truck roared by. He moved on through the crowds, scanning the faces of people sitting at some outdoor tables. He zeroed in on a man eating a burger, a red scar visible at the top of his chest. “Do you talk to God?” Nick asked him. “Every day — I died twice,” the man said, explaining he had survived a car accident. 

 “What happened when you died?” Nick asked. “Didn’t see any white lights,” the man said. “Nothing.” “Well, Jesus loves you,” Nick said, and kept walking until he felt God pulling him toward a young man in plaid shorts standing outside a bar. He seemed to be alone. He was drinking a beer, his eyes red. “Hi, I’m Nick, and I wanted to know, how are you doing?” “Kind of you to ask,” the man said. “My uncle killed himself yesterday.” 

 “Oh,” said Nick, pausing for a moment. “I’m sorry. You know, God is close to the brokenhearted. I know it doesn’t feel like it all the time.” He began telling him his own story of a troubled home life and a childhood of bullying, and how he had been close to suicide himself when he was 18 years old, and how, on a whim, he went with a friend to a massive Christian youth conference in Nashville of the sort that is increasingly common these days. 

A worship band called Planet Shakers was playing, he said, and deep into one of their songs, he heard what he believed to be the voice of God for the first time. “The singer said if you’re struggling, let it go, and I halfheartedly said, ‘Okay, God, I guess I give it to you,’ and all of the sudden I felt shaky. I fell to the ground. I felt like a hand on my chest. Like, ‘I have you.’ I heard God say, ‘I love you. I made you for a purpose.’ When I heard that, I bawled like a baby. That was when I knew what I was created for. For Jesus.” The man with red eyes listened. “Thanks for saying that,” he said, and Nick continued walking the sidewalks into the early evening, his confidence bolstered, feeling more certain than ever that he would soon be leaving his roofing job to do something else for the Lord, something big. 

He had been preparing, absorbing the lessons of a church that taught him his cause was righteous, and that in the great spiritual battle for America, the time was coming when he might be called upon to face the ultimate test. “If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples,” said Nick. “John the Baptist was beheaded. One or two were boiled alive. Peter, I believe he was crucified upside down. If it goes that way? I’m ready. If people want to stone me, shoot me, cut my fingers off — it doesn’t matter what you do to me. We will give anything for the gospel. We are open. We are ready.” 

Ready for what, though, is the lingering question. Those inside the movement have heard all the criticisms. That their churches are cults that prey on human frailties. That what their churches are preaching about LGTBQ people is a lie that is costing lives in the form of suicides. That the language of spiritual warfare, demonic forces, good and evil is creating exactly the sort of radical worldview that could turn politics into holy war. That the U.S. Constitution does not allow laws privileging a religion. That America does not exist to advance some Christian Kingdom of God or to usher in the second coming of Jesus. To which Penate, the former mayoral candidate, said, “There’s a big misconception when it comes to separation of church and state. It never meant that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics. It’s just loving the city. Being engaged. 

Our children are in public schools. Our cars are on public streets. The reality is that people who don’t align with the church have hijacked everything. If I ever get elected, my only allegiance will be to the Lord.” Or as a member of Mercy Culture who campaigned for Penate said: “Can you imagine if every church took a more active role in society? If teachers were preachers? If church took a more active role in health? In business? If every church took ownership over their communities? There would be no homeless. No widows. No orphans. It would look like a society that has a value system. A Christian value system.” 

 That was the American Kingdom they were working to advance, and as another Sunday arrived, thousands of believers streamed past the fluttering white flags and into the sanctuary to bathe in the Holy Spirit for the righteous battles and glories to come. The drums began pounding. The screen began spinning. The band began blasting, and when it was time, the pastor stood on the stage to introduce a topic he knew was controversial, and to deliver a very specific word. He leaned in. “Submission,” he said. “We’ve been taught obedience to man instead of obedience to God,” he continued. “God makes an army out of people who will learn to submit themselves,” he continued. “When you submit, God fights for you,” he concluded. He cued the band. 

