The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life

Wanted: A Chief Distributor of Black Bread

 By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

Martin Luther called the Gospel Schwarzbrot, meaning black bread, which he considered the most nourishing fare. Luther’s metaphor is magnificent in that it addresses the nutritional value of this spiritual kind of bread. It’s called Heilsgewissheit, or certainty of salvation. It frees the believer to roll up his sleeves and manage the challenges of secular life in the left-hand kingdom, as we Lutherans say.

I cannot think of any period in history when this message has been more pertinent than now. This world is in a frightening state: terror, wars, nuclear threats, the impending bankruptcy of entire nations, the ongoing genocide of unborn life, a spiraling collective ignorance, the breakdown of the family, one natural calamity after another, manmade disasters of unprecedented dimensions. Only a fool can feel safe in this situation where we have become witnesses of an “ecstasy of power and madness... [and] have seen a poisonous atmosphere envelop our globe,” as the late German theologian Helmut Thielicke observed in his powerful sermon on the Lord’s Prayer toward the end of World War II. Thielicke spoke of evil as a very real force “brooding over the world, its continents and seas.”

It takes good, healthy Lutheran theology to address this reality; it takes, more specifically, a confessional theology that has not been reduced to a museum piece. I am talking about “black bread” theology here, not mega church numbers games of the kind I am observing close to my new home in Orange County, California. Nor do we need the lethal theologies of “false clerics and schismatic spirits,” as Luther phrased it, a term I find particularly descriptive of the contemporary worldview that edits one or the other element out of Luther’s definition of the Christian as simul iustus et peccator (at the same time justified and sinner).

Theology without reference to sin amounts to a “Satanic attack upon the Church,” to quote a famous remark by Nigerian archbishop Peter Akinola about the sexualization of parts of Western Anglicanism and related post-Christian heresies. Theology without reference to justification, such as we hear in the sermons devoid of the Gospel preached to auditoriums filled with thousands of hand-waving enthusiasts is equally dangerous, and huge numbers don’t make it right.

 

We cry out for the “black bread” of the Gospel that never goes stale and provides the certainty we cannot find in “the world,” where we nonetheless dwell. This is the Lutheran moment. This is the moment when the true nutritious Gospel must urgently be posited against the multitude of absurd homemade gospels bombarding us from all directions. This is the moment when we must tell our fellow Christians how to worship once again in a manner based on Scripture as opposed to the trivial gobbledygook springing from the imagination of liturgists holding themselves in higher esteem than God’s word.

This is the moment that calls for a powerfully eloquent theologian-cum-pastor at the helm of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and this is why in my capacities as a simple Lutheran layman and as a writer on religious affairs I am endorsing the candidacy of Rev. Matthew Harrison for LCMS president. May he be elected chief distributor of black bread at this church body’s convention on July 14-19 in Houston.

 

 

The Warmest Sound in Angel City

 

How Helga Kasimoff kept the Blüthner pianoforte legend alive in America through tumultuous times

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the April 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)

One hundred years ago, Julius Blüthner, founder of one of the world’s most celebrated piano factories, died in Leipzig, Germany. Composers Brahms, Débussy, Ravel and Andrew Lloyd Webber bought Blüthner Grands. In the company’s recent history, German-born Helga Kasimoff played a captivating role. She made sure that the legendary “golden tone” on its instruments would still to reach America even though they were manufactured beyond the Iron Curtain.

In her showroom on North Larchmont Boulevard in Los Angeles, Blüthner dealer Helga Kasimoff caresses the most valuable grand piano on exhibit. “I can’t play it,” says Mrs. Kasimoff, a native of Hanover, Germany. “I am dyslectic to the point that I can’t even coordinate my hands.” So this morning two of her three sons, Serge and Kyril, take turns in eliciting the distinct Blüthner sound from this spectacular instrument built in 1860 on the orders of King Johann of Saxony (1801-1873).

This sound is quite unlike the tone of any of Blüthner’s eminent competitors Steinway, Bechstein or Bösendorfer.  It is full and dark. Some music aficionados claim that it is emblematic of Leipzig, where the “Julius Blüthner Pianofortefabrik” has been building keyboard instruments since 1853.  This “warm Leipzig sound” has also long been considered the mark of the Gewandhaus orchestra, the world’s oldest municipal symphony.

A mother and her little boy enter the Mrs. Kasimoff’s shop and wander from grand to grand and upright to upright. “He is only 18 months old but already besotted by pianos,” the mother explains, bringing a big smile to Helga Kasimoff’s face. This little incident provides a marvelous counterpoint to the story of how King Johann’s piano had come into her possession.

The tale begins in England. Mrs. Kasimoff suspects that Johann had commissioned this Blüthner as a gift for the Court of St. James where his relative, Queen Victoria, reigned. It eventually wound up in the store of a London art dealer who sold it to a Los Angeles interior decorator.

“This lady felt that the instrument was too big for her house; it didn’t leave enough space for a large plant,” says Mrs. Kasimoff. “So she offered it to me, asking me if I could replace it with something similar, just a trifle shorter.” Thinking about this request for a less space-absorbing substitute for a masterpiece makes Helga Kasimoff chuckle softly. Still, she took it in and sent it to the Leipzig factory for restoration. “This cost me more than $25,000, plus the freight charges,” she says, estimating this instrument is currently worth $275,000.

 Los Angeles suffers no shortage of originals, but Helga Kasimoff, née Otto, must rank among the most remarkable. Living in a funky one-storey house behind her store, she is the proud owner of a kumquat and a lemon tree, a rusty 1962 “Metro International” truck bearing the name “Blüthner” on its sides, of an ancient VW bus, and a light green 1975 diesel-powered Mercedes sedan, plus 15 Blüthner grands and seven uprights.

 How did she get there? How did she, who lived through the relentless allied bombardments of Hanover where her parents owned a harmonium, become the premier North American specialist on one of the world’s grandest piano brands? Her company, Kasimoff-Blüthner Piano Co., sells them new for 32,000-$140,000; it loans its own instruments to illustrious clients, including the Mexican government; it tunes and appraises Blüthners and advises their owners on their restoration.

 Helga Otto was a religion teacher and occasional English-language interpreter when she arrived in Chicago in 1952 to audit courses on American church history at a Lutheran seminary. Still traumatized by the memory of the air raids, she had become a passionate pacifist. So it was at a rally of Christian pacifists in California that she met William Petrovich Kasimoff, a clarinet player and piano tuner.

 The son of Russian immigrants, Kasimoff had spent World War II in U.S. internment camp for refusing to serve in the military; his family belonged to the “Molokans”  (milk drinkers), an antiwar sect that had split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century. Helga and William married, and the couple lived at first in Pasadena.

 Then came the day when William Kasimoff worked on a Blüthner grand and fell in love with its sound. “One day I will own one of those,” he told his wife. Given the political circumstances, that was a tricky dream because Blüthners were made in Leipzig, on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

 There were of course some older Blüthners in America, but much fewer than Steinways made by a New York-based company founded by a German immigrant. Still, Blüthners had enjoyed fame in the United States not least because a Blüthner had been the first piano to be played in the air. In 1936, a specially built light-weight grand was used for the first piano concert in the air on board the airship Hindenburg; this performance was broadcast live to 63 radio stations around the world.

 This was when Hitler was already in power in Berlin – Hitler whom Rudolf Blüthner-Haessler, a grandson by adoption of the company’s founder and now its head, had defied in his own inimical way. “Knowing that many Jews fleeing Nazi-ruled Germany owned Blüthner Grands, he offered to have their instruments properly packaged in zinc casings and transported to port at his company’s expense,” relates Helga Kasimoff. “As far as I know between 75 an 100 Jewish-owned Blüthners were shipped out of Germany; many of these came to America.”

 World War II and its aftermath were a particularly harsh time for Blüthner-Haessler. An air raid in 1943 wiped out his entire production facility. He managed to rebuild it while bombs were still dropping on Leipzig and while this town was being occupied by the Soviet Union, a nation with legendary musical institutions such as the conservatories of Moscow and Leningrad. Blüthner equipped them with his pianos.

 Blüthner-Haessler did not live to see the day when the Communist government of East Germany expropriated his company in 1972, though leaving his son Ingbert in charge of production. But nine years earlier he had received an elegantly crafted letter in German from Helga Kasimoff asking him if she and her husband could become Blüthner’s dealers in America.

