On Sunday, I decided to visit an evangelical (protestant) church in the area. The evangelical churches in Aachen all minister to different districts. According to their website, I live in the Dietrich-Bonhoeffer Haus district. The name caught my attention. My mother and several others have mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an inspirational German christian. During World War II he spoke out against the Nazis. He even chose to remain in Germany rather than oppose them from afar, which led to his eventual execution.
Sunday morning, I wandered down to the church. It's no Aachener Dom. Really, the sanctuary was just a spacious room with rows of chairs. I received two hymnals at the door and an announcement sheet. Instead of listing the hymns in the bulletin, a plaque on the wall with adjustable numbers indicated which hymns and verses to sing. I probably would never have noticed it had the pastor not commented before the service that numbers on the left corresponded to one hymnal, those on the right to the other.
You cannot imagine my relief when I heard how the pastor spoke. Unlike people on the street who speak at ludicrous speed and leave out half the words in a sentence, he pronounced every word clearly at a rate that I could follow. Hooray for proper public speaking! As he welcomed the community, I realized that I had chosen an interesting day to attend. The first Sunday in October is Erntedankfest.
Erntedankfest translates roughly to harvest gratitude festival, effectively thanksgiving. However, don't go picturing turkeys and stuffing. In Germany, the celebration is more of a church holiday than a nationally celebrated one. Traditions vary from region to region, and some congregations don't recognize it at all. In this particular church, they celebrated by collecting food, displaying it artistically on the altar, and sending it off afterwards to a food pantry.
The pastor called up the little children and asked them to find foods from the table that did not come from Germany. One held up coffee. Another grabbed rice. Yet another took pasta that had a "made in Mexico" label. The pastor raised the issue of fair trade and let the children sit back down. Then, he reflected how he had disliked any foreign foods when he was young. "If I don't know it, I don't like it." That mentality is just silly applied to foods. Applied to people, it is a tragedy.
It turns out, that was the real theme of the sermon, being open and accepting of foreigners. The pastor even had the congregation call out what makes life oppressive for foreigners and what they can do to alleviate that burden. I spent an hour sitting in a room full of Germans discussing how best to be kind and helpful to immigrants! That was both heartening and extremely surreal.
Afterwards though, I had no time to stay and mingle. Sundays at 1, the sport complex has a free open Gym for gymnastics, trampoline, and advanced wheel gymnastics! Of course, having never done wheel gymnastics before, and having shown up with the wrong shoes, I could not really participate in that particular event. I did however get reacquainted with my inner acrobat. For one and a half hours I messed around on the floor mats, exchanged tricks with other students there, and may have fallen over once or twice.
Best of all was that I spoke entirely in German with the other gymnasts. It wasn't perfect, but it was comfortable. They did not slow down for me, and I did not feel a need for them to do so. My everything hurts today, but not enough to keep my away. The beginner wheel gymnastics takes place tonight!
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