The drums began to pound again, and he told people to “breathe in the presence of God,” and they breathed. He told them to close their eyes, and they closed their eyes. He gave them words to repeat, and the people repeated them. “I declare beautiful, supernatural submission,” they said. 

 By Stephanie McCrummen Stephanie McCrummen is a national enterprise reporter covering an array of subjects for The Washington Post. Previously, she was the paper's East Africa bureau chief based in Nairobi. She has also reported from Egypt, Iraq and Mexico, among other places. She joined The Post as a Metro reporter in 2004. Twitter

Christian Nationalism and the Church at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

 

A Church built onto a guard tower at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

When I visit concentration camps, along with learning about the horror, I pay attention to how the survivors, both victims and those who live nearby, deal with the evil happened in their midst.  

At Flossenburg, one response was to build a memorial chapel just two years after the end of the war in 1947. The stone building of the chapel is attached to a former guard tower.  The chapel honors the victims from 22 countries who were murdered in the camp.  Its design stands against every form of Christian Nationalism--the arrogant and hateful belief that God picks specific nations to be His representative here on earth.  

Christian Nationalism has been the justification for slaughter in the name of God since the Church melded with the government after the fall of the Roman Empire.  I recently read Karl Jaspers "Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus." Jaspers makes clear that Jesus pointed to the Kingdom of God and had no program for any kind of kingdom here on earth.  In the Gospels, there is nothing to support taking any kind of political power in the name of God.  A vegan butcher is less of a contradiction than conquest in the name of Jesus. 

The Beatitudes, or the Sermon on the Mount, one of the central documents of Christianity, says God is with the victims in this world.  "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." That is not the marching orders for "Christian" army to slaughter its neighbors.

But Christian Nationalism has fully infected the Evangelical Church in America.  In 2016 nearly 80% of Evangelicals voted for the "America First" immigrant-hating candidate who expressed their beliefs.  The percentage went up in 2020.  Four years of lies and hate made the Christian Nationalist candidate more attractive. White supremacists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka just made fake Christians more excited.   

So in the midst of all the sadness of the remains of the Flossenburg concentration camp, I was glad to see a flat rejection of Christian Nationalism and all of the simmering hate behind it.  

No one can love the whole world. Abstract love is not love at all. The commandment of God to love our neighbor whether in the Hebrew Scriptures of the New Testament can only be brought into being by loving those with us and near us.  

The Holocaust, among its many horrors is a record of people who ignored, betrayed and murdered their Jewish neighbor.  From the Pyrenees to the Ural mountains, the Jew next door was beaten, robbed and dragged away in the night to be murdered. 

Every form of Christian Nationalism is wrong and hateful. Flag waving America First Evangelicals make the Jesus they claim to worship into a symbol of hate.  

Meeting an American Author in a Paris Bookstore

 

Author, professor Nita Wiggins at 

The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore opposite Jardin Luxembourg in Paris.   

My first full day in Paris, I walked to Jardin Luxembourg to visit The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore.  I have visited the store several times since 2018 when Penelope bought the store and moved it to this lovely location near the Pantheon and the Sorbonne.  

Penelope, owner of The Red Wheelbarrow

When I arrived at the store it was not open. A woman was waiting outside and said the store would open soon in English that was very American.  Penelope arrived a few minutes later.  While we waited outside the store, Nita Wiggins and I began talking about The Red Wheelbarrow and the beautiful day in Paris.

As we talked I learned that Nita is a professor. She teaches journalism in Paris at l’Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Paris. she moved to Paris in 2009 to teach journalism and has lived here ever since.  

Before moving to Paris, she was a sports reporter for all of the major US networks. Her book: 

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism

was published in March 2019.  It is the story of her career as a sports reporter and all of the difficulties she faced in the very-white-male-dominated world of sports reporting.   

Nita and I talked about living in Paris, loving Paris, journalism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and how badly American journalism failed in predicting the rise of Trump and the cult he created.  I am looking forward to reading the book on the plane back to America.  

For more about the book and the author, her web page is here.