 This led to an extraordinary friendship across the Iron Curtain. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, Blüthner-Haessler sent the Kasimoffs a moving letter of condolences. In the midst of the Cold War William, Helga, Serge, Kyril and Vanya Kasimoff went in their Volkswagen camper to see the Blüthners in Leipzig.

 It wasn’t easy to sell Blüthners in North America where Steinway was a fierce competitor on the top end of the piano market. “Because Blüthner was located in East Germany, the U.S. government levied a 40 percent customs duty on its products, instead of the 5 percent it charged for West German goods,” according to Mrs. Kasimoff.  “So how did you manage?” she was asked. “We had no choice but to absorb the extra cost; we couldn’t pass it on the customers,” she answered.

 Still, of the 300 Blüthners the Kasimoffs imported to the United States, some 200 came in East German days. One, an enormous instrument measuring seven and a half feet were to the historic King Ranch in Texas. Star performers, both classical and pop, helped to uphold the Blüthner fame. The Beatles used one in their recording “Let it be.” Soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and baritone Hermann Prey insisted in their contracts for every North American tour that they be accompanied on a Blüthner. And when 13 Jewish cantors meet once a year in Temple Sinai in Los Angeles, they request a Blüthner from Helga Kasimoff’s shop.

 After Germany’s reunification, Blüthner became once again a family-owned company. Helga Kasimoff, a widow since 1997, is advancing in years. But she is still very much in charge of her business of upholding the Blüthner name on shady North Larchmont Boulevard. “It will survive me,” she insists. “All three of my sons are capable of handling it.” Two of them are by her side much of the time: Kyril, who helps her run the store and Serge, a renowned jazz pianist specializing in the Cuban beat, who spends his nights reading philosophy. And then there is Vanya, the youngest, a college professor of English. “But he too,” says Helga Kasimoff with a satisfied smile, “knows how to tune a Blüthner and assess its value.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Uniforms – and Dignity

How an East German conscript became an all-German major

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

(From the March 2010issue of The Atlantic Times)

One of the most remarkable accomplishments of Germany’s reunification 20 years ago was the bloodless dissolution of the East German military, the second largest in the Warsaw Pact. Its 25,000 draftees became part of the “Bundeswehr,” the federal armed forces. They received not only new uniforms but also the kind of dignified treatment they had not known before.

Recently, an uncommon military ceremony took place in a classroom of “Georgia Southern University” at Statesboro, Ga. In front of fellow faculty members and cadets of the school’s ROTC battalion stood Prof. Michael Reksulak in German army fatigues. He was flanked by his Taiwan-born wife Hsiao-Ting Su and a German Luftwaffe general who pinned the insignia of a major to the professor’s epaulettes, one silver pip with two oak leaves.

Brig. Gen. Gero L.K. Schachthöfer had flown to Georgia from Reston, Va., headquarters of the German Armed Forces Command in the United States and Canada; Schachthöfer controls some 1,500 troops stationed at 84 North American locations. Prof. Michael Reksulak teaches economics at Georgia Southern where he also serves on the ROTC’s advisory board.

What made this event so extraordinary was this detail: In 1990, Reksulak was drafted into the East German “National People’s Army” (NVA). While he was still a “grunt,” the two Germanys became one. Reksulak stayed on as a conscript, but in the light grey uniform of the Bundeswehr, the former West German and now all-German military.

His national service over, Reksulak remained in the Bundeswehr as a reservist while training as a journalist, attending universities at home and in England, earning his doctorate in the United States and working as an associate professor on tenure track at Georgia Southern.  Given his promising academic career in America, why does Reksulak bother with pulling reserve duty in the German Army?

“Because I owe the Bundeswehr much gratitude,” he told The Atlantic Times in an interview.

 His story is a sublime nugget in the larger narrative about the noiseless disappearance of the powerfully armed NVA that once numbered 170,000 active soldiers and 300,000 reservists all trained to hate the Western system. By the time Reksulak was called up, the Communist regime in East Berlin had already collapsed. The moribund “German Democratic Republic” held free parliamentary elections on March 18, 1990, Resuksulak’s 18th birthday.

 This vote in which democratic parties won an overwhelming majority had one consequence of exquisite irony: A Lutheran pastor, Rev. Rainer Eppelmann, became defense minister. Eppelmann, an ex-prisoner of the now-defunct dictatorship, suddenly found himself in charge of a military whose commissioned and non-commissioned officers were almost all members of the Communist Party.

 Reunification with West Germany was known to be imminent. Still, Michael Reksulak, a recent high school graduate, had to report to the Steiger-Kaserne, the dilapidated home of the NVA’s 24th Motorized Rifles Regiment in Erfurt, where he was made to share a 300-squarefoot dorm with nine other conscripts.

 Reached by telephone in his office in Statesboro, he said that he had only hazy recollections of the NVA’s twilight weeks when most East German corporals and sergeants seemed to do their job of giving basic training to conscripts only half-heartedly. “Many of our superiors had already given up, only a few tried to enforce strict discipline,” he recalled. “One senior NCO spent most of his time locked in his room drinking getting drunk.”

 On the evening of October 2, 1990, all soldiers were ordered to pick up their new Bundeswehr uniforms. Newly attired, they stood at attention in the Steiner-Kaserne’s yard on the following morning to greet their regiment’s new West German commander, Lt. Col. Armin Meyer-Detring, who was to become Reksulak’s mentor and personal friend.

 “Meyer-Detring’s arrival was like a breeze of fresh air,” Reksulak continued. All of a sudden grunts were treated civilly. In West German military fashion, superiors greeted soldiers not just by their last names. Regardless of grade, the proper way to address anybody in the Bundeswehr is “Herr” (Mr.), followed by the soldier’s rank and surname. Pfc. Reksulak thus became “Herr Gefreiter Reksulak.”

 The former NVA draftees were amazed that their new chiefs never remained seated when subordinates were standing before them. Unlike his NVA predecessor, Meyer-Detring kept his office door open; Reksulak and his fellow draftees could not remember ever seeing their former commander, except from a distance.

 Meyer-Detring also took his meals with his soldiers, which was not customary in the Communist military. In Erfurt, Meyer-Detring discovered a special need for culinary solidarity. On his first day with the regiment, he had inspected the kitchen. “It was a pigsty,” he told The Atlantic Times in a telephone interview. “Paint kept peeling from its walls and dropping into the stockpot, but the cook continued stirring the soup unperturbed. By the food counter stood a stinking trashcan. Just outside the kitchen, garbage piled up. So I asked the municipal fire department to have its men stand by while I had the rubbish burned off. We watched hundreds of rats fleeing the flames.”

 Reksulak picked up the thread: “Next the colonel commanded our platoon to scrub the kitchen floor. It was covered with a thick layer of grease. Cleaning up this place took us a very long time.” Meyer-Detring ordered the interior of the Steigerkaserne repainted, and allowed no more than four soldiers to sleep in one room.

 As for his own place in the Steiger-Kaserne, the West German lieutenant-colonel was in for an unpleasant surprise. “In my office, I discovered tiny microphones with cables leading to some hidden recording device,” he said. “The Stasi (East Germany’s secret police) spied on every NVA unit.” This, it appears, continued for a while even after the country’s reunification.

 Today, Reksulak, Meyer-Detring and their families consider each other close personal friends. But how did this friendship between an eastern German conscript and a West German officer begin? “What he liked about me was that I spoke my mind,” Reksulak said. Because of his candidness, be was made spokesman for the enlisted men in his unit.

 “One day,” Reksulak continued, “the defense minister (of united Germany), Gerhard Stoltenberg, visited our regiment. At lunch, Lt. Col. Meyer-Detring placed me next to the minister who asked me if the soldiers had any complaints. One of the grievances I mentioned was this: ‘The Bundeswehr gave us nice new uniforms but made us continue to use our old NVA winter underwear.”

 And what was wrong with East German long johns, Stoltenberg wanted to know? “They were very scratchy,” replied Reksulak.

 Armin Meyer-Detring left Erfurt in 1991 to become the senior press officer of the Bundeswehr’s Third Corps in Koblenz in western Germany; he took Pfc. Reksulak with him as his assistant. When Reksulak returned to civilian life, he trained to be a journalist with a local Erfurt newspaper and went to university, but then returned to military duty when the Bundeswehr assumed a peacekeeping role in Bosnia.

