7 July 2010. 22:30. Eiffel Tower, Paris.

In retrospect, we should have taken heed of the red flares as they released clouds of amber apprehension into the air. But as twilight encroached on that balmy summer evening, impending peril was the last thing on our minds. The day started out innocently enough. My intrepid partner Sophie and I, Robert Langdon, had just caught our breath after a surprise run-in with the French gendarmes after we tried to burn down the Louvre to see if the charred embers would settle into a treasure map showing where the Knights of the Round Table hid the real James ossuary—no, not James the brother of Jesus, James and the Giant Peach, obviously. Oh shoot, I just blew my cover of using that Dan Brown pseudonym…

Back to the Dan Snyder adventure:

So Tira and I appraised Delacroix and mimicked Michelangelo’s models at the Louvre, gazed at the grandeur of the Parisian skyline from the top of a Ferris wheel, and window shopped the showcases along the Champs Élysées. So far it was your pretty average, mundane day as university students. But, as the evening wore on, our stomachs begged for nourishment and we yearned for sustenance. We then made the fateful decision to turn left and leave the lovely lane of luxury, questing after more thrifty fare. Apparently, our meanderings were not meant to come to fruition. Perhaps the change in the air was provided as a premonition, but we were presently only perceptive towards any potential purveyors of provisions.

After finding no such establishments (in what we later realized was the business district) we stumbled upon the Eiffel Tower. There, a throng of thousands of Parisian youth were passively filing into a motivational talk entitled, “Geriatrics and Geraniums: Rediscovering the Joys of Gardening with Grandma”. Some of the more uncouth jeunes were calling it by its more commonplace soubriquet, “World Cup Semi-Final between Spain and Germany”. So after we all had our interest piqued in getting botanical with Grandma (many in the crowd seemed to read a nationalistic subplot into the speaker’s message and were either really excited for or mad at Spain) nevertheless we all tried to calmly exit the venue amidst controlled explosions of fireworks, limited jubilation, and a hushed murmur that only added to the tranquility of the evening.

It was a good thing that Parisians are renowned for being so orderly and courteous, otherwise Tira and I might have been clutching each other’s hand, dodging unruly gangs of rabble-rousers who may have been inciting senseless violence, and running to safety away from a frenzied mob back to our group on the other side of the Eiffel. But instead I say, kudos to you Paris for making Public Courtesy courses mandatory for all secondary students—worth every euro cent!

All in all, a gloriously unforgettable day, which finished with swing dancing beside the Eiffel. And to paraphrase the Bible: swing dancing covers a multitude of sins. So Paris, your slate is clean, no hard feelings. Well, maybe a few for only getting chips and a muffin for supper…

Lesson learned? Europeans are to the World Cup as Canadians are to the Stanley Cup playoffs; different sports, same crazy fans. Some things really are the same after all!

Dan S.

I have recently been in a state of individual reflection rather than the communal growth that I was focusing on in the beginning stages of the trip.  Alongside personal growth, I have been trying to find my place in the bigger picture of my spirituality and faith.  Stepping in and out of incredibly built cathedrals, historical monuments and ancient ruins, I am overwhelmed with the amazing spiritual and cultural experiences I have been a part of.  I have felt as if I have been involved in something bigger than myself and our small Christian university as I played simple games with a group of refugee children from all over the world in Munich, or as I learnt about the disastrous fire bombing of Dresden while taking part in a Kurt Vonnegut tour.  This trip forces you, in some way or another, to look beyond your own tragedies and woes and take on someone else’s for a day or just an hour.  This is why the communal aspect is constantly reflected in the life of the individual during the SSU Europe trip.  Although there are times to reflect on a personal level, there is always the wider view of community and my place within it.

I don’t believe I will ever be fully accustomed to living in a 40-person group traveling around Europe, but I do believe there is richness in allowing yourself to grow around people who challenge and disturb you on a daily basis.

Ariel S.

My favorite movement in art history is probably Impressionism, because of their creative innovations that break away from the rules and structure of art’s establishment. It is interesting to think how new worlds can open up once you bend the rules a little! Should art be given formulaic constraints? The Impressionists saw that art should roam free.

Aside from being inspired by great art and great minds, I am also impacted in other ways through our experiences. I have been shaken, as well. I will never forget walking through the Dachau concentration camp and suddenly feeling no sense of morality, loosing any grasp of good and evil. Nietzsche was right, God is dead and everything is permissible;  my mind went to chaos. I then realized the spiritual element to this.  I realized that I was impacted so much precisely because of the inherent worth that exists in all of human kind, a type of value that is indeed God-given. When you enter a place where people have experienced suffering through extreme oppression, a place where their inherent value has been utterly rejected, you cannot leave without feeling something.

Our journey through Europe ends soon! And I will not leave it an unchanged man.

Joel S.

The Frauenkirche was originally thought to have survived the bombing, however, two days afterward, the dome collapsed thereby reducing the church to stones and dust. It stayed this way until the reunification of Germany in 1990. The church was then reconstructed using the blueprints from the original church as well as sandstone from the same quarry the original sandstone was from. All the rubble was gone through to see what could be reused. Some of the stones were placed back where they had been originally, other stones were used to make up entire sections. The church was consecrated in 2005.