Talking to Amtrak Conductor About Late-Life Enlistment, Loving the Cold War Army

 

Many Amtrak conductors and other rail workers are veterans. Over the past quarter century of commuting to Philadelphia on Amtrak, I got to know many veterans. The most recent is a conductor named Darrell I have only got to know in the past year. I still go to Philadelphia every week. 

Darrell is a conductor on the 9:33am train. That train always runs to Philadelphia with the engine in the back of the train and the cab car up front. Until recently, Darrell’s crew did not let passengers use the cab car, leaving it for crew with nearly empty trains. But Darrell let me ride in the cab car knowing I was a long-time rider. A couple of weeks ago, Darrell and I talked about being in the Army. 

He asked me about my backpack, surprised I would have gear from a recent war. I told him I deployed to Iraq in 2009-10. We got into a long conversation about how I got back in and deployed at 56 years old. Darrell served four years from 1988-92. He served in Germany for right at the end of the Cold War and during the Gulf War sending supplies to Kuwait and Iraq. He said it was the best four years of his life. Then we talked about friends from Cold War service. 

I told him I was going to Europe to visit my roommate from the late 70s in Cold War Germany. Darrell is meeting some of his friends from the Army later this summer. Darrell said he got out, had kids and didn’t think he could ever go back in. He is more than a decade younger than I am and was thinking if I could do it, he could have.

The Army returned the enlistment age to the traditional 35 years in 2009, so the window has closed on older soldiers returning to service.  

Now Darrell and I are two old soldiers riding the train who can say with the crew of "Fury" that being a soldiers was "The best job I ever had."

Who Fights Our War? Veteran of the Tet Offensive in 1968 Working Security at Kennedy Airport

The Tet Offensive in 1968 was the beginning 

of the end of the War in Vietnam

This afternoon I checked in for a flight to Paris on IcelandAir.  Checking in for boarding took a while because of COVID documents, but once I had a boarding pass, there was almost no line for security.

When I approached the screening area, I told the guy at the metal detector that I would need the alternative screening.  I said,"I have metal here, here and here" pointing to my neck, left knee and left elbow.  James, the TSA screener, said "Go ahead and try anyway." I did. The alarm sounded and I waited for the technician to check me. After I put my arms over my head in the plexiglass booth, James came over to do the pat down. The technician was a woman and could not do the hands-on check. 

When James walked over I held my arms out straight to my sides.  He said, "You don't need to do that, you're not an airplane."

'And you are a native New Yorker,' I thought.  

Then he said, "You got metal all over the place, was it shrapnel from a war?" 

"As a matter of fact, in 1973......"

"No way," he said. "You were in 'Nam? I was there during the Tet Offensive. '68. Radio man." 

"I managed to get blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion in America," I said.  "Live fire test."

"That sucks," he said. "No Purple Heart, right?"

"Right?" I said.  Then I told him about my fingers hanging off and getting re-attached.  With professional curiosity and gloved hands, he checked the first fingers on my right hand.

He then told me about his communications site being surrounded, then the North Vietnamese went around his bunker and moved on. "I was sure I was dead," James said.  

We fist bumped then waved as he went back to the check-in line.  

I have talked to many TSA agents who were Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. I don't remember a lot of Vietnam War veterans.  Certainly not recently.  But it was fun to talk with him.  

My Summer Vacation: More Concentration Camps

Arbeit macht frei the ironic and terrible sign at the gate 

of Auschwitz and other Nazi Concentration Camps

Next week I am flying to Germany to join my best friend Cliff on a thousand-mile tour of Nazi Concentration Camps.  We have visited other concentration camps together in 2017, 2019 and 2020:  Buchenwald, Dachau, and the first concentration camp opened in the state of Hesse in February1933.

We also visited Nuremberg in 2020, the site of the rallies that were central to Hitler's power. 

In July we will visit Flossenburg, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt.   We chose these because Cliff had never been Auschwitz, I had never been to Flossenberg and neither of us have been to Theresienstadt. 

Auschwitz is the largest and worst of  the camps. A million Jews died Auschwitz, but by the time the camp was in operation, three million Jews had already been murdered. They were shot by tens of thousands of German soldiers, German police, and by police and volunteers in conquered countries.   