 As a corporal in the reserves, he became the de facto editor-in-chief of “Der Keiler” (The Wild Boar), a newspaper for the German contingent of SFOR, the “Stabilization Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Before long, he was commissioned second lieutenant. Said Reksulak: “Time and again in my years in the Bundeswehr I met people who actually took an interest in me as a human being. This helped me get to where I am at this point.”

 At the time of this writing, Michael Reksulak is taking a staff officers’ course in Germany. Meanwhile in Statesboro, students at Georgia Southern told “ratemyprofessor.com,” an Internet-based grading service for academics, that they considered him one of the greatest and toughest teachers they knew.

 Which explains this young academic’s gratitude: Experiencing his country’s reunification as an all-German grunt has turned out to be an excellent thing for 37-year old Michael Reksulak

Homage to a Very Decent Foe

“It’s impossible for me to hate Germans ever since a U-boat captain saved my life," a former U.S. sailor said

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the January 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)

Unrestricted submarine warfare was a significant issue in the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trial against German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander in chief of the German navy in World War II. But Lieutenant-Commander Gerhard Wiebe did not allow orders to limit his commitment to decency. Wiebe’s humanity has caused two former sailors of the U.S. merchant fleet to teach their children not to hate Germans.

In Café Mozart, a cozy German restaurant in downtown Washington, Robert Morrison unwraps one of the most treasured items he had inherited from his father, Leslie, who died in 1998. It is a bronze plaque showing the stylized outline of a U-boat. “German prisoners of war gave this to Pop when he served as an officer on a merchant vessel carrying them to the United States,” says Morrison, a senior fellow with Family Research Council, a Washington think tank. “This was their way of thanking him for treating them so well. A non-smoker, he gave them all his cigarette rations.”

As always in wartime episodes, there is a “story behind the story.” Why did Leslie Morrison who lost a brother in a German submarine attack on his ship tell his children over and over again that he could never hate Germans? Why has this become part of the Morrison family lore?  It was because of the decency of one unsung hero of World War II, Lt. Cmdr. Gerhard Wiebe, who acted against the explicit order of his admiralty not to rescue sailors of vessels sunk by German submarines.

Little is known about Wiebe. “His file is astonishingly thin,” reports Horst Bredow, founding director of “Traditionsarchiv Unterseeboote” (U-boat archive) in Cuxhaven, which holds the records of most of Germany’s 41,500 World War II submariners. “We know that he was born in 1907. There’s nothing in his folder about any decorations he might have been awarded, even though U-516 sank 9 vessels while under his command from 12 May 1942 until 23 June 1943.”

One of these ships was S.S. Deer Lodge, an American freighter on which Leslie Morrison served as able-bodied seaman when it was torpedoed in the middle of the night 39 nautical miles off Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  “We were carrying military trucks in the hold and four narrow-gage locomotives with their tenders on our deck; the brand-new locomotives, built in Baltimore, were destined for British-ruled Palestine,” recalls Manuel Dias, 88, of Milford, Mass., adding that Morrison, 10 years his senior, was his mentor on board.

On 17 February 1943, Dias had just finished his watch and was about to climb into his bunk when alarm was sounded. “I rushed up to the deck. It was pitch-dark, but I could spot the silhouette of a U-boat 300 to 400 yards across our bow,” says Dias. “Then the torpedo hit us portside. We had a crew of 55. Two were killed, but the Germans gave the rest of us plenty of time to leave our listing ship, even though we had some initial problems with our life boats.”

What happened next is a little hazy. According to Morrison’s son, the German skipper and his crew provided the Americans with food, water and charts. Dias can’t recall this detail but he agrees with Morrison that Lt. Cmdr. Wiebe deliberately held off firing a second torpedo for a quarter of an hour to make sure that all survivors were safe.  The second torpedo sank the doomed S.S. Deer Lodge.

Seas were heavy. “I was in the water, certain that the Germans would shoot all of us,” Dias relates.  “But when I caught up with our captain, Irving Jenson, he said that Wiebe had asked him in English, ‘Are any of you injured? Do you need first aid?’ I could hear the two officers’ voices. Jenson told me that before leaving the scene, Wiebe had directed him to safety; he advised us to head for Bird Island or Cape Recife. I thought that this was pretty decent of him. Six hours later, a South African warship rescued us.”

Reached in Cuxhaven by telephone, Horst Bredow, founding director of the “Traditionsarchiv Unterseebote” (U-boat archive) and a watch officer on a German surface ship in World War II, insisted that many German submarine commandants acted that in this manner. This so they violated the order from Berlin not to concern themselves with survivors but “only with the safety or your own boat and with efforts to achieve additional successes as soon as possible.”

“Unrestricted submarine warfare” practiced by the “Kriegsmarine” (German Navy) became a major issue in Grand Adm. Dönitz’ war crimes trial in Nuremberg, but his sentence did not assess this particular violation of international accords because of similar actions by the Allies.

Before the Nuremberg tribunal Dönitz’s defense attorney, Otto Kranzbühler, presented an interrogatory of Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, the former commander-in-chief of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific. Nimitz confirmed that on orders of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington he himself had conducted unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan.

Dönitz spent 10 years in Spandau Prison in Berlin. Manuel Dias and Leslie Morrison concluded from their wartime experience that Germans “are wonderful people, although Hitler was a of course a different matter,” according to Dias. Fort Elizabeth is now part of a metropolitan Municipality named after Nelson Mandela and home of a huge assembly plant of Volkswagen, the German carmaker.

Gerhard Wiebe was ultimately promoted to full commander. He left the submarine force soon after his encounter with the S.S. Deer Lodge for medical reasons, and spent the rest of World War II training junior officers and then more than two years in a British prisoner of war camp.

While not celebrated as an ace by his superiors, Wiebe was a champion in the eyes of Manuel Dias, Leslie Morrison, and now Morrison’s his son Robert. When Wiebe died in 1985, few of his fellow countrymen had even heard of this extraordinary representative of Germany’s small band of submariners whom U.S. historian Timothy P. Mulligan acclaimed as an elite corps of World War II, which killed most of them.

 

The “Me” Culture in the Crosshairs

From the brochure of the League of Faithful Masks, December 2009

by Uwe Siemon-Netto

For decades, the “Me” culture has wreaked havoc with contemporary society in the Western World. It has devastated individuals, businesses and communities financially. It is threatening to unravel this country’s social structure. The “Me” culture is killing millions of unborn children every year. It is imperiling the ethical standards in the economy, industry, education, in medicine, jurisprudence, the media, the family, the arts, and in politics. The League of Faithful Masks (LFM) has been established to champion the Judeo-Christian worldview of vocation as an effective antidote to narcissism and its destructive consequences.

 

What is the League of Faithful Masks?

 

We are a non-profit corporation led by successful members of a variety of professions, an engineer, a businesswoman, an attorney, a corporate executive, a journalist and a minister. The name of our organization is taken from Martin Luther’s definition of man as a mask behind which God hides while carrying out his concealed purposes in the secular realm.

 

Is LFM evangelizing - is it a charity?

 

No. We are merely proposing the biblical concept of selfless service as an alternative to today’s self-important mindset. We are not do-gooders. We have no partisan-political agenda. We occupy no pulpit. We do not advocate a redistribution of incomes. But we do promote Martin Luther’s theological insight that all of us have divine callings in our daily lives – as parents, craftsmen, professionals, students, politicians and voters. If we exercise these secular vocations out of love for our neighbors we render the highest service to God.

 

How will LFM promote this message?

 

1. We organize lectures, conferences, seminars in congregations and other organizations, such as Rotary clubs, Scouts, and student fraternities.
2. We serve, sometimes with the help of outside specialists, as a theological-ethical resource center for political candidates, voters, professionals, educators, pastors and other individuals or groups seeking advice on questions pertaining to church and society, faith and reason, natural law and related subjects. Our advice will be non-partisan and free of charge, although voluntary donations to LFM might be solicited. Questions regarding this service are best directed to the director’s personal email address: [email protected].
3. We will offer to develop and teach courses guided by this ethos in journalism, economics, politics and many fields to all levels of schools, including home-schooled children.
4. We offer published resources and video productions. 
   
