Fire and Lutefisk

Winning souls for Christ with fire and sword was the strangest concept I wrestled with during my Road Scholar trip to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. (Except for some of the unmarked, two-handled shower controls. Inscrutable.) A book they told us to read, The Northern Crusades, had me hollering down the corridors of time at the founder of the Cistercian order of monks, “Bernard, what were you thinking?”

     Bernard of Clairvaux. You picture him like this, right? Humble. Saintly. Give him points for writing about loving God because of Who He is, and for reforming the monastic movement, but he also wrote the book on how soldier monks can knock the (literal) demons out of pagans so as to prepare them to hear the Gospel. Wherever crusaders might go, he said, they should fight the unbelievers “until such a time as, by God’s help, they shall be either converted or deleted.” Um.

     Bernard wrote the rule book for the Knights Templar, of Holy Land crusade fame, and the Teutonic Knights adopted pretty much the same constitution. The Teutonics started out as a small group in Palestine. Then some German nobles decided they needed their own version of the Templars and started enriching the humble hospitalers with cash, castles and property. Just in time, they had a trained and disciplined army ready to subdue the pagans, and, oh, by the way, take over some new territory to the east. A bishop or two spoke up: “If they had come to strengthen the Christian faith… they should do so by preaching, not by arms.” Well, yeah, the Bible says a thing or two about that. But the Pope said go, you’re official crusaders, and your sins will be absolved.

     The conquests are a long story. Some of the “missionaries” went full Old Testament on temples of scary four-headed idols, tearing down the statues, chopping and burning what were by all accounts beautiful buildings. But they brought the Good News: join our church, or we chop your head off. On occasion, the pagans chopped and burned them right back.

     Now Latvia and Lithuania are mostly Roman Catholic, and there are churches all over. The tour guides who show them to you still say, “Christianity came to us with fire and sword.” And Estonians say, “We are the least religious people in the world.” I couldn’t decide whether that was a boast, a joke, a neutral fact, all of the above? The country is nominally Lutheran. I’d go for the coffee and lutefisk over the death threats too. Well, maybe not the lutefisk. But I vote for doing things the way God says in His Book. More potlucks. Less mess. And maybe a faith that’s more than nominal.

    

Fort IX

     Outside Kaunas, Lithuania, the bus turns down a fairy-tale lane where leafy branches brush the windows on both sides. The lane opens onto gentle green hills as smooth as a golf green, looking softer than down. The setting calls for picnics and kites and curly-haired babies taking first steps. But to the left is a concrete sculpture that blasts from the earth in three tall jagged sections. I can’t make sense of it and must turn my eyes away.    

Our guide leads us to a dent in the earth, too large for a ditch, not quite a ravine. It is covered with the soft green grass. At the far end is a brick and stucco wall, pocked and scarred in patches. Perhaps from bullets. This is Fort IX. 

     A paved plaza is lined with memorial plaques, one for Russian soldiers and many for the Jews, the 50,000 people killed here. The city of Munich acknowledges with shame and mourns the thousand Jewish citizens who were sent to this place to die. Their plaque is a blue mosaic riddled with black lines like cracks.    

     Time to look at the fortress built into a hill by the Russian Tsar’s army for a garrison. At first, it has an image of Old World charm, a pink wall and a red brick enclosure with green-roofed turrets. But when you get closer, you see the barbed wire. When the Soviets came, they used it as a prison. When the Nazis came, they made it a death camp. 

     We learn that one Japanese diplomat stood for humanity by issuing visas to allow Jews to escape. Some Lithuanians hid their Jewish neighbors. Others turned the Jews in and helped to murder them.    

We have read the memorials and looked into the depths. Now we turn to face the sculpture. It roars and rages, masses of arms and fists and furious faces, jagged, frightening, overwhelming. Like the memory. Like the truth. It stabs upward through the grassy earth and shrieks at the sky. In a beautiful world, men still work evil.

     I don’t see any birds, not even a pigeon or a piebald crow. There are flowers, though, along the paths, under the fences, tiny wild ones like purple clover and Queen Anne’s lace and bright yellow flashes of some brave little blossom. Small, but alive. Small, but real. Innocent and beautiful. Thank God. We drive away, brushed once more by the green leaves.