Flossenburg is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred by the Nazis just before the war ended. One of the worst Trump toadies wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer in 2011.  Eric Metaxas could write about a martyr and then praise Trump.  

Thereseienstadt in the Czech Republic was the "show camp" for the Nazis early in the war. It was a place they took the Red Cross to show them the camps were not as bad as the rumors. It was also the camp where Jews who were confessing Christians were sent.  Churches in Germany stood aside and let their members who had any Jewish heritage be murdered.  

Bruder Timotheus and Kanaan 

Cliff was Sergeant Cliff Almes in the1970s in Cold War Germany where we were roommates.  After leaving the U.S. military he became Bruder Timotheus at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt. Kanaan was founded in 1947 by two women who believed Germany must repent for the Holocaust.

Before 2017, I had never been to a Holocaust museum or memorial or a concentration camp.  But when a racist President put the head breitbart.com in the White House, I knew I had to get connected to my genetic heritage.  Steve Bannon gave white supremacists and neo-Nazis a place to promote hate on breitbart.com  

In August 2017, Nazis were "fine people" according to the President and I needed to learn more about the hateful people who are his base of support.  

Germany was a civilized, if impoverished, country in 1932. By 1945, the country was bombed, invaded and defeated. The Nazis killed millions of innocent people and left their own country a smoldering ruin.  America was the leading democracy in the world in 2016, we are now slowly sinking into tyranny while Republicans cheer. 

I am going to concentration camps to see just how bad it can get if a tyrant rips away American democracy.  

The Three Little Pigs in French--the original gruesome version

 

Last night I read the original version of "The Three Little Pigs" in French. Children's books used to be so much more gruesome.

In this version the pigs who built their houses of straw and sticks ended up in the wolf's baking dish with an apple in their mouths.

The last pig tricked the wolf three times and made him so angry he jumped down the pig's chimney into a cauldron of boiling water.

The pig had boiled wolf for dinner!

That gave me paws (a telling tail).

Since the story is in French, it sounds lovely. I read aloud to enjoy the sound. Here is the exchange when the wolf arrives at each of the houses:

--Petit cochon, petit cochon, laisse-moi entrer.

--Non, non, par la barbiche de mon petit menton.

--Alors je soufflerai, et je gronderai, et j'ecraserai ta maison.

My Daughter's First Book -- Amelia's Journey to Find Family

 

Lauren Auster-Gussman, my oldest daughter, 

with her book Amelia's Journey to Find Family

If I were asked to name one thing that defines the life of my oldest daughter, I would say, "Lauren loves dogs!"

We got our family's first dog when Lauren was eight years old. The German Shepherd named Lucky was the whole family's dog, but Lauren really loved that dog.  Except for when she lived in college dorms, Lauren has had dogs ever since.  She currently has two rescue dogs named Guinness and Watson, but she wrote her first book about a dog named Amelia.  

Amelia and her book

Lauren adopted Amelia last year and kept her alive and as healthy as possible until she passed away last month on May 20, National Rescue Dog Day at the age of approximately 12-14.  The book is a story told by Amelia about finding her last and final family.  If you would like to get the book for a child in your life (or yourself), order here.

Lauren volunteers for Lu's Labs, a Labrador Retriever Rescue organization.  Lauren fostered thirty rescued labs over the past five years before deciding to keep Amelia.  

Over the past year, Amelia posted daily on the Lu's Labs site as well as her and her brother's instagram page. These posts detailed her transition to Lauren's home, old lady ailments, the difficulties of training the humans and attempting to understand their behavior, and about finding the simple joys and things to be grateful for in each day.  These posts had hundreds of followers. 

In her passing, Amelia received over a thousand messages from people telling her how her posts inspired them, taught them about love and gratitude, helped them through difficult times in their lives, the uncertainty of COVID, and how reading her daily posts became part of their morning coffee routine or part of family dinner each night. These messages also had another common and incredible theme, so many people spoke of the incredible love they had for dog they'd never met. 

Lauren is currently posting on Facebook at Team Wag Forever.