5. We will have a lively website called, The Mask. It will treat the vocation theme from all conceivable perspectives in a journalistic manner.
6. We will establish local LFM chapters around North America and overseas, hoping that they will network with one another and launch regional events promoting the doctrine of vocation, and participate in LFM resource center activities on the regional, national and international levels.

Masks’ tasks past, present and future

 

LFM has succeeded the “Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life” (CLTPL), which prepared many programs of this kind around the nation and on the campus of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, for the last four years. Audio and video recordings of these events can be downloaded from Concordia’s website.  In September 2009, CLTPL moved west. It has its new office at Concordia University, Irvine. Since its relocation, LFM/CLTPL has presented lectures at the University of Calgary, Canada, at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Ind., and a variety of congregations in southern California. In the spring of 2010, LFM will sponsor an advanced journalism course at Concordia Irvine and series of lectures on campuses in northern California, Pennsylvania, New York State, Indiana, France and possibly Germany. Some of these events will be co-sponsored by the Institute of Lutheran Theology, a Web-based seminary on whose Board of Regents LFM’s president, Uwe Siemon-Netto, serves.

 

Is LFM only for Lutherans?

 

Not at all. True, LFM’s board is made up of confessional Lutherans, and the League promotes a worldview that is central to Lutheran theology. But LFM is non-sectarian, desires to reach out to all faithful Christians and Jews and sees it as its duty to serve the community at large, irrespective of religious affiliation. Moreover, the doctrine of vocation is grounded in Scripture and shared by other denominations.

 

Who serves on LFM's board"

•  Chairman: David Atkinson, engineer

• Vice chairman: Ruth DeNault, businesswoman and philanthropist
•   Secretary: James Lowe, attorney
  
• CFO: Janet Muller, retired corporate executive, adjunct professor
•  President: Uwe Siemon-Netto, journalist and lay theologion

• Chaplain and theological consultant:  Rev. Daniel Harmelink.

 

 

How is LFM funded?

 

• As a non-profit corporation, LFM/Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life depends entirely on grants, donations, offerings and speaker’s honoraria.

 

• LFM is an outreach of Faith Lutheran Church, Capistrano Beach, California.

All contributions for LFM/CLTPL should therefore be made out care of “Faith Lutheran Church of Capistrano Beach” (FLC).

• Important: In the memo portion of the check the payment must be earmarked for “LFM/CLTPL.” 
• Mailing address: LFM/CLTPL c/o Faith Lutheran Church of Capistrano Beach, 34381 Calle Portola, Capistrano Beach, CA 92624

• Phone numbers: Faith Lutheran:  949-496-1901. LFM 949-705-6550

• A designated LFM/CLTPL fund has been set up in the yearly budget for FLC for this purpose.

•  All contributions will be fully tax-deductible. FLC will send a receipt to the respective donors at the end of each calendar year for tax purposes.

 

Can EU donors receive tax credits in their countries?

Yes! As in the United States, contributions to LFM from anywhere in the European Union are fully tax deductible. In Germany, LFM has the status of an outreach (Arbeitszweig) of the Gesellschaft für Innere und Aeussere Mission im Sinne der lutherischen Kirche), founded by Wilhelm Loehe in 1849.

• Address: Missionsstrasse 3, 91564 Neuendettelsau, Germany

• Telephone (+49) 9874-689340

• Email: [email protected]

• Bank: Sparkasse Neuendettelsau, BLZ (bank code): 765 500 00

• Account (Konto): 760 704 080

•  IBAN DE59 7655 0000 0760 7040 80

• SWIFT-BIC: BYLADEM1ANS

• Important: All checks or electronic transfers must be made out to the Gesellschaft (as above), but carry the mention (Vermerk) „für (or for) LFM/CLTPL”

 

In an Age of Louts, Sparks of Civility

It takes manners to prevent modern technology from making life misery

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic Times)

 

How a tiny gadget brought our correspondent to his knees, and how a kindly human voice raised him back to his feet. Tales of rescue from precipitate hell in a weird new world.

 

Never in my 73 years have I knelt for so long. The object of my genuflection was in this particular case not God. I was on my knees in a dark corner behind the computer desk in my new apartment in Irvine, California, swearing like an infidel at inconsiderate corporate louts responsible for the miniscule numbers on the labels of my Cable TV modem and my router.  The two gadgets would not communicate.

I called technical support with my right hand on a cell phone, and was made to perform a penitential act. My interlocutor was a young woman. She spoke with a little girl’s voice, a fashionable affectation. It’s bad enough when they do this to you face-to-face. But squeaking at me wirelessly is physical abuse. You can only guess what people like that are trying to say.

 I think that she wanted me to give her the “MAC ID” on the back of my router. I squinted at the device in despair and then begged her, “Please wait a few minutes. Perhaps somewhere out in the street I’ll find a two-year old with eyes good enough to read this ridiculously small print.” She hung up; baby-voiced tech support agents have no sense of sarcasm.

 Again and again I called tech support, still kneeling. Finally I got hold of a rare specimen of human kindness even the world of electronics could not manage to phase out. He sounded like a schoolteacher and waited patiently as my wife, Gillian, rummaged through our unpacked boxes in search of a magnifying glass and a flashlight; he even suggested that I got off my knees for a while: “Sit down, rest a little,” he advised me.

 In the end I deciphered the “MAC ID” with the help of my grandfather’s hand lens, thus enabling my anonymous helper to perform a series of long-distance tests on both gadgets, but to no avail. “You need a new router,” he concluded, and the ordeal was over after a procedure that had taken four times as long as an angioplasty.

 Even the aforementioned two-year old could probably have figured out that all this made little economic sense. This waste of corporate time – and my own -- could have been avoided had the manufacturers of the router and the modem possessed the benevolence to print “MAC IDs” and serial numbers in readable fonts.

 It takes upbringing to think of these things, and manners are in short supply in this narcissistic culture haunting both sides of the Atlantic. Just before moving to California, I observed the contrast between the effects of the technological “Me” society and a display of basic humanity in an extraordinary place – the railway station of Angoulême in southwestern France.

 It has lately been beautifully restored at taxpayer’s expense. The officials working here have bright and generous offices. But then there was evidently no money left for escalators leading to the platforms. Our luggage was heavy, and I had just recovered from a heart attack. How do French railroad bosses expect a septuagenarian couple to carry four suitcases down a steep flight of stairs and up another to the Paris-bound train on platform 2? Well, the answer is that they didn’t care.

 But the acting stationmaster of Angoulême, a comely blonde in her 20s, did care. Though this was beyond her call of duty, she shouldered our baggage and carried it to our carriage while she herself was getting drenched in a sudden cloudburst. She did more. She saw to it that a young man picked us up upon our arrival at the Montparnasse station in Paris. He turned out to be a student of art history. As he took us to the taxi stand, we discussed the link between Reformation-era paintings and 20^th-century surrealism.

 Thus two exquisitely mannered young people trouncing the soullessness of this technological age dominated by louts was a triumphal experience. That was good news.

 Gillian and I remembered this on the next day in the quaint old German city of Wetzlar north of Frankfurt. Wetzlar was once the seat of the Reichskammergericht, the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe based his epistolary novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” on an episode of unrequited love in his own youth while serving as an intern at this exalted judicial institution.

 My own “Wetzlar sorrows” were travel-related. We took a bus from our hotel to the station. It was a brand-new vehicle filled with school children. When I was their age, my father, who was blinded in combat in World War I, refused to take a seat in a streetcar as long as a single woman or older man was still standing in the aisle; in those days buses and trams had banquettes reserved for wounded veterans.

 In Wetzlar, no child offered his or her seat on the bus to any of the older people on board, not even to a handicapped passenger. Worse still, none of the adults urged them to get up. At the station, which also had no escalators to the platforms, the kids raced across the tracks, dropping candy wrappings. The engineer of a regional train watched their dangerous behavior from the side window of his locomotive and said nothing. What could he do? He could not leave his train.

 My sense of gloom darkened when I reached Frankfurt’s central railway station, the busiest in Europe.  Daily, 342 long-distance and 290 regional trains pass through this magnificent terminal. But no longer are luggage carts available to the 350,000 passengers using this station every day. They were habitually stolen, causing the Deutsche Bahn AG, the German railroad corporation, annual losses €30,000 ($45,000), so the company eventually stopped replacing them.