At the beginning of the trip Gregg Finley read to us Psalm 23. He emphasized verse three which reads, “He restores my soul”. In Jeremy Wiebe’s philosophy 300 class last semester we read an article on sexual violence, I don’t remember the author or the title of the article, but there was a particular sentence which stood out to me, I will paraphrase: “When our lives are shattered and lying in pieces we are given the opportunity to pick them up and choose what we want to keep and what we want to throw away”. Is it possible that the restoration of a church such as the Frauenkirche could speak not only of the restoration of  a building but also of individual human souls?

Last semester was very difficult for me, not academically, but personally. I spent most of the semester bitter and angry, broken hearted and lost; my life felt, and to some extent still feels like a pile of rubble. Just as the rubble of the Frauenkirche was gone through, some reused, some thrown away, so am I going through the pieces of my life, choosing what I want to keep and what I want to throw away. And just as the Frauenkirche was restored to its original beauty and brilliance in the Dresden skyline, so is God restoring my soul.

Cara T

War robs lives.  Even the lives that were not physically taken are no longer their own.  They become shells of their former selves that are forever changed.  They are robbed of their memories, their emotions and their relationships.

World War One.  The Great War.  The War to End all Wars.  Apparently not.  We are surrounded by war.

I had a conversation with a woman who lives in Belgium today.  Belgium is a country that still holds physical evidence of the destruction of war within its people, architecture and land.  Something she said about North America stuck out to me.  She was comparing the films from her country to mine and said that the movies that are made in Belgium are “too sweet to be true” and the movies that come from America are mostly focused on action, destruction, and death.  It made me think about the perspective we as North Americans have on war, being a country who has not felt the horrors of it like Europe has.  Would we be so apathetic towards the war in Afghanistan if our cemeteries were overflowing with unmarked soldiers graves?  Something needs to change.

War.  I do not understand it.  I do not pretend to.  What I do understand is the power and importance of life and the need to protect and preserve the value in it.  Some say that in war the end justifies the means.  When will the means no longer be needed?  When will the end be now?  When will the value of life outweigh death?

This topic is not an easy one for me. I often come away from these visits feeling horrified. I find myself desiring to say that war is never the answer, that there must be some other solution.

As I left the memorial site that was once the Dachau Concentration Camp, I came across one last information board with something that perplexed me even further. On it was a photograph taken around the time of the liberation of the camp by American troops. The prisoners, gaunt and bedraggled as they were, had gigantic smiles on their faces as they waved to welcome the soldiers. What if those soldiers had not come? Would someone have been able to come up with an alternative solution? One that did not extinguish millions of lives in order to save millions more? This photo made me wonder if there might not be cases where war is necessary. I still have a hard time thinking that this might be the case though. Regardless, the need for creative responses to group conflict is critical.

I also find myself wondering at what my own personal response should be as a Christian. Throughout history, Christian responses to war have run the gamut from pacifism to war enthusiasm. Is one response more appropriate than another? Should I choose a position and stick to it unswervingly or determine as best I can what the best response would be dependent upon the situation?

I don’t have answers for these questions right now, but I recognize them as good questions to be asking. I’m grateful to be seeing the kinds of sites that bring them up.

Lately I have been struggling with the theme of the trip: the community versus the individual, and my previous theme, the sacred versus the secular. Although I have been told not to always try to compare and contrast opposites, these have been the recent things on my mind. I find myself entering a church, a cathedral, a basilica or a chapel, and I immediately feel the presence of God, or the lack thereof. There is either a “thinness” or an absence of thinness of space between myself and God, and it does not have any correlation between the amount of tourists or the amount of historical significance in these places. I will enter a historically important place, with absolutely no one else in the church, and sometimes it will seem very flat, and very without God. Other times, there can be a hundred tourists taking pictures, bumping shoulders with me, but I can strongly feel where God is. What makes a place worshipful, or sacred? It very much has to do with the community surrounding the place. It is not the physical location, but rather the community, that makes a place thin. If a place is not so thin, or not so sacred, it is up to US, the individual, to make it a sacred space, or make it worshipful. It is up to the community to change the significance of a place. Vimy Ridge would just be a hill to a passer by, but there is extreme historical significance there that makes us FEEL the heaviness of war. Flanders Field is just a geographical landscape, but when we think about the tens of thousands that died there – that is what makes it important. Sebastian, an individual before the reformation, could not have published his Ship Of Fools without the help of Gutenberg’s printing press in Strasbourg. That sparked the flame of the reformation in Switzerland. What if the printing press was created somewhere else, such as England? What if Sebastian wrote a book about the positive effects of the Medieval era, and found that secularism was better than encouraging Protestantism? These individuals have shaped our lives, much more than we know.

What do we, as students of St. Stephen’s University, have to do with this transformation of a nation? What if Joel Mason’s publications, or the SSU Prayer Book, ended up in the hands of a very powerful publisher, or on the 6 o’clock news? Could we change the face of North America with our Celtic liturgies, our passion for the preservation of the environment, and our heart and focus on community? Could this become another reformation?

It is up to us to decide. So do we take this challenge? Do we step up, with our crosses and our writings, and create a better world?

These are aspirations almost too zealous for me to actually think about, but it gives me shivers. Discovering where I fit as an individual in a community that is potentially in a very influential position in the 21st century is a huge undertaking. This trip has made me consider these things, pray about these things, and talk about these things, in a way that I never would have expected before coming to Europe with SSU. I hope that this fire doesn’t die away upon my return to Canada, and that we can keep on keeping on, making this world more sacred and more thin with every step we take.

Julia R.