On Instagram:  Amelia Writes Books and Guiness Watson and Friends.

Lauren shared with me many of the hundreds of comments she received.  I was really moved by the comment from her soccer coach at Juniata College, Scott McKenzie.  I only went on one college visit with Lauren and that was the college she picked. I remember little of the visit except the first moment of meeting coach McKenzie.  

Lauren and I walked into McKenzie's office. He was sitting at the desk looking at some papers, looked at Lauren then bolted straight up out of his chair, hands raised like he was in Church and said, "Praise the Lord. A five-foot ten goalkeeper wants to play for my team."  

Lauren played every season, but missed a lot of her senior season after an open fracture of her finger in a pre-season game.  

Here is Coach McKenzie's response to Amelia's passing.  Lauren's nickname on the team was "Goose."  

A good friend of mine lost one of her dogs this morning. Not just any friend and not just any dog!  Goose (my friend) competed for me while a student-athlete at Juniata College. Goose was a terrific goalkeeper for our women’s soccer team. She’s an even better human being who has dedicated her professional life to caring for others. It makes sense, then, that this tendency towards care would carry over to her personal life in the dedication she shows to her family and her pets. Goose volunteers for an organization called Lu’s Labs, which connects available dogs with their forever families. 

In Amelia’s case, the cards were stacked against this wonderful chocolate lab. Elderly dogs and dogs with compromised health are tough to place. In steps Goose (about a year ago) and becomes Amelia’s foster and then forever Mom. Goose and her husband welcomed Amelia into their family of two other labs and they became a family of five. 

Goose and Amelia wrote a children’s book together about finding a home and being loved. I can’t wait to get my “pawtographed” copy. 

Goose gave Amelia a voice and many of us have followed their wonderful journey together. 

This morning, that journey ended as Amelia earned her wings and will be waiting for her families at the Rainbow Bridge. 

Before she left, Amelia asked for a favor from all of us. She asked us to consider an elderly or ill dog if/when you adopt. She proved, over the past year, that they can give love and laughs with the time they have left. I believe this to be true. 

So, please learn more about adoption. Visit Lu’s Labs online. Consider Amelia’s book as a good read for you or a friend. 

Most importantly, open your heart to the possibility of the great amount of love that remains in our dogs, no matter what their age. 

Amelia, I never met you but my eyes were filled with tears of heartbreak when I learned of your passing. 

Good dog Amelia. Good dog. 

Goose - you’re an amazing person and I thank you for allowing many of us to join you in loving that good dog.

"He's Got No Damn Common Sense" said Sergeants of Soldiers, But It's True of All of Us

By the time Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1775, 

the idea of common sense was already disappearing. 

"He's got no damn common sense," is a lament I heard all through my Cold War military career in the 1970s and 80s.  Frustrated sergeants, including me, lamented dealing with soldiers who knew nothing about wrenches or lieutenants who got lost on every field exercise.  

In Germany in 1977, I got a new replacement crewman named Brian. Every new tank crewman starts as a driver, which presumes some mechanical ability.  Brian had never owned a car and never used wrenches before joining my crew.  He became a legend (in the worst way) when I had to show him how to use an open-end wrench in a tight space.  

The head of an open-end wrench is slightly offset. You turn turn a bolt a few degrees, turn the wrench over and turn a few more.  It's slow, but you can remove or tighten a bolt in a tight or covered space by flipping the wrench.  This process mystified Brian.  He got it eventually, but his fellow crew members made merciless fun of him for not knowing how an open-end wrench worked.  

Knowing or catching on quickly to this kind of process is referred to as having common sense.  At the time, I was sure Brian lacked common sense.  

But in her most important philosophical book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt says that by the time Brian was accused of lacking common sense, the whole culture had lost what was common sense across the world.  

Arendt says that the rise of modern science, beginning with Galileo's invention of the telescope, showed we could no longer trust our senses.  

Common Sense took the experience of our five senses and gave them a unified frame of interpretation.  But Galileo showed us that what our senses can be completely wrong even when we simply look at the night sky.  In her book Being Wrong Kathryn Schulz explains how thoroughly wrong we can be when all of our senses tell us we are right. 