 In Frankfurt, too, I experienced basic humanity defeating modernity’s misery. I injured myself. Blood spurting from my right hand, I hurried into the station’s pharmacy, where everybody seemed to back away from me, except for a young saleswoman. Without any prompting, she came around the counter and guided me to an office where she bandaged my hand. She turned out to be a first-year medical student.

 In Germany, you can actually receive help with your luggage if you turn to the railway station’s “service point,” usually a day ahead of your journey. We were lucky. A Sicilian-born porter by the name of Giovanni took us to the high-speed “Inter-City Express” (ICE) to Berlin. I said, to this train, not into it, as Giovanni would have for most of his 36-year career at this terminal.

The reason why he did not carry our bags to our seats was this: In Germany, the trains and the stations, though still state-owned, belong to separate corporations nowadays; working for the station, Giovanni was not permitted to board the ICE because it was the property of a “different” outfit. And thus it came to pass that 21^st-century corporate mindlessness precluded humans from doing things human.

 Racing at speeds of up to 200 mph toward the nation’s capital, ICE 592 abruptly ground to a halt just before reaching Brunswick.  To many rail travelers, this has become a hauntingly familiar sensation: Once again, somebody had thrown himself in front of this train. Now ICE 592 remained stationary for two hours while police and prosecutors investigated the incident.

 At this sinister moment, it was absorbing to observe the disparity in the behavior of our fellow passengers. Most lined up cheerfully for free soft drinks offered in the bar car. Others, though, had different concerns. They asked the train chief: “How is the engineer dealing with this traumatic experience? Can we do something for him?” Thus while we waited for another engineer to drive us to Berlin, a gulf emerged between two sets of contemporaries in a technological age: Some seemed more compassionate than others; but has this not always been so?

 On the next morning I boarded a double-decker bus. As in Wetzlar, it was filled with kids, clearly high school students, but how different they were! One young girl offered me her seat. I overheard her and her friends discussing American history, albeit it not very expertly. “Who was the first American president?” one asked. “Kennedy?” her classmate opined. “No, I think it was Nixon,” said another student.

 Still, they were so charming that when I left for California on the following day I was heartened: Civility is still alive, even though our age seems dominated by cold technology and ill-mannered louts.

 

 

The Global Importance of Bach Today

_{^{(Opening presentation by Uwe  Siemon-Netto at the “Bach in Today’s Parish” conference, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN, November 2, 2009)}} 

A few caveats are in order before I speak to you about the global significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I am not a musicologist, nor a musician; you’ll hear from these eminent scholars and artists later. I am just a journalist, and as a journalist, I’ll start with hometown news first -- before going global.

I was born in Leipzig, virtually in the shadow of the Thomaskirche. When I was four, my parents began taking me to the motet or cantata services in the Thomaskirche every Friday or Saturday. This might sound alien to present-day parents, Lutherans included, who do not introduce their kids to music saying that they were “too busy” for that and preferred to spend some “quality time” with their children, like munching hamburgers together.

I spent most of World War II in Leipzig. This is why a blend of two kinds of acoustical impressions has been resonating in my head ever since my childhood – the sound of bombs and sound of Bach.

Often the two dovetailed. Often an air raid followed a cantata service or an organ recital. Or an air raid interrupted a house concert in our home. It was during one of these weekly concerts that I was first introduced to the Art of the Fugue, to which I shall return several times this morning.

The first time I heard the Art of the Fugue, it was played by a string quartet in the music room of our downtown apartment, which was destroyed on Dec. 4, 1943. Two of the musicians were members of the Gewandhaus orchestra, and two were amateurs. In the middle of the performance the sirens howled, and we all rushed to the basement.

There is something else I must tell you about these extraordinary events. They suspended on a very private level the artificial division between Jew and non-New imposed on us by the Nazis. Often Jewish relatives or friends came  out of hiding a night to perform Bach or Beethoven, Pachelbel or Pastorius with us before joining us in the air raid shelters or disappearing into the night.

From that the very moment I heard the Art of the Fugue at home, the opening bars of its Contrapunctus One returned to my inner ear virtually every day – while being bombed, while fleeing from Soviet-occupied Leipzig after the War, while sitting exams at school, while feeling lovesick or covering the Vietnam War as a reporter, while suffering from a writer’s blocks.

O, I sang Lutheran hymns in my head too, and I still do, none more often than “Abide with me.” But most of all I am fixated by these fugues! They order my mind and my soul.

In my prayers fugues join the hymns my grandmother sang into my ears during the air raids. And this has been so for nearly seventy years now.

But that’s enough about me for the moment. Let’s stay in Leipzig for a while longer, though, in Leipzig, cradle of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall exactly 20 years ago. Did you know that this monumental event in history has a strong Bach connection?

The protest movement that ultimately snowballed into the bloodless revolution of 1989 started with young Christians, and even though it developed into a mass movement involving more non-Christians than Christians, it was the Church that provided the umbrella for its growth.

Here is a significant bit of information you will rarely find in your media:

 

This protest movement had its roots in the popular anger over a barbaric act committed by the regime of East Germany’s Communist leader Walter Ulbricht. Ulbricht was a former bordello bouncer.

On his orders, the Communists blew up Leipzig’s  graceful late-Gothic university church. It stood on Karl-Marx-Platz, formerly – and now again -- called Augustusplatz. Ulbricht, also a native Leipziger, had big plans for transforming this largest square in Germany into the biggest proletarian parade ground in Europe. In Ulbricht, a church had no business standing at such secular venue.

The university church, symbol of Leipzig’s academic life, as murdered on May 30, 1968. Three weeks later, the Third International Bach competition took place in Leipzig. During its opening session in the Congress Hall of the Zoo, Aall the Communist bigwigs sat in the front rows, next to prominent personalities of the international Bach community.

Suddenly, invisible hands unrolled a yellow poster from the ceiling of this concert hall causing a gasp. The poster showed the outline of the murdered church, the year of its death --1968 – and the words, “Wir fordern Wiederaufbau” (“We demand Reconstruction”).

 This spectacular incident drew the attention of the world’s musical elite to a Communist outrage. The authors of this demonstration were four young physicists, all Christians. One was eventually betrayed by a West German leftist to East Germany’s secret police and sent to prison.

It was this stunning episode that ultimately spawned the resistance movement whose success in November of 1989 Germans are commemorating in these weeks.

I must still beg you to remain with me in Leipzig for a little longer for it is, after all, the capital of the global Bach community, the number one pilgrimage site for Bach lovers from all continents. Of the 850 students at Leipzig’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Germany’s oldest state conservatory, almost one quarter hails from Asia. Asians fill the pews of the Thomaskirche during its motet and cantata services. 

Japanese in particular have been flocking to Leipzig even in Communist days. One of them was musicologist Keisuke Maruyama. He became a Christian by studying the impact of the weekday pericopes in the 18^th-century Lutheran lectionary cycle on Bach’s cantatas. 

After he had finished his research he told my friend Rev. Johannes Richter, then the superintendent (regional bishop) of the half of Leipzig’s Lutheran parishes: “It is not enough the read Christian texts. I want to be a Christian myself. Please baptize me.” 

When Richter told me this during one of my rare reporting stints to Leipzig, atheism was the state religion of East Germany. On the same occasion I interviewed the members of the Thomanerchor, whose director Bach had been from 1723 until his death in 1750.

 Since the Reformation, the Thomanerchor has been a municipal institution, and so it was in Communist days. But under Communism, for the first time in the choir’s history, no chaplain was allowed to provide pastoral care to these boys in their boarding school. For the previous 800 years, their predecessors received their instruction in the Christian faith in their dorms; now even table prayers were forbidden. To be catechized they had to go to a nearby church.

But when I asked several of these children whether they were believers they replied: “O yes, almost all of us are. You cannot really sing Bach without faith.”

These two examples show that in an era of darkest atheism Bach worked as a missionary – to a scholar from far-away Asia, and to kids raised in a godless environment, and even a ranking Communist functionary. 

I remember interviewing the director of the Leipzig Bach Institute of that period. He was a member of the Communist hierarchy. He told me that he could only be an atheist only as long as he did not have to listen to Bach. “It is strange, though, how quickly this changes when I hear Bach’s music.” 

