Vicki and I found two seats among the group. It was a warm crowd, members of a Methodist congregation from somewhere in the deep South, just a peach short of the Georgia line.
A Bad Kohlgrub arrival
We did but we didn't do Oberammergau
Steeple climb
The awful happened.
Work on the Köln (Cologne) Cathedral sputtered and stalled. After 300 years of labor, this “structure of hope” outpaced its resources. It was unfinished, unfunded, and unroofed in places. The 25-meter wooden Domkran was idle atop of the South Steeple, an arm with no muscle. To make matters worse, the archives (read: building plans) were lost to French revolutionaries in 1794. The vision of a grand cathedral, conceived in the middle of the 13th century, was all but lost.
Structures of hope
Josephus knew about it and them
For those who are curious about the landscape of the biblical world, the Rhine River may seem to be a stretch, a reach, a foul ball. The Rhine (Grk Ρήνος, Lat Rhenus) is an unlikely entry in a Bible dictionary or atlas. It is unrecognized in the biblical text. And yet, this waterway and those who peopled its banks were known in the New Testament world, more by reputation than experience.
This is us/them
I sat with Moriah and Peter in a 160-year-old restaurant in Köln known as Brauerei zur Malzmühle. While we chewed crispy pork knuckle, grilled pork belly, and raw minced pork (do you smell a theme here?), a local family settled into a stained wooden table adjacent to ours. Somehow we stood out as foreigners and became a subject of their whispered conversation.
Go with the Flow
We walked the asphalt trail. The earth smelled wet and looked smudgy. The sky was indecisive. In one moment the rain dropped and veered, its trajectory altered by gusts of wind. A moment later, the muslin drapes of the sky were pulled back and sunlight shot through. It ricocheted off the wet sheen and illuminated the droplets clinging to leafless branches of the trees (that undoubtedly provided marvelous colors or welcome shade along the riverbank in other seasons of the year). These droplets transformed into diamonds for an instant, then the drapes curled and closed. The dance was over as suddenly as it started.