"Step outside...in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars.  Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of the tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in the spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary--stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you. 

"It is, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonia porch is misleading.  The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say, we ourselves are not the center of the cosmos. Not only are these things wrong, they are canonically wrong. They are to the intellect what the Titanic is to the ego: a permanent puncture wound, a reminder of the sheer scope at which we can err. What is strange, and not a little disconcerting, is that we can commit such fundamental mistakes by simply stepping outside and looking up."

Arendt says that when we cannot trust the most obvious perception of our sense, we eventually lose the common sense that still is valued in its absence a half millennia later. If physics on a cosmic scale says we are wrong when we perceive the sun circling east to west every day, it's worse at the atomic level.  Who can really believe an oak table is as much empty space as the night sky.  The solid hardwood of every oak plank at the atomic level protons, neutrons and electrons and a whole bunch of nothing. And those atoms are strung together held by charge with mostly empty space in every direction.  

Poor Brian could blame every physicist from Galileo Gallilei to Albert Einstein to Richard Feynman to Roger Penrose for proving that nothing that his senses experience is as it appears. 

The Cold War sergeants' lament that "none of my soldiers has a lick of common sense" was more true than he knew.  The sad thing is, that old sergeant did not have much common sense in the traditional sense either. 

Resiliency Training Looks So Different in 2021 Compared to 2015

 

Howard Lloyd, me and Mike Pavasco

Two of the people I talked with at the welcome home for the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade were Howard Lloyd and Mike Pavasco. Lloyd was the commander of the brigade during the deployment. Mike was one of the sergeants who kept the brigade network in operation.  

Both were in the unit when I left five years ago.  Colonel Lloyd was the executive officer of the brigade.  Pavasco kept the network in operation.

In 2014 or 2015, Mike Pavasco was also in charge of resiliency training for the company we were in. He is a very upbeat guy.  He asked me to be one of the presenters for the training.  I turned him down.  I had no other choice at the time, I did not believe the training would do any good.

I left the Army the following year in 2016.  When I met up with Mike at the party, it occurred to me I could not only be one of the resiliency training sergeants now, I really have come to believe in the program.

It's almost crazy to think how far I have come in changing my view of meditation, yoga and balance in life. In 2014 I had just finished an Ironman Triathlon and was an advocate for an out-of-balance life focused on athletic goals.

While I was training for the Ironman, when I had an injury and a physical therapist said, "Listen to your body" I would think, 'My body is a whiny little bitch. I'm not listening.'

Now when a PT says "Listen to your body" I listen to her and do (or not) what my body says.

 The pandemic interrupted my yoga practice, when I returned last month I injured my knee--the one that is still me, not metal.  But I have meditated every day for more than three years--even days of injury and surgery and recovery.  

Resiliency also involves spiritual practice. The path to peace for most of us is spiritual, even for those who have no religious practice.  

Along with adding meditation and yoga to my life, I had a huge spiritual upheaval in my life that led to peace.  The winner of the 2016 Presidential election turned my spiritual world upside down.  Christians across America first supported and then worshipped a man who bragged about breaking commandments, who is the inverse of the Beatitudes.  Conservative Catholics and Evangelicals decided a vain liar was their man. They even made up stories about how he was a modern-day King Cyrus.

Every white supremacist, militia member and Nazi wannabe in America celebrated. Steve Bannon--the head of the white nationalist website Breitbart--got an office in the White House.  The following summer I visited Auschwitz and Yad Vashem and came home to Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us."

I joined a synagogue a few months later.  During World War II, 400 million self-described Christians lived between the Pyrenees and Ural mountains. About one in a thousand helped Jews, 999 of a thousand looked the other way or joined in the looting, dispossession and murder of the Holocaust.  Nazis were now "fine people" in America.  

I thought things would get much worse than they have.  But whatever happens, I have peace knowing the Synagogue is the place I should be.

Resiliency training makes sense to me now.  It touches every dimension of life and can really help in a difficult world.