This now really does take me to the global significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I have made the fascinating discovery that whenever I write about Bach for the Atlantic Times, my regular client, these articles automatically appear in its sister paper, the Asia-Pacific Times.

Why should this be so? Because the editors of both publications know that Bach is one of the hottest topics in the Far East. You write about Bach in Germany or in France or in the United States, and Asians gobble it up – so much so that features like these sell advertising space more easily than many other topics.

My wife and I spend our summers in the Dordogne in southwestern France, where towns and villages are gradually restoring their Romanesque parish churches; there are about one thousand of them in the Dordogne alone. These sanctuaries are usually empty, largely for lack of priests. But this changes during the summer thanks to a concert series organized by Ton Koopman, the great Dutch organist and Bach performer, who owns a home there.

Then busloads of music lovers pour into the Dordogne from all over the world, Dutch, Belgians, Germans, Scandinavians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese. A French count sleeps in a car parked immediately in front of ancient churches where the musicians store their ancient instruments. He protects those instruments literally with his own body against thieves and vandals.

French peasants devoid of musical education suddenly appear in their churches they and their ancestors had ignored for at least two centuries. Their children, until recently ignorant of any form of classical music now join choirs whipped into shape by Koopman, the star, and hitherto unknown instructors.

Wealthy Frenchmen like my friend Francis Vigne, a retired engineer, buy orphaned organs from the Netherlands and Germany and install them in these rural sanctuaries that had never held any instrument since they were built a millennium ago. Now slowly the locals, intrigued by their alien sounds, pop into these churches they had never seen from the inside. And more and more often do I hear them sigh:  “All we need now is a pastor.” 

It is my impression, which I cannot substantiate with statistics, and for which I must beg you to trust my experienced journalist’s nose, that all this is a manifestation of what many French call la grande soif pour Dieux or, more sophisticatedly, la soif pour la transcendence.

I claim that the music of Bach and his contemporaries lures the thirsty to a place where they will be refreshed -- to ancient edifices where they sit tightly packed on narrow benches, often without backrests, and listen to Koopman’s Baroque ensemble, more and more and more every year – so much so that many copycats are now imitating Koopman’s initiative.

When I see and hear all this I cannot help thinking with enormous sadness and anger of one big Lutheran church near St. Louis, which proudly proclaims: “Here you will never hear the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.”

Well, let me tell you this: In southwestern France people might not fill the pews every Sunday but they have also not replaced the altars with sets of drums; they swing along not with praise bands but with Bach, Telemann and Pachelbel, Schütz, Schein and Scheidt. And I have noticed that when the concert season is well over, some of the churches, once so empty, remain packed.

Yes, I do believe that Bach is busily at work as an evangelist, to paraphrase Nathan Söderblom, the former archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. I also share a similar view expressed by the late Arthur Peacocke, one of the most significant figures in the burgeoning dialogue between Faith and Science.

Peacocke, an Anglican canon and a noted biochemist, sounded much like Martin Luther who once described music as a tool of the Holy Spirit. He specifically made a point to which I am inclined to subscribe to heartily:

The Holy Spirit Himself dictated The Art of the Fugue into Bach’s plume.

When I wrote this on my blog site I got into deep waters with Lutheran coreligionists who believe themselves to be more orthodox than I.

What infuriated them was not only my reference to the Holy Spirit’s authorship of the Art of the Fugue, but even more so a story of mine describing how Glenn Gould’s rendering of the Goldberg Variations, another very abstract work by Bach, had triggered the interest of Masashi Masuda from Hokkaido in northern Japan in Christianity.

Masuda told me on the telephone one day that he wanted to discover the source of this wonderful composition – and was guided to the Christian faith, thus supporting Arthur Peacocke’s theory.

 Masashi Masuda became a member of the Society of Jesus, and ultimately a professor of systematic theology at Sophía University, a Jesuit-owned school in Tokyo.

 You cannot believe the furious electronic missives aimed at me across the internet in response to this report. “Sir, did you not know that the Holy Spirit only works through the Word?” one angry reader chided. I replied, “I thought we had learned in Systematics III that the Holy Spirit blew as he wished.

 I apologized saying that I was unaware that the Third Person in the Trinity was under any obligation to study the Book of Concord before blowing? So now we know: The Holy Spirit has no right to use an abstract composition by Johann Sebastian Bach as a shoe ladle for the Word of God.

Another email correspondent seemed ready to burn me at the stake, if only this could be done in cyberspace, for implying in my Masashi Masuda story that the Holy Spirit might have guided this former non-believer to a denominationally incorrect target. “See? Now Siemon-Netto even asserts that Bach has driven this man to the Antichrist.”

Rare in a journalist’s life are such wonderful occasions when divine irony refutes absurdity with swift fury. On the very day I received this email a friend from Portland, Oregon, sent me this beautiful bit of news: She had a grandson, who used to be a godless lout. Then one day his father gave him a Glenn Could recording of Bach’s Italian Concerto, another work without words 

A few months later, this young man surprised his father by playing the Italian Concerto on the father’s piano, from memory. Until that point Dad had had no idea that this teenager even knew how to handle a piano.

Next, the boy informed his grandmother that he would now like to learn how to play the organ.

So from that day on he accompanied her every Sunday to her Lutheran church, and now he can play the organ and has become a Christian. I just copied this bit of her email to my angry interlocutor, self-righteously adding three of the first Latin words I had ever learned: “Quod erat demonstrandum.”

As Prof. Robin Leaver told me this morning, Johann Olearius, the 17^th-century German mathematician and librarian, called the Holy Spirit “der grosse Kapellmeister” (literally, the great orchestra donductor). Again: Quod erat demonstrandum.

This leads me to a fascinating question others are probably more competent to answer than I:

How come that the most destructive and tasteless forms of music and the very best have an almost equal ability to transcend ethnic, cultural and geographic barriers while others don’t.

How come you see people twitch to the same inane beat whether you are in Iceland or Okinawa, in Berlin or Bali? If Arthur Peacocke is right that the Holy Spirit disseminates Bach, what do you call the spirit that promulgates rap and Hip Hop but not, for example Schubert’s lieder, on a global scale?

We might have to consult psychologists here, perhaps even physicians. After attending a genuine – not touristy – Voodoo   séance in Haiti back in 1964 my wife told me that this experience had literally put a spell on her, mesmerized her, changed her physically at least as it was happening.

One physician said that this intense drumbeat actually changes your breathing or your heartbeat. I don’t know about that. I was there too, and it did nothing for me. But like my wife, and evidently like huge audiences in Tokyo, I feel profoundly changed when listening to the Art of the Fugue or the final chorus of Bach’s St. John’s Passion.

There might well be some kind of spirit involved in Rap and Voodoo, in addition perhaps even to temporary biological and physiological transformations. Others might be more competent to opine on this.

But what about the Spirit who made sure that the Japanese with their entirely different musical background grasp the significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whereas most of us Westerners might find the traditional tunes of Japan charming, exotic, an alien delight, but not really overwhelming.

About ten years ago, I put this question in Tokyo to a couple of musicologists, whose names, I am ashamed to say, I have misplaced in my messy archives. They came up with the following theory that might in part explain the current Bach Boom in Japan and other parts of Asia for several decades now.

 When Francis Xavier and other Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries landed in southern Japan in the mid-16^th century, they brought with them Western-style church music, especially Gregorian chant, and the organ. In fact they built pipe organs from bamboo, and before the sixteenth century was out, some Japanese princes were so accomplished on the Queen of the Instruments that in the 1560s three of them toured European courts playing before kings and princes and before the Pope.

 Christianity was eradicated in Japan in the early 17^th century. Christians were crucified, burned at the stake, and scorched to death while hanging upside-down over cesspools.

 But my Japanese interlocutors told me that while the Christian faith was wiped out, elements of Western music infiltrated Japanese folk song.  This influence evidently remained strong enough to help Bach’s music sweep Japan four centuries later.

 I like this theory. I am sure Arthur Peacocke would have loved it. It comforted me in my perplexity throughout the last four years in St. Louis when I listened to Robert Bergt’s spectacular Bach at the Sem performances, and found the huge Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus filled with white heads.

 Most of these heads belonged to members of outside communities. I was grateful to see them there. But where were the seminarians in whose theological tradition the music of Johann Sebastian Bach played such a towering role? Where, for that matter, were most of the faculty members?

