Friends,
For this week’s Contact installment, I want to mention two items, both of which are related to travel at MPC.
First, I want to re-extend an invitation to anyone interested in traveling to Spain with me next April. On this journey we will be spending a week together learning about the convivencia, a period of several hundred years during which, under Islamic rule, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived side by side in southern Spain. Sometimes the convivencia was a time of peace and of rich cultural cross pollination and sometimes it was a time of repression and conflict, and the goal of the retreat is to come away with a better sense of what worked, what didn’t work and why.
Over
the course of six days we will visit Granada and Córdoba and our leader will be
the Rev. Dr. Daniel Muñoz, an Anglican priest who teaches Christian history at
the Protestant Seminary in Madrid. For about ten years Daniel and his husband,
Guy, ran a retreat center in the Sierra Nevada (the one in Spain), where I
spent a wonderful week last summer. They have since sold their property in the
mountains and are now converting their retreat-leading work to group
experiences like ours.
The retreat will start in Granada on April 20, 2020, and will depart from
Córdoba on April 25. The cost is $1350 for those sharing a room and $1450 for
those wanting a single room. (Please note the costs are calculated using Euros,
so the final cost may be slightly different; also if more people come the price
will go down). The price includes our rooms, two meals a day, all of our costs
for visiting places like the Alhambra, and it covers the cost of paying our
tour organizers and retreat leaders. We need to have a roster of participants
by October 1.
On August 25 and September 15, I will be leading classes on the convivencia as part of the process of preparing for the journey. Please feel free to attend those classes if you are interested in learning more about the trip, and please contact me if you have any questions.
***
The other trip-related matter that is on my mind is an act of vandalism or, depending upon your point of view, nonviolent protest that happened in Geneva last week. In Geneva there is a monument to the Reformation that was designed by the same artist who built the iconic statue of Christ in Rio De Janeiro. It is a place a group of us visited while in Geneva two years ago, and it has always been an important place for me spiritually.
Last week someone protesting the Church’s historical condemnation of LGBTQ folk poured rainbow colored paint on the monument. As someone who has a deep appreciation for the Protestant Reformation, and who has a passionate concern for the rights and the wellbeing of LGBTQ; as someone who believes the sins of the Church’s past must be called out and as someone who feels the reformer’s virtues are often misunderstood and under appreciated, I have mixed feelings about the protest/vandalism.
On the one hand, I don’t believe any art should be vandalized. On the other hand, I don’t believe there should be any room for sacred cows in the Reformed tradition. I support both creative nonviolence and respect for common spaces. It is a hard nut to crack.
The good news is that the monument can and will be power washed clean. Also, as you will see in the photo below, the curmudgeonly old men of the Reformation don’t look so bad all dressed up for Pride.
God’s Peace,
Ben