 These concerts were recorded and then repeated over KFUO-FM, this marvelous gift by faithful German-American Lutherans to the larger St. Louis community, a jewel of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod whose reputation is otherwise not really one of winsomeness.     

Now this KFUO is being sold for an apple and an egg. The church body whose founder had linked music and the Holy Spirit so closely glibly jettisons one the Comforter’s most splendid tools. Ladies and gentlemen, by all means grill me electronically for this outburst: This unfathomable act reminds me hauntingly of Walter Ulbricht’s massacre of our University Church in our mutual hometown of Leipzig in 1968.

I have been invited to talk to you about the Global Significance of the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach. You cannot do this without contemplating the Third Person of the Trinity, and I cannot help noticing that He is being mocked in our own family of faith. 

Of course you can try to keep the Holy Spirit and his toys out of reality and replace them with kitsch. But be warned. The Holy Spirit will still blow as he wills, perhaps not on Founder’s Way in St. Louis, but -- Japan and Korea, in once abandoned Romanesque churches in southwestern France, in the head of a formerly godless lout in Oregon -- and in my head, which keeps finding order and comfort thanks to Bach’s incomplete masterpiece, the Art of the Fugue.

 

 

 

NEWSLETTER: "Masks vs. Me" Incorporated

 

NEWSLETTER ONE

 

Incorporated: Masks vs. Me

 

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

 

The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life (CLTPL), formerly of St. Louis, has now been legally established as a non-profit religious corporation based in California, according to its founding director, Uwe Siemon-Netto.  Intent on challenging the prevalent “Me mentality” in Western society, CLTPL adopted the name League of Faithful Masks (LFM), borrowing Martin Luther’s term for God’s creatures. Behind these masks God hides, Luther said; through these masks God carries out His hidden purposes.

 

The League will continue to carry the name, Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life, in its subtitle. As an outreach of Faith Lutheran Church in Capistrano Beach, Cal., LFM will depend financially on grants, donations and other offerings all of which will be tax deductible. LFM’s office is located on the campus of Concordia University Irvine, CA 92715.

 

LFM’s Board is made up of five members, all Lutheran laymen. They are:

 

Chairman: David Atkinson, engineer;

Vice Chairman: Ruth DeNault, businesswoman and philanthropist;

Secretary: James Lowe, attorney;

Chief Financial Officer: Janet Muller, retired corporate executive, adjunct professor at Concordia University;

President: Uwe Siemon-Netto, journalist and lay theologian.

 

At its first meeting the Board decided that LFM should continue to project Lutheran theological concepts into the public arena, in line with the activities of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life. However, the Board made it clear that, far from wishing to be sectarian, LFM must reach out to all faithful Christians and seekers interested in Luther’s teachings concerning the life of a Christian in the secular realm.

 

LFM especially strives to introduce Christians of all denominations to the Lutheran doctrine of calling, which states that every human being has numerous divine vocations in the worldly realm. Seen from the Lutheran perspective, Christians practicing their diverse vocations -- including “divine assignments” as voters, political leaders or parents -- out of love for their neighbors are rendering the highest service to God. LFM considers this worldview based on Scripture a useful antidote against the narcissistic Zeitgeist advancing all kinds of questionable “rights” contravening natural law.

 

These alleged entitlements include seemingly unlimited abortion “rights,” the “right” to place deviant sexual behavior on the same level with the traditional marriage, but also the presumed “right” of corporate executives to enrich themselves obscenely to the detriment of the world economy, or the “rights” of politicians to act solely in their own interest rather than in the interest of society at large.

 

Following the four-year practice of CLTPL, the League of Faithful Masks will promote theological alternatives to the excesses of the Me culture with publications, lectures, conferences, seminars, video productions and other activities. LFM has already taken first steps to establish regional chapters in various parts of North America and Europe in the hope of creating a multi-location network of faithful Christians determined to uphold the biblical concept of the priesthood of all believers in the secular realm.

 

LFM Activies since moving to CA

 

• In an article in the September 2009 issue of Christianity Today, Uwe Siemon-Netto, described his stay with an Amish congregation in Eastern Illinois, discussing his encounter with this community from both a human and a theological perspective. Similar articles by Siemon-Netto about the fascinating contrast between his Lutheran theology and the Anabaptist theology practiced by the Amish appeared in prominent publications in Germany and Switzerland.

• In early October, Siemon-Netto gave four presentations at the University of Calgary in Canada:

 

1. In a seminar titled, “What this Lutheran Learned When he Visited the Amish,” Siemon-Netto discussed his theological observations gained from this encounter with the University’s chaplains and other members of the Calgary clergy.

2. In an address titled, “Voters as Priests – the Lutheran Paradox,” explained the Lutheran two-kingdoms doctrine and its significance in a democracy; this public lecture held in commemoration of the late Peter Craigie, former Dean of Humanities at the University of Calgary, was open to the general public.

3. Addressing members of the University’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, Siemon-Netto, a former Vietnam War correspondent discussed the complex and often strained relationship between journalists and the military and intelligence communities; this speech was titled, “War, Piracy and the Media.”

4. Siemon-Netto’s final presentation at the University of Calgary was before members of its religious studies department. This speech was titled, “Called to the Beat –the Vocation of Journalists.”

 

Upcoming events

 

• On Reformation Sunday (Oct. 25), Uwe Siemon-Netto will speak to the congregation of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Huntington Beach, Cal., about the Christian’s role as the mask behind who the invisible God hides while reigning and acting in the secular realm.

• On November 2, Siemon-Netto will lecture on “The Global Importance of Bach Today” at the Tenth Annual Conference of the Good Shepherd Institute at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Ind.

• In the Spring Semester of 2010, starting January 20, Uwe Siemon-Netto will teach an advanced journalism course at Concordia University Irvine.

 

Contributions

 

Checks for The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life (CLTPL) should be made out care of “Faith Lutheran Church of Capistrano Beach” (FLC); in the memo portion of the check the payment should be earmarked for “The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life.”

 

Mailing address:

 

CLTPL c/o Faith Lutheran Church of Capistrano Beach

34381 Calle Portola

Capistrano Beach, CA 92624

The phone number (949) 496-1901

 

A designated CLTPL fund is being set up in the yearly budget for FLC for this purpose. All contributions will be fully tax-deductible. FLC will send a receipt to the respective donors at the end of each calendar year for tax purposes.

 

CLTPL is back - but in Irvine

IRVINE, OCT. 1. The Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life (CLTPL) has resumed business    Thursday, three months after being shut down for budgetary reasons by the Board of Regents of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, according the Center’s director, Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto. 

CLTPL is now operating out of Concordia University Irvine, Cal., and is legally a ministry of Faith Lutheran Church at Capistrano Beach, Cal.

The Center’s mission is to reflect on secular issues from the confessional Lutheran perspective. A non-profit organization, CLTPL offers lectures, articles, broadcasts, videos, and conferences on topics such as the vocation of voters, journalists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers and parents. CLTPL is planning to establish regional chapters at several locations around the United States and abroad. “With our emphasis on the doctrine of calling we intend to propose a healthier alternative to the contemporary ‘Me’ culture in America,” Siemon-Netto said. 

CLTPL’s first major event after moving to Irvine will be a lecture series by its director at the University of Calgary in Canada on the priestly roles of voters and journalists in the secular realm, and on “War, Piracy and the Media” at the University’s “Centre for Military and Strategic Studies” on Oct. 6-7. This will be followed by a presentation on the Global Significance of the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Ind., on Nov. 2.

In the spring semester of 2010, the Center’s director, a longtime foreign corrrespondent and editor, will teach an advanced journalism course based on the ethics of the Lutheran doctrine of vocation at Concordia University Irvine.

CLTPL is supported by grants, donations and other offerings that are all tax-deductible. All contributions for The Center should be sent to “Faith Lutheran Church of Capistrano Beach” (FLC); contributions should be earmarked for “Center for Lutheran Theology and pulic life” in the memo portion of the checks. The mailing address is as follows: CLTPL c/o Faith Lutheran Church, 34381 Calle Portola Capistrano Beach, Cal., 92624.

The Center’s Concordia University address is: The Center for Lutheran Theology & Public Life, Old Admin Building, Room 312A, 1530 Concordia West, Irvine, CA 92612-3203, telephone 949-854-8002, extension 1335.

Europe’s spiritual heart – beating again

Built 1,100 years ago, Cluny Abbey was razed in the French Revolution, but six miles away a center of faith is thriving. It’s called Taizé 

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

(From the September 09 issue of The German Times and The Asia-Pacific Times)

This month, festivities will commence commemorating the birth of Cluny Abbey eleven centuries ago. In medieval times, Cluny was the monastic capital of Western Europe. The abbey spawned 1,200 priories and other dependencies with 15,000-20,000 monks. It became a cradle of Western civilization but degenerated in the Renaissance and was destroyed in the late 18^th century. Now a new spiritual center of global significance is blossoming nearby – the ecumenical community of Taizé.

 

Marie-Angély Rebillard is a sprightly 87-year old with links to the Christian splendor of Cluny’s past and to the robust spirituality of present-day Taizé, a neighboring village that is home to a burgeoning ecumenical community.  Her family gave Cluny Abbey its last prior and also its last physician, plus many of the town’s notables. But she was also a close friend of Frère (Brother) Roger Schutz, the Swiss Reformed pastor (1915-2005) who founded Taizé, which now hosts 4,000 pilgrims a day, especially young people.

 

Rebillard was a young social worker when Schutz rode his bicycle from Switzerland to southern Burgundy, and proceeded to smuggle Jews out of German-occupied France into the part of the country that was ruled by the Vichy government. She also knew Mathilde de Brie, the owner of the manor house that served Schutz and his wards as a refuge and has since become the center of his international order of 100 Protestant and Catholic monks of whom 70 between the ages of 21 and 92 now live in Taizé.

 

In an interview, Rebillard said, “Mathilde de Brie, related an amazing story to me. In 1926, long before World War II, a Benedictine nun informed her of a vision: ‘I saw men in white robes on your property, and their prior was called Roger.’” Sixty years on Pope John Paul II visited Frère Roger and his white-clad monks in Taizé and exclaimed: “Coming here is like passing a spring.”

 

Taizé is only a 10-minute drive from Cluny, whose mayor, Jean-Luc Delpeuch, is an engineer. When I met Delpeuch in his 16^th-century city hall he declared that his town of 5,000 inhabitants will become “the spiritual capital of Europe” as of Sept. 13 when the anniversary festivities begin. Historians differ on whether Duke William I of Aquitaine founded the abbey in 909 or 910 A.D. ; hence yearlong celebrations make all the more sense. Delpeuch stressed the need for spiritual centers and therefore particularly praised Taizé whose current prior, Frère Alois, a German Catholic, he had befriended years ago.  Alois has led Taizé since a demented Romanian woman killed 90-year old Roger Schutz by cutting his throat during a prayer service in 2005.

 

Beyond the geographical proximity, there are remarkable parallels between Cluny and Taizé, according to New York-born Frère Jean Marie. “We share Cluny’s sense of beauty and its emphasis on liturgy as a means of communicating and feeding faith.” Cluny and its daughter priories, sometimes called “little Clunys,” were renowned for the magnificence of their divine service. Taizé has produced a wealth of songs and chants that became part of the hymnals of many denominations; Frère Jean-Marie is one of its hymn writers. Like the monks of Cluny, the brothers of Taizé follow a rule “close in spirit” to the Benedictine rule, “ora et labora” (pray and work), he explained. It was formulated by Roger Schutz.

 

Moreover, like Cluny, Taizé is international. Cluny’s influence spread as far as Poland in the East and England in the West, and its priors met once a year in Aachen, now Germany, with their abbot.  In other words, Cluny was a pan-European enterprise. In the same way, “Europe was very much Frère Roger Schutz’s concern,” Jean-Marie explained. This seemed only logical given that Schutz had witnessed the horrors of the Old Continent’s second fratricidal war in the 20^th century.

 

Today a pervasive European spirit marks Taizé. “In some weeks, two-thirds of our visitors are young Germans, at other times they are mainly French,” said Jean-Marie. In the last few years, groups have been pouring in from Scandinavia. Other pilgrims come from Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asian, North and South America. Moreover, Taizé brothers live in self-chosen poverty in small fraternities on other continents where they earn their living in the secular community. 

 

Taizé’s lifestyle is humble; Cluny’s was not. The Abbey and its affiliated priories were enormously rich; their monks lived well; in the Middle Ages they were renowned for their opulent cuisine. In a book about gluttony in medieval convents, the American writer Norman Foster reports a mind-boggling discovery by modern nutritionists. Studying Cluny’s daily menus they concluded that during an average meal 12^th-century Cluny friars consumed 10,000 calories, which resulted in frequent and lengthy hospitalizations; the Abbey’s hospital ranked among the largest and most comfortable in Europe.

 

By contrast, the Taizé brothers live modestly. A little wine with their meals is about the extent of their “luxury.” While Cluny’s commendatory abbots, who often were aristocratic laymen appointed by the kings of France, resided in sumptuous and nicely heated palaces, Roger Schutz inhabited unembellished quarters now occupied by Alois, his successor.

 

For virtually her entire adult life, Marie-Angély Rebillard has lived in the extraordinary spiritual tension field connecting Cluny and Taizé. Since her childhood she knew Cluny’s ruins, which are “as majestic as the ruins of ancient Rome,” in the words of the Abbey’s administrator Jean-Denis Salvèque. They are testimony to an act of unspeakable barbarism committed in the aftermath of the French Revolution – the destruction of 90 percent of  this “preeminent accomplishment in all of architectural history,” according to the brilliant U.S. scholar Kenneth John Conant (1894-1984). It was Conant who in the 1920s started the first major excavation of Cluny financed by the Medieval Academy of America.

 

There is still a poster on exhibit advertising tiles and cut stones, doors and fireplaces from the abbey church, which until the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome had been the largest sanctuary in western Christendom, and which between 1798 and 1823 was reduced to a common quarry. In Napoleon’s reign, it supplied the building materials for the construction of the “Haras National,” the national horse breeding station.

 

Rebillard spoke of an eerie detail she remembered from her childhood. “I recall that preserving jars in the Cluny area were sealed with a parchment bearing ancient texts in Latin and French.” They hailed from the Abbey’s archives, which were ransacked by revolutionary mobs. In the Middle Ages Cluny’s scriptorium was considered the finest in the world. It copied the most magnificent theological and ancient philosophical texts; it was also in Cluny where a group of five scholars produced the first Latin translation of the Koran.

 

The Abbey’s superb library and archives were ravaged first in the religious wars between Protestant and Catholic forces in the late 16^th century and then devastated by a fanatical rabble in the late 18^th. As a ghastly consequence, Cluny was littered with invaluable manuscripts well into the current era. “When I restored my 13^th-century house, I found a huge crack by the fireplace filled with ancient parchment manuscripts,” said Jean-Luc Maréchal, a retired engraver and local amateur historian.

 

If such testimony to the wanton destruction of an apex of Christian civilization has been a reality in Marie-Angély Rebillard’s life, so has been the manifest renewal she witnessed in Taizé. Roger Schutz counted the need for Christian unity as a foremost priority. “The will to unity is often lacking,” lamented Brother Alois, the current prior. “But living together, praying together, singing the Gospels together bridges our national and confessional differences.” Among Taizé’s friars are four Roman Catholic priests and two practicing Protestant pastors; the rest are laymen.

 

In an interview, Alois stressed the ever-growing stream of youthful pilgrims; he described the young people’s “quest for silence and simplicity, and their yearning for deep values. They are looking for a the opposite of the superficiality in their own lives.” And he marveled about their ability “to spend long hours on their knees in prayer.”

 

In contrast to the commonly-held stereotype that Europe and especially its northern parts have become hopelessly secularized, Alois reported an astonishing observation: “For the last 10 years we have been observing a steady increase of visitors from Sweden, in addition to the constantly growing number of young Germans; they include more and more young people from eastern Germany, who often lack any knowledge of the Christian faith. Yet they are unbiased. They are seekers. Only years later we might hear of individuals who have become Christians as a consequence of their visit to Taizé.”

 

Route D981 links Cluny and Taizé. Young people constantly hitchhike back and forth along this road connecting two eras of Europe’s spiritual capital. In an age not noted for its fervor for history, they commute the short distance between feudal splendor, revolutionary devastation and renewal -- a distance of six miles and 1,